The Commercial Innovation Grant Program assists REALTOR® associations by making funding available to help launch new commercial projects and services, or innovative enhancements to existing programs locally.
Apply using the 2016 Commercial Innovation Grant Application (DOC: 32KB). The application process opens January 11, 2016 and closes February 29, 2016.
Important Notes
Attending MIPIM? It will be helpful to get a lay of the land before you go. Following are business strategy tips along with some practical information to make the most of your time in Cannes. Enjoy!
“I’m so glad to hear this. I’ve literally been pulling my hair out trying to get all of these systems to work together, and I didn’t know everyone else was, too.”
I’m not sure who said that at our marketing meet-up yesterday, but I remember the statement because it could have been said by any of us. We all have conflicting data points, we’re all trying to get all of our systems to connect to each other in real time, and we’re all pining for the day that full marketing stack automation becomes a reality.
But that’s not the point of the story. The point is the comradery.
Everyone at the table belongs to a startup of 100 people or less. We’re all part of marketing teams that you can count on your hand. We’re balancing brand, demandgen and process. And we love sharing ideas because we’re communicators.
This was the True Ventures marketing meetup in the Bay Area. But an investor is not the only place to find this tribe. If you’re a startup, you could find other marketing leads by:
All it takes is a few sailors of the same boat to remind you about true north and get the best ideas rolling — ones that are much more likely to work in your context than analyst reports or Fortune 500 studies..
About the Author: Maura Ginty is the VP of Marketing at Kissmetrics.
Editor's Note: Legal information is not legal advice. For any questions regarding the law, please consult an attorney.
Customer testimonials are great for your business. They build customer trust, create goodwill for your product, and show potential customers a positive brand history. But there are some things you need to watch out for when using them. Endorsements and testimonials are governed by truth-in-advertising laws.
First, we’ll take a look at the effectiveness of testimonials, and then we’ll go over four key legal tips for using them correctly.
Let’s examine whether testimonials are actually useful. It seems almost self-explanatory that when choosing between two similar providers, the one with excellent reviews and numerous testimonials would appear to be the better choice. But just how persuasive are reviews?
Quite a bit, it seems. Over 70% of customers look at product reviews before purchasing, and a survey sponsored by Zendesk found that 90% of participants were influenced in their buying decisions by positive reviews, which is huge. Take a look at the graph below:
If your business can capitalize on positive customer testimonials and reviews, that will almost certainly influence the buying decisions of your customers. The primary reason is testimonials build trust. They show that your business is good at what it does and that your product does what you say it will. Testimonials also go a long way toward showing a history of good service, which is extremely important to most customers. They want to know that you’re not just a flash in the pan.
Testimonials should be authentic and not “salesy” so that they stand out as unbiased and genuine accounts of how happy your customers were with what you provided. Sincere and high-quality testimonials not only help to overcome the doubts of skeptics about your product, they even go a long way toward changing the minds of prospects who aren’t sure about the legitimacy of your product.
The reason for this is called “social proof,” which is also known as social influence. Social proof is essentially the power of the crowd. If a person is unsure of something (like a product or a business) but everyone else seems to love it, that person is more likely to give it a chance.
But there are specific rules that you need to follow if you are using testimonials or endorsements. The law says that they must be truthful and not misleading.
Let’s take a look.
You must disclose any special relationships between you and your endorsers. For example, employees who promote your product must disclose that they are your employees, and business owners must create a policy that states this. Within your business, you should make sure you share this policy with employees, shareholders, and investors.
One way that endorsers can disclose their connections is to include tags or hashtags on social media promotions. For example, have a look at this tweet about Nutella from Brooke Burke-Charvet:
You can see that at the end of her tweet, she uses the #ad hashtag. This shows that she is promoting Nutella as an advertisement, and that she is being paid to promote it.
As another example, Amazon requires that all Amazon Associates (business owners and bloggers who earn referral fees by placing links to products for sale on Amazon.com on their own websites) must disclose that they are an Amazon affiliate and that they are paid when users purchase a product from their promotion.
You can be held liable for failing to disclose material connections with your endorsers.
All disclaimers and disclosures should be in clear, simple language so that viewers can’t miss or misunderstand your message. For example, use the #ad tag or a short statement like “This product was sent to us for review purposes” or “This review was funded by [Company].”
You need to make sure all testimonials are accurate. One of the primary rules of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is that endorsements must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences of the endorser.
The FTC uses the following example to show how honesty about products should be conveyed:
“An advertisement for a weight-loss product features a formerly obese woman. She says in the ad, ‘Every day, I drank 2 WeightAway shakes, ate only raw vegetables, and exercised vigorously for six hours at the gym. By the end of six months, I had gone from 250 pounds to 140 pounds.’ … Because the endorser clearly describes the limited and truly exceptional circumstances under which she achieved her results, the ad is not likely to convey that consumers who weigh substantially less or use WeightAway under less extreme circumstances will lose 110 pounds in six months.
“If the advertisement simply said that the endorser lost 110 pounds in six months using WeightAway together with diet and exercise, however, this description would not adequately alert consumers to the truly remarkable circumstances leading to her weight loss.”
The other aspect of this (also illustrated by the above example from the FTC) is that endorsements must reflect typical experiences; and if the experience is not typical, it should be disclosed in an easy-to-spot disclaimer. Here’s an example of what this type of disclaimer would look like:
You can be held liable for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements.
Be sure to keep a paper trail of any endorsement agreements or arrangements that you set up. If a customer agrees to endorse your product, get their agreement in writing (an email is sufficient).
This protects you in case a customer later wants to retract their testimonial. If they’ve agreed in writing that you can use their testimonial for a set period of time, you won’t have to remove their testimonial until the contract ends.
You can include clauses in your Terms of Service or Privacy Policy that any user reviews submitted to your website can be used for marketing purposes.
If you see a good testimonial for your product on another site, don’t just copy and paste it onto your own website. Most review sites have a clause in their Terms of Service stating that user-generated content (such as reviews or testimonials) is owned by the user and licensed to the website.
This means that if you copy and paste the testimonial, you are infringing on the intellectual property rights of the person who wrote the review, which is not the best way to treat people who love your product!
Instead, you can use links on your website that go to these review sites, or you can use plug-ins that connect to crowdsourcing review websites like Yelp. If you want to have reviews easily available on your own site, use resources such as BazaarVoice.
Remember that you can be held liable for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements and for failing to disclose material connections with your endorsers.
It’s not hard to follow the FTC’s guidelines. Simply ensure that all testimonials are honest and that they accurately represent the product. Also, ensure that you and your endorsers disclose all affiliations and any payments that are being made for the testimonial. By following these rules, you can benefit from the use of testimonials without being subjected to investigations or penalties from the FTC.
About the Author: Leah Hamilton is a qualified Solicitor and writer working at TermsFeed, where businesses can create legal agreements in minutes using the Generator.
What is the purpose of a landing page?
To acquire valuable information from prospects that will allow you to market to them effectively, right?
It’s a simple transaction. You, the marketer, lay your offer on the table. If the prospect finds your offer valuable enough, they’ll give up some of their information to receive what you’re offering. Nothing else in marketing could be so simple. It’s a great “take it or leave it” scenario.
So how do you know if your landing pages are doing well?
The average landing page conversion rates are all over the board. Some people claim the average is 2%, while other say you should be at around 20%.
Wishpond looked at data from a number of different companies and found the average conversion rate for a B2B landing page is 13.28%, while the average for B2C is 9.87%.
If you’re struggling for conversions, the best thing you can do is repeatedly test variants against the originals. But if you’re always producing low-quality variants, it’s unlikely you’ll see a budge in conversions.
That’s what today’s infographic is for. It will show you what a lot of landing pages get wrong – and how you can rectify those flaws. From here you’ll be able to create better variants that’ll kick your originals in the rear.
We’ve created a lot of free content to help you take your landing pages to the next level. Here are some of my favorite webinars (blog posts are included under Related Posts):
Signup for these webinars. They’re presented by top-notch folks who have been around the block and done their fair share of optimizing. Now they share that knowledge with you, for free.
They’ve already been recorded, so as soon you watch the webinar you’ll get to watch it right away. You’ll have some great takeaways for each.
What techniques have you used to increase landing page conversions?
About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.
Marketing technology is moving at a rapid pace that is enabling businesses to reach more potential customers and better engage existing ones. So, if you are still stuck with excel sheets and manual outreach processes, it’s time to reexamine how you can bring in the much required marketing efficiency to your business.
Automation doesn’t necessarily have to be an advanced AI capable of solving complex riddles, predicting and magically running your show. Nor does it mean that you should be able to automate the complete chain of activities in a process. Using marketing technology to reduce manual effort and intervention itself can save a ton of time and improve conversions.
WSJ published a great article recently on how companies are using automation (paywall) to boost their marketing efforts and reach their customers better. The author describes marketing automation as an ever-expanding area with a big focus currently on automating activities such as website and content management, email marketing, customer segmentation, lead filtering, digital advertising and social media marketing.
While digital has opened up a ton of opportunities for marketers, the increasing amount of noise and activity online makes it really tough to be heard and seen. For a business, this means two things:
Deploying marketing automation is just as important for SMBs as it is for large companies to have a competitive edge. You can identify activities for automation by looking for repetitive tasks that are backed by some data or specific logic. Often such activities involve simple decision-making or are rules-based.
Below are five examples of marketing processes where automation can bring immense benefits. You can automate parts of these processes by using off-the-shelf solutions or building some small tech in-house. The decision of choosing one over another should be based on cost-effort-time analysis.
Like I said before, the battle today is open for every lead. However, it is impossible and probably stupid to nurture leads through manual processes. Whether you are working with 50-100 leads a month or several thousands, a CRM is must in your marketing technology arsenal.
Most CRMs offer automatic lead capturing from contact forms. There are several cloud based CRM SaaS providers, and some even offer access for single user for free. And if you are a SaaS company, most likely your CRM would be heavily integrated within your product.
Salesforce is the big daddy of the CRM software world, and while a bit pricey, it offers valuable integrations with key software products you are likely to use now or in future like Pardot, Hubspot, ExactTarget and Marketo. Salesforce also allows for a lot of flexibility to configure, but its user interface is not one of the friendliest to work with.
Other popular CRM solutions include Close.io, Pipedrive, AgileCRM and Zoho – all of these are modern and easy to get started with.
Close.io has a clean interface, and is great for logging email and call interactions, bulk emailing, calendar integrations and reporting.
Zoho does most of this and is cheaper, maybe not as elegant.
Pipedrive is a good low cost basic CRM.
AgileCRM is interesting and goes beyond regular lead tracking and management. It has a bunch of marketing automation features, which SaaS companies will find useful. These include user onboarding with rule-based emailing, in-app messages and guided tours, social media monitoring, and web engagement tools.
Getting the data in order is just the beginning. Using this data to drive conversions is the big battle. This starts with mapping your sales cycle, identifying the various touch-points and opportunities for follow–ups, and then automating the follow-ups themselves or the reminders for the personal ones (depending on the kind of business you run).
In a typical SaaS scenario, you generally have 30 days or less to get a user engaged and convert. A series of well-planned emails, sent on an automated schedule during the period, based on the user activity pattern can improve conversions significantly. It also allows you to create the much needed touch points for user interaction, early problem resolutions and feedback.
While setting up the email follow up plan, be sure to customize it to the existing engagement of the user with the product, using the activity data of the account. For example, if the user account has not registered any trigger activity, following up with a demo suggestion is a great idea. But if the user is already primed and active, sending in a congratulatory note praising the activity might be more in order.
While it is always possible to set up such rule based email campaigns on your own, considering the option of using one of the many email marketing automation solutions is always worthy of exploration.
Some popular email marketing automation software:
Marketing automation tools and email marketing apps:
Social is a busy business – engaging thousands of fans and followers is no easy task. There are 3 critical components of social media engagement and marketing:
Of these, no. 2 should never be automated. However, the other two do have a reasonable scope of automation, and between them, content more than the community.
Posting on social every couple of hours is a good idea, as the content is so fast moving that if you are not there every few hours, your account will have very poor visibility. To create this amount of content real time and posting can be extremely time and effort intensive. This is why you’ll need something like Buffer, which makes it easy to schedule posts and send them out on customized times. All social media platforms are included, as well as some analytics to tell you the engagement each post/tweet receives.
I think the real big win comes from partially automating your content generation process. As it’s expensive and very difficult to generate this volume of new content, curating thought leadership stories for your social accounts is a great alternative. Most businesses rely heavily on sharing content from sources other than their own web properties.
Community building is largely difficult to automate, and should ideally be driven by effort from real people. I’m personally strongly against automated direct messages, likes and retweets – these go against all principles of social media and are also against the policies of social platforms. However, if you use a tool to find people who’d be interested in your social accounts and follow them – that’s a perfectly okay partial-automation boost.
Social media automation has been a topic of much debate, but as long as the basic principles of social media are respected, technology can bring in the much-needed efficiency to reach out in the crowded space.
For the most part, content marketing is a tough one to automate. But time consuming activities like content research and idea generation can be technology enabled. Similar to the use of content curation tools for social media, the same apps can be used to monitor the trending content thematically, getting a personalized content feed for idea generation, research or curation.
Having been in the content industry for over 6 years now, I have seen content creators spend close to 30% of their time in these activities. Even partial content research automation can save hours of energy spent Googling for relevant stories or material. The trick to partially automating content research is to use tools to track your industry news and trends – basically let some cool technology do the content discovery and filtering for you. Below are some handy apps you can use:
You can also use some free tools to help discover what your target audience wants to read.
Similarly, a lot of energy is spent in planning and coordinating content generation and publishing. As content marketing involves multiple process stakeholders (freelance and in-house content creators, content managers, graphic designers and sometimes more), a project management platform is in order. There are project management platforms solely dedicated to managing content marketing efforts, but the popular multi-purpose project management platforms do the job as well. Not using any workflow automation can easily create a lot of process and communication redundancy, and even lead your content marketing efforts astray.
Good multi-purpose project management platforms include Asana, Trello, Basecamp and Teamwork. I particularly like Asana – it has a neat interface that makes tracking tasks and team conversations a breeze.
Converting a user is half the battle won. Retaining the user, ensuring that she stays engaged and finding opportunities for expanding the relationship are the next big and important challenges. The good news is much of this can be managed by smart automation backed by data.
Onboarding a user is a critical part of SaaS sales. It starts when a user creates an account.
A well-crafted automated email campaign for the defined conversion cycle is required. It should start with a welcome note and then lead into emails/in-product messages about usage-prompts (based on the user activity), offering of support and resources, and a few reminders about paid plans and trial periods nearing end (if the case be). Once the user converts to a paid plan, continuing to lend a helping hand with resources, tips and gentle notification nudges to encourage activity, can go a long way in ensuring user retention. Khuram Hussain of Fileboard has written a step-by-step on how to follow up with leads.
Intercom.io also has a great blog post on several good examples of converting emails.
Smart use of data is the building block of awesome marketing. Segmenting users by activity data and classifying them in buckets will allow you to create personalized automated marketing campaigns for cross and up-sell. For example, your most engaged SaaS users can get prompts for discounted upgrades or add-ons, while relatively low activity users can get emails about tips to better use the software or cross-sell of the add-ons that can bring more value.
For e-commerce, previous e-commerce purchase history can be used for selective product cross-sell (complementary products) or up-sell (better/newer versions of what customer previously purchased).
Below is an illustrative example (simplified) of an email campaign based on customer segmentation:
Your web and mobile interfaces are your most important marketing assets, and offer many opportunities of improving conversions and capturing users. Well-placed and timely prompts to engage users can be very valuable on these assets. Several off-the shelf solutions are available to A/B test and implement changes. Similarly, several marketing tech solutions are also offered to measure performance and recommend changes for search engine optimization or on-site or app user engagement.
Automation solutions that track visitor or user activity real-time and present timely prompts to take desired actions can significantly improve conversions. When configuring such tech for your app or site, it is important to make sure you don’t over-do the prompts and that they are thoughtful to bring about desired results. Too many disruptions in a user’s experience with your product will irk the user to moving away from it. Tools like Kissmetrics, Intercom.io, SumoMe and Hubspot can be very handy in achieving such high quality user interactions.
E-commerce businesses can especially benefit a lot from marketing tech that allows them to assess real-time user behavior and allows them to give smart recommendations to convert a sale. Cart abandonments also should trigger timely reminders or feedback requests, both of which can be very valuable.
Marketing technology offers a lot of opportunities for bringing in new customers and doing more business with existing ones. Large companies are using it on a big scale to drive more efficiency in their marketing processes, and better engage with their customers. But marketing automation is not just the dominion of large businesses, smaller businesses need it just as much to drive down marketing costs and convert more to have a competitive edge.
Automation doesn’t necessarily mean complex systems running large processes on big data. Even smaller hits with partial process automations can bring in significant wins. What’s most important is structured thinking about marketing processes to identify areas of opportunities and implementing automated systems to run the show for you.
About the Author: Sophia Solanki is a co-founder of DrumUp, a social media and content marketing automation app and Godot Media, a content services firm. She has over a decade of experience in content and social media marketing, entrepreneurship and business consulting. Sophia is an ardent supporter of technology to improve efficiency in all aspects of life and business. You can also follower her on Twitter @sophiasolanki.
