Some marketers expect content revenue to have a linear path. You make content, people click on it, and then—BOOM—they immediately buy something or fill out a demo request form. After all, if our search ads work that way, shouldn’t content work that way too?

It doesn’t, but that’s not a bad thing. Content is all about building trust and loyalty with people so that when they’re ready to buy something, you’re their first choice—driving continuous demand and making the sales process much easier.

This is why we invest so much of our marketing budget in content at Contently. The vast majority of people don’t just read an article like this and request a demo. But they do come back and read something a few days later, then sign up for our newsletter or attend a webinar. When the time is right, they request a demo to learn how we can help.

While content conversion doesn’t follow a linear pathway, you can chart these stages to tie your content to revenue.

The 3 stages of content ROI

I’ve found it’s easiest to tackle content marketing ROI when you chunk it into three stages. The best place to start is at the upper half of the funnel, where you can map how your audience turns into sales-ready leads.

1. Audience growth

At this stage, you’re trying to make a damn good impression on your target audience in hopes of converting them to the next stage. You want to build awareness, trust, and an overall positive brand sentiment through helpful, entertaining content.

Most marketers are comfortable with the key metrics at this stage—they’re the ones Google Analytics shows you default: unique visitors, return visitors, time on site, pages/sessions, and scroll depth. Social metrics—shares, comments, likes—come into play here too.

We’ll talk about how to maximize audience growth in a bit, but some content marketers tend to stop here. That’s a mistake because if you want to drive revenue from your content, you need to inspire people to take an action.

To drive more action, you want a strong SEO strategy that’ll bring in the right type of readers. For instance, we focus on ranking for keywords like “best content marketing platforms,” “how to write a white paper,” “enterprise content marketing,” “content marketing for banks,” and “b2b content marketing funnel.” These keywords are likely to attract people who are good customer fits for Contently.

You also shouldn’t be afraid to use paid distribution to reach more folks who fit your ideal customer profile. It’s a great way to grow the top of your content marketing funnel. It’s getting more effective, too, since paid content distribution costs are down 34 percent since March.

2. Content leads

A lot of marketers call anyone who downloads their e-book or attends a webinar a “lead,” but I find that misleading—particularly to your sales team. Just because someone downloads an e-book doesn’t mean they’re ready for a sales call. It’d be like if you downloaded Tinder and immediately got a passive aggressive voicemail from a wedding planner. These things take time.

I prefer to call these folks a “content conversion” or “content lead.” They’ve taken an action that’ll allow us to build a deeper relationship with them. Trust doesn’t magically build after one article. But if someone starts reading your newsletter every week, or attending hour-long webinars, or takes an educational course you made, that person is much more likely to become your customer in the future.

Your job is to make it as easy as possible for people to convert into content leads. Give them a few different options. For instance, we’ll offer free content resources each week on a blue bar across the top of our blog. Right below it, there’s a sticky button to subscribe to our newsletter.

Once a month, we’ll also target each visitor with a prompt to sign up for our newsletter using Sumo, which converts at almost a 3 percent rate.

We also include a content offer unit on the right rail. We’re a tech company, so we don’t need to sell ads, but we can still put that white space to good use.

If you want a B2C example, Marriott does a great job of using smart UX on its popular travel mag, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, to maximize conversions.

(Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently customer.)

Here, you want to track both the number of content conversions as well as the rate your visitors convert to one of your content offers. Google Analytics conversion goals are a great tool to do this. (Check out Andy Crestodina’s guide for more.) And you need to properly nurturing content leads through a marketing automation platform until they become sales-ready leads.

3. Sales-ready leads

Next, you want to nurture your content leads until they become sales-ready. What is a sales-ready lead? Someone who’s raised their hand and asked to learn more about your product, usually by filling out a form on your website.

At this stage, you want to nurture your content leads with a drip campaign of relevant content. If someone signed up for a webinar on content marketing ROI, follow up with additional articles, case studies, and product videos that cover the topic. Feel free to include a call-to-action to talk to sales. You want to make it easy to convert—but only after you’ve delivered valuable content.

Once those leads hit sales, you can drive a massive amount of additional ROI through a strong sales enablement strategy. That’s the topic of a whole other blog post, which you can read here.

Making your own map

To tie content to revenue, track your conversion rates at each of these three stages and map how content flows downstream until someone becomes a sales-ready lead.

Say we drive 100,000 unique visitors at the audience growth stage. Based on our conversion goals, we know that 1 percent will sign up for a webinar or another content offer, while another 2-3 percent will sign up for our newsletter. This translates to 1,000 webinar sign-ups and 2,000 newsletter sign-ups.

Next, via our marketing automation platform, we look at the rate at which our webinar attendees and newsletter subscribers convert to demo requests. Our model shows that for every 100,000 visitors to our blog, we’ll generate 80 demo requests.

Then, to get all the way to revenue, you just need to understand how much each sales-ready lead is worth to your business. Say that your average deal size is $100,000, and each lead converts to a sale at a 5 percent rate. In that scenario, each demo request adds $5,000 in weighted pipeline, and those 80 demo requests are worth $400,000 to your business.

The compounding returns of the content marketing funnel

The great news about content marketing is that when it’s done well, you’ll see compounding returns over time.

Most marketing is fleeting. Spend $500 on ads today, and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow to see the same results. But spend $500 on a piece of great content today and it will drive continuous traffic and leads for free—by ranking well for search, getting shared on social, engaging website visitors, and increasing newsletter engagement.

As I wrote last month, this phenomenon is called the compounding returns of content. Even as your monthly investment in content remains flat, the results will compound over time. And if your content marketing funnel is set up correctly, that audience growth will translate into sales.

There’s never been a better time to build your audience. Engagement with branded content is up 16 percent right now, and people are eager for insights and thought leadership that will help them overcome new challenges and do their jobs better.

Help them overcome those challenges while following the guidelines here, and you’ll build a content marketing machine that’ll deliver compounding revenue for years to come.

This article is based off my webinar, How to Make the Case for Content Marketing: Compounding Returns and ROI. Watch it on demand here.

The post How to Map Content Marketing to Revenue, in 3 Steps appeared first on Contently.

That’s kind of how marketing used to work. Teams would invest a certain amount in one channel, maybe more in another, maybe less in a third. Revenue would, hopefully, come out the other end in the form of sales. But no one really knew for sure if a return was heading their way or not.

At SiriusDecisions Summit 2018, held at the glittering Mandalay Bay in Vegas, it was clear that marketers are tired of black boxes. We’ve been giving lip service to improving the connection between marketing activities and sales for years. But if the conversations, vendors, and presentations were any indication, that alignment is a key goal for many of the top marketing teams across the country.

Sales and marketing: Best friends forever?

If you scan the list of vendors who ponied up for SiriusDecisions sponsorships, you’ll see a few key categories: sales enablement (Seismic, Highspot), account-based marketing (6sense, Terminus), and sales readiness/operations (Bigtincan, Brainshark).

Most people I talked to during the event had the same question: How do I improve my sales team’s productivity? Some common symptoms popped up around the fact that teams struggle to train salespeople and keep messaging consistent. As a result, salespeople regularly use outdated assets or none at all, and that activity often goes untracked.

The symptoms seemed to hint at a larger issue—marketing doesn’t trust sales, and sales doesn’t trust marketing. Salespeople think they know how to win each opportunity their own way. Marketers want to scale their content and messaging across a salesforce skeptical of their abilities. Meanwhile, sales teams are overwhelmed by software they don’t use or don’t believe in.

Many vendors are jumping to solve this disconnect. Some want to make content more readily available and intelligent, ourselves included. Some want to make it easier for salespeople to train themselves and prepare for big meetings. Others want to remove salespeople from the equation altogether, replacing roles like SDRs with automated “sales reps” or—in one particularly odd case—female prisoners.

The connection between marketing and sales is obviously weak. A jackpot awaits those who can make marketing and sales best friends or, at the very least, trusting partners.

A few other takeaways

1. Technology is starting to support the customer-centric movement. One of the best keynotes (with the worst name) at SiriusDecisions Summit was “Nurture in a Demand United Waterfall World,” where Sirius analysts discussed the monumental shift occurring in how marketers nurture leads and customers.

In the past, marketers smacked leads over the head with pre-determined paths of content: This quiz first, then this report, then this e-book, and so on. Not surprisingly, CTRs and conversion from this approach are often less than impressive.

Now, many forward-thinking companies are beginning to serve personalized content when it’s needed based on signals from customers. For example: rather than drip content one piece at a time, if the lead is indicating that its suddenly hot, the system will go into overdrive and serve the highest converting pieces all at once.

2. Vendors are really bad at explaining what they do. Almost every booth tagline was some combination of “Leader in Sales Enablement… Leader in ABM… Leader in Marketing Automation… Leader in Content Marketing.” Good luck figuring out the difference between them without grilling a salesperson for 15 minutes.

3. Mandalay Bay is huge. There are 24 restaurants; a wave pool, lazy river, beach club, aquarium, and topless beach; permanent Cirque du Soleil (Michael Jackson ONE), a House of Blues, and 135,000 square feet of gaming; and the 2 million square foot convention center where SiriusDecisions Summit took place. You could spend weeks there and never leave.

4. Contently won an award! We were named a Program of the Year for Brand and Communications.

We could not be more thrilled to accept the @siriusdecisions Program of the Year Award for Brand and Communications! Join us to hear the story of our latest initiatives at 2:40 PST at the #SDSummit: https://t.co/OeJjDL9iMm pic.twitter.com/4OsNvXDZM2

— Contently (@contently) May 9, 2018

Our client, Dell, won an award later that day from Digiday for their content program.

Our team at Dell Technologies won the @Digiday award for the best branded content site! We're honored and so proud of everyone who worked tirelessly to deliver these stories: https://t.co/aDiNeHv70L pic.twitter.com/08MLVa2A6Z

— Contently (@contently) May 10, 2018

5. Vendors need to stop with the gimmicks. Oxygen bars, RC cars, little sloth plushies, free chocolate—you name it, a vendor was doing it. These purely exist so event managers can scan anyone and inflate the number of “leads” to impress their bosses. The click-click-click of a carnival wheel still haunts my dreams.

The post 1 Big Takeaway (and 5 Smaller Ones) From SiriusDecisions Summit appeared first on Contently.

Einstein. Sensai. Watson: Three important words for the future of martech and artificial intelligence. Salesforce’s Einstein launched late last year, Adobe’s Sensai two months later, and IBM and Salesforce announced a partnership to sell their AI together, earlier this month. As an IBM representative told TechCrunch, “Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business—will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies.”

However, not everyone is impressed. Henry Schuck, CEO of marketing and sales intelligence platform DiscoverOrg, thinks the AI arms race isn’t a new phenomenon. According to him, many martech companies are just rebranding technology that has been around for years. He isn’t the only one feeling skeptical. In a recent article on The Content Strategist that examined AI hype, Sameer Patel, CEO of the smart automation software company Kahuna, said: “There’s just a lot taking old technology [and] plastering AI on it.”

As artificial intelligence continues to grab headlines, I spoke to Schuck to get his take on evolving skill sets for marketers, where salespeople fit in an automated future, and why some marketers struggle with marketing technology.

I know you’ve expressed some skepticism about artificial intelligence. Do you think it’s going to be a big part of marketing’s future?

I’m certain AI will be a part of marketing’s future. But part of my perspective on this is the way companies use the word “AI.” It’s like a fancy word to describe something that marketers, particularly B2B marketers, have been doing for years now. It’s really just predictive lead scoring.

Marketers have been doing that for the last decade with website tracking and their own leads, all without using AI. It’s really over the last four or five years that there have been dozens of predictive lead scoring companies that have added machine learning to that process. They bring in a bunch of different data elements to help you look at your customer base and then identify which customers are your “A” customers, your “B” customers, your “C” customers, your “D” customers, all based on a complex statistical model that looks at the activities that your customers and non-customers have done. Then they identify what your ideal customer looks like.

So I think it’s interesting that there’s all this buzz around something that’s been around the B2B marketing world a long time.

Do you think in some cases it’s marketing technology companies rebranding something that has already existed, or do you think there actually has been a change in the technology itself?

No, I think they’re rebranding. My guess is, post-Salesforce announcement, the companies in the predictive lead scoring space began to rebrand themselves as companies who are in artificial intelligence.

That would not be too surprising. It seems that happens a lot, not just in marketing, but in technology in general.

Salesforce leads the way on a lot of that. DiscoverOrg was always a platform that was available on the web, but in 2010, when companies got really excited on the idea of the cloud, that’s just what we rebranded as: your data service provider in the cloud, everything in the cloud, all of your tools in the cloud. It was really because that’s when Salesforce was pressing on this cloud thing harder than they ever had before.

Do you think there is going to be a time in the future, say five years from now, when a proper AI technology can really change things?

First and foremost, I don’t think that AI ever fundamentally changes the need for a salesperson. In B2B sales, especially in the mid-market and enterprise side, there is a true skill to what a salesperson is able to do. A salesperson is able to comprehend the needs of a customer, make pattern recognition to what this customer needs compared to another customer, and so on. I don’t think that AI ever gets to a point in the near future when it replaces the art of what a salesperson does.

I don’t think that AI ever fundamentally changes the need for a salesperson.

I think what it will do, and what it’s already doing, is taking away some of the most mundane tasks that sales reps have to do. Calendar management is a place where you can see AI doing a great job.

In our business, we curate high quality information on companies and buyers that sell to companies. We have machine learning that’s built throughout the technology that we use. But one thing that we found is the last five yards, ten yards that you need, machine learning just doesn’t get you there. And sometimes those last yards make all the difference.

When you talk to some marketers and look at studies on how marketers are implementing tech, marketers are having problems with integrating everything and making sure it actually functions. Do you think that’s because marketers are not as technologically savvy as they should be, or is that more the fault of vendors not building products that are easy to use?

It’s two things. One, the industry has changed so quickly that the marketers who have those talents—who know how Marketo interacts with Salesforce, how to do campaign attributions, and how to look at different stages in the sales funnel—the number of people with real experience in that is very few. The entire universe of people who have done marketing attribution at scale is probably a couple hundred people in the United States.

Two, most of the technologies trying to help marketers are pretty new. Plus, the problems that marketers face are rapidly evolving, and the software’s trying to evolve alongside it. But it’s obviously a little bit behind.

With all AI, there are always humans behind these tools, and humans can make mistakes. Do you think there are potential problems where maybe the initial data input isn’t correct or there’s a wrench in the system that messes everything up?

With any AI, any predictive lead scoring, and really any of these analytics tools out there, they are only as good as the data that goes into them. So if you have a predictive lead scoring tool that defines a model and looks at your customer data, it’s entirely dependent on the quality of data that goes in. Once you have a bunch of the wrong contact types or incorrect industry labels, then the model is pretty useless.

With any AI, any predictive lead scoring, and really any of these analytics tools out there, they are only as good as the data that goes into them.

If you talk to any marketer about a predictive lead scoring tool, the biggest project is normalizing the data and filling holes. You spend a lot more time making the data normalized and filling gaps of the data with your own data than you do actually getting the data in and having it do the analysis.

It all comes down to how disciplined you are gathering your data, keeping your data cleansed, and making sure your data is in a format that can be easily translated into multiple systems.

So if you’re an average marketer and maybe you don’t work for the most tech savvy firm, how should you prepare for the increasing automation?

I think what you’re going to continue to see is people in marketing are going to be required to have a real technological skill set that maybe a decade ago they didn’t need to have. They could be creative and artistic and clever and probably get away with being a good marketer, but today’s marketer needs to be data-driven, technology-savvy, and able to pick up new concepts quickly.

If you look at the martech landscape, it’s almost tripled in size in the last three years. There are thousands of new marketing technologies that are coming online. Having a sense of what those things do and how they play in your environment really requires technological savvy.

We did a study where we looked at companies that grow fast and companies that don’t. For the companies that grow fast, one of the top characteristics that they looked for in salespeople that they hire is technological savvy. That contrasts against slow-growth companies that look for experience and discipline. I think it goes to the point that technologically savvy salespeople and marketers are the ones who are able to get the most out of today’s B2B sales marketing world.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The post ‘Today’s Marketer Needs to Be Data-Driven’: DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Martech appeared first on Contently.

Content and marketing actually require very different skills; putting a content creator in a marketing role, or vice versa, is like mixing vodka and milk.[note]There’s some debate, in the context of Mobb Deep’s “Survival of the Fittest,” as to whether “mixing vodka and milk” results in a negative or positive outcome. As in “We’re a VERY volatile combination, and likely to shoot you” or “We make a delightful pairing, like a White Russian.” For the purposes of this article, we’ll be going with option A.[/note] The people in these roles speak different languages: ROI and go-to-market vs. TKs and Oxford commas. Most of the marketers I talk to—and as a marketer at a marketing company, I talk to a lot of them—have some kind of horror story about trying to repurpose a junior marketing manager into a content marketer.

Another issue to consider is the traditional separation between creative and business functions within a company. Who among marketers hasn’t complained about the output and inscrutability of creative teams, and which creatives haven’t rolled their eyes at annoying requests from the front line? (I usually do both things on a daily basis.)

When you think about it, the larger challenge isn’t just marketing against content marketing, it’s how marketing and content support the front-line teams in general. How do you know that your content drives results? What does the feedback loop look like between marketing and sales? How can you create teams that support the middle and bottom of the funnel while still prioritizing top-line goals like reach, brand awareness, and lead generation?

As Contently has grown from a small startup with a well-read blog into a 120-person-strong company with a robust marketing operation, we’ve had to confront a lot of these dilemmas. We tried different systems, organizational structures, goals, and even different managers—none of which worked as well as we wanted.

It wasn’t until we took a page from agile product development that we finally saw the light.

How agile applies to marketing

Agile is a project-management process typically used by developers to break down a big project into a more manageable schedule that prioritizes different tasks. Instead of siloing different functions, you combine them. The point is to structure a team in a way that allows for fast iteration and efficient cross-departmental collaboration.

On Contently’s product team, this means engineers, UX designers, product managers, and data analysts work together on small teams to build and refine a new software feature. Each group has the personnel to complete a project without having to pass it off to anyone else.

Adopting this approach in marketing made us way more flexible. We could ideate, write, edit, design, and publish based on data and feedback. With fewer dependencies, we got more work done.

With fewer dependencies, we got more work done.

Now, each part of the marketing funnel gets a cross-functional team that includes a content creator, a marketer, and a designer. There’s often a member of the front-line teams assigned as well, as a kind of sponsor, to make sure the original idea behind the project doesn’t get lost. Since we already have “teams” within our marketing department (content, marketing, and design), we ran into a nomenclature issue, so we decided to christen these working groups “squads.”

Here’s how we visualize our agile squad structure:

Agile has allowed us to solve two of the biggest problems marketers face:

1. The unicorn problem

Marketing leaders obsess over finding that special creature good at both content and traditional marketing. Fun fact: Those people are really hard to find. Squads have solved that problem for us because people get to focus on their specialized skills.

This model could work even better for larger companies that have bigger pools of talent. Pairing a marketer with an editor allows you to get the best of both worlds. After enough time, each person will learn about other disciplines without needing to pretend like they’re already experts.

2. The “creative at scale” problem

Brands, especially big ones, need a steady stream of content to empower their various divisions and lines of business. But that need also leads to a situation where these companies not only have too many cooks, but they have too many kitchens as well.

Companies are building “content centers of excellence” or “brand newsrooms” so they can have a centralized place where people handle all creative work. Adding representatives from each teams that plan to use that work means you execute faster (because you’re not sitting around waiting for 900 approvals), but, more importantly, you don’t wind up with pieces of content that never get seen.

The nice thing about this structure is how it can grow as the company grows. Once we ask marketing and sales to provide more specialized functions, we can deploy our creative talent within squads that service those functions. We can have disparate teams pull together to take care of crucial projects. In the long run, that process will make our organization smarter, more harmonious, and more effective.

It may not be simple, but then again, neither is making a decent White Russian.

The post How Agile Thinking Can Transform Your Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Sales teams, under constant pressure to hit their quotas, often look for shorter-term solutions. Yet, thanks to the rise of social selling — the practice of leveraging social networks to enhance lead generation and boost conversions — sales teams are warming up to the idea that content can help them do their job and close more deals.

Jill Rowley, social selling evangelist at Oracle, put it this way: “Content is the currency of the modern sales organization.” This sentiment is in line with new industry norms, as 91% of business-to-business marketers use content to build awareness and cultivate relationships.

Rowley is currently busy educating the 23,000 salespeople at Oracle on how to prospect and engage leads via social media channels. Leads seek and respond positively to content that addresses their business challenges, she said, and when a sales pro provides this type of content, it’s not seen as pitching. Instead, the sales pro is seen as a trusted advisor.

Oracle’s brand magazine, Profit, is at the heart of the company’s content strategy. To maintain a healthy flow of content, Rowley suggests that salespeople use the 4-1-1 Rule: sharing four pieces of relevant third-party content for every one piece of Oracle-branded content, plus an offering of lighthearted fare like a cat video or motivational quote.

Content is the currency of the modern sales organization.”

Rowley notes that social selling at Oracle isn’t a popularity contest; it’s about gaining a competitive advantage through the smart use of content. “I have to tie social selling to pipeline generation and revenue,” she said. Based on the reactions she’s received from colleagues at Oracle, it appears to be working.

For social selling to work, it helps to determine where a prospect is in the organization’s sales funnel, which determines the best type of content to deploy. At the top of the funnel, the name of the game is awareness, but as the funnel narrows and prospects are more immersed in the decision making process, video content, white papers or blog posts are key tools for closing a deal.

Michael Freeman, senior manager of search and analytics at ShoreTel, which sells products based on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, agreed that the traditional sales cycle is changing. “For us, we’re in a market that most people don’t know much about, so we want to reach prospects and show them we are trustworthy and friendly. We can provide value via our content, even if the person is not in the market for VoIP at this time,” he said.

ShoreTel also uses the Social Inbox tool from Hubspot to provide real-time notifications to its sales team when people mention the company online or visit the ShoreTel website. Freeman believes in the value of automation, but said it works best when sales pros are empowered to decide for themselves the best course of action. For instance, some sales organizations have default mechanisms in place, such as sending out a white paper in response to an action taken by a prospect. But this isn’t always the best move.

“We’re social people and we’re complex, therefore, you can’t just automate your way to success,” Freeman said.

In line with Freeman’s nuanced approach, it is now commonly accepted that blasting people with a firehouse of “look at me” branded content is a mistake. This applies to social updates, too. Carly Fauth, head of marketing at Money Crashers, an online guide to financial fitness, said sending out endless tweets about your brand makes far less of an impact, for instance, than conducting regularly-scheduled Twitter chats.

Jessica Thorpe, vice president of marketing at EXPO Communications, added that highly-engaged consumers want to help other consumers make smart purchase decisions. “They see themselves as innovators and informants,” Thorpe said.

We’re social people and we’re complex, therefore, you can’t just automate your way to success.”

EXPO syndicates consumer video on behalf of major consumer packaged goods brands, plus massive retailers like Walmart, Sears and Amazon. Thorpe said EXPO’s clients who leverage consumer-generated video (produced by EXPO) on their product pages are now seeing a six-to-thirty six percent lift in conversion rate and an eight percent lift in cart size, on average.

With figures like that, branded content should continue to play a bigger role in the sales process, and salespeople who fail to embrace it will likely be left behind.

The post Content And Sales Get Hitched appeared first on Contently.

Platforms like LinkedIn are power tools because they:

1. Nurture long-term business relationships with minimal investment
2. Leverage content as the driving force between strong interpersonal bonds
3. Promote a ‘network effect’ between sales reps and decision makers
4. Facilitate an unobtrusive communication channel

Think – the beauty of online dating for the powerful world of sales.

LinkedIn has partnered with Aberdeen Group to help educate businesses about social selling – which is inseparable from your social content strategy. Think of content marketing as your introductory handshake. Platforms like LinkedIn are the digitized conferences, parties, and industry directories that help make those handshakes happen.

Why This Visual Rocks

LinkedIn and Aberdeen Group have done a great job illustrating why sales teams should be more social: boost customer renewals and increase quotas. LinkedIn is a platform that’s experiencing rapid growth and provides a powerful platform for connecting with new prospects.

The infographic simplifies three core components of social selling:

1. Finding prospects, and understand their values
2. Reaching out – connect to learn more, or just say hi
3. Sharing insights – here’s where content marketing comes in to help build the relationship

Finally, props to LinkedIn for projecting their brand and leveraging content marketing to advertise their sales solutions platform. Some brands shy away from being salesy, but LinkedIn pulls it off. Remember that content marketing is a powerful way to help move prospects through your conversion funnel. Self-promotion is totally acceptable along the way.

Room for Improvement

The infographic is conceptually strong but suffers from a lack of clarity. First of all, LinkedIn should define the concept of social selling. What is it? How is it different from traditional selling? An introductory section could do wonders for unifying the rest of the content within this infographic – as is, the core messaging is a bit fragmented.

Then there’s the section about the LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI). The section is convoluted and difficult to understand. What exactly is the SSI, and why should non-LinkedIn employees care? What value does this quantitative framework bring to typical sales groups?

LinkedIn could also share examples of best-practices for finding prospects, building connections, and sharing insights. Here is a perfect opportunity to bridge a direct connection to content marketing.

The idea behind this visual is strong, so look past the conceptual disjoints and gray areas to focus on the message’s core value. Get social about your sales.

The post The Powerful Force of Social Sales [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Contently.

For some reason, the two seem to be perpetually at odds.

Beat people over the head with a sales message, and they’ll instantly run away. Ignore sales to focus on content only, and the business will implode.

Surely, a balance exists. But what exactly is it?

Case Study 1: Content as the Introductory Handshake

With content, sales need not be the sleazy black sheep.

“If you’re out there creating interesting, thought-provoking content, wouldn’t it be a shame to let the conversation stop at the front door? Instead, invite your new guests inside for a drink or two, get to know them, and then, and only then, can you comfortably move into a sales cycle,” Dan Taylor wrote for The Next Web.

Consider the case of KISSmetrics, a web analytics platform. According to the company’s marketing expert and co-founder Neil Patel, the KISSmetrics blog generates more than 70% of the company’s monthly inbound traffic.

“That traffic generates leads for our sales team who then close on customers,” he wrote in a blog post.

Case Study 2: Content as the Trust Builder

Companies and consumers have finite budgets. Marketing dollars need to guarantee ROI. With whom are people more likely to splurge — complete strangers or trusted peer counterparts with stellar reputations?

“The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you,” according to Copyblogger’s Brian Clark and Sonia Simone.

As an example, consider women’s fashion retailer ModCloth. The company’s stylebooks feature creative trends in an entertaining, magazine-like format that builds trust with shoppers.

To trendsetters, the content is a source of inspiration — people come to ModCloth to learn and discover new ideas. Underscoring the inspiration are ModCloth’s own products. Content opens doors to sales.

Case Study 3: Tact as Virtue

It’s possible to encourage sales without being over-the-top. Elegant calls to action are essential for accomplishing this goal.

“Designing call to action buttons into web interfaces requires some forethought and planning; it has to be part of your prototyping and information architecture processes in order for them to work well,” Jacob Gube wrote for Smashing Magazine.

Brands should plan content marketing efforts around the ‘next-steps’ that they wish to guide. It could be as simple as an unobtrusive but visually compelling banner.

On every post and page of its marketing blog, CrazyEgg introduces visitors to its heat-mapping software.

The focus of the copy is what marketers and decision-makers want most: “Increase your website’s conversion rate or revenues within the next 30 days.” Complementing the content, the product introduction is tactful, attractive, and welcoming.

Image courtesy of Redshinestudio/shutterstock, ponsulak kunsub/shutterstock, PhotoStocker/shutterstock

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A whopping 75% of incomplete transactions occur because users abandon their online shopping carts. With 40% of consumers preferring social login, these incomplete transactions could be deterred with social login options, says Monetate.

The post Social Login Boosts Retail Sales [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Contently.

Last-click attribution is that final click that consumers make in the last stage of the “buying-cycle action.” Before users make those purchases, however, they visit social media sites, view banner ads, and do their research online.

The first-click attribution receives none of the credit, but it is just as responsible for closing a purchase. Marketers should note that success metrics must include first-click attribution as well. This infographic will “change how [companies] allocate the budgets across social and other digital channels,” says eWeek. Check out the findings for yourself below.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Jo Jakeman

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