Brisque

Is it worth using an AI writing tool for your content?

Hellen Oti — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 17:17:52 +0000

According to the world economic forum, by 2025, 85 million jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence and robots.

Back when I worked primarily in the software industry, there was always a scare regarding artificial intelligence technological advancements. There was the fear there would be a point when artificial intelligence and robots would replace most human jobs, leaving a lot of skilled workers out of work. The good news is as AI displaces jobs, it also creates jobs, with an estimated 97 million jobs created because of the use of algorithms.

In the marketing world, automated content writing is one of the most remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence. Today, many artificial intelligence content writing tools boast of doing an excellent job as any human writer.

As with any new technology, there are skeptics, and there are those adopting the technology to help increase content production speed.

Here are a few common questions when using artificial intelligence for content writing that I’ll attempt to answer in this article:

What is AI content writing?
Which AI tool is best for content writing?
How does AI writing software work?
How do AI content tools affect your SEO? Is there a negative impact?
Is it wise to replace human content writers with AI content generator software?

1. What is AI content writing?

Artificial intelligence (AI) content writing is the concept of using AI content creation software to generate content. The content can be in the form of articles, landing pages, or marketing messages. The AI content generator uses machine learning or programs that learn to perform human tasks to produce phrases and sentences based on a given topic or keyword.

2. Which AI tool is best for content writing?

If you are starting to investigate AI tools for content writing, it’s normal for you to want to know which ones work the best. There are quite a few review articles to check out. I’ll focus this blog on what you should look for when selecting an AI text generator tool instead of the specific tools.

Here are a few things to consider when selecting your AI text generator:

Know what you’d like to do with an AI tool

Firstly, I believe it’s essential to get a sense of what features or functionality you’d like your AI content generator tool to have. For example, some tools are better suited for article writing, while others might be better at copywriting or both. Just know what your goals are.

Test a few different AI tools with the same topic

The easiest way to know if you’ve found the AI content creation software you’d like to use is to test them. Luckily most AI content generators offer free trials to try your hands at creating content before deciding to pay for a subscription.

For instance, if you are writing an article about how to create a business plan, you could try different AI text tools to see which one covers the basics.

Check content with plagiarizing tool

You can also use a plagiarizing tool like Grammarly to cross-check the content. A plagiarizing tool can help you identify generalized content you need to update manually. The system that provides the most original content would be the easiest to work with since you don’t have to edit as much.

3. How does AI writing software work?

Artificial intelligence writing software works in a way where you simply insert your keyword or topic, and the software generates articles based on the information offered. Of course, the more detailed you are with the information, the better the content produced will be.

I tried out the steps using the AI text generator tool: Hypotenuse AI.

The AI text generator I used has a few different types to select from product descriptions, blog posts, marketing copy, and image generation.

In my test, I wanted to create an article on how to write a marketing plan. So, I inserted “marketing plan” as my keywords.

Here are the results:

I must say that I was impressed with the outline of the blog post. The six steps are indeed six steps that you could take the create a marketing plan.

The part that is lacking for me is the details. You can tell the article has a lot of fluff or general content. The text comes from a computer program, so it’s challenging to have real-life examples for each point. That’s where you would come in and add to it.

How do I feel about using an AI text generator for my blog writing?

Through my AI testing experience, I didn’t mind the outline component. It gives you structure. Depending on the type of writer’s block you face, sometimes creating the elements of an article can be a bit challenging.

However, everyone is different.

For me, the most extensive writer’s block I face is often not the inability to create a structure for my articles but rather how to have a unique take on something. So, unfortunately, this text writing tool can’t help me with that. I love to think of ways to bring my viewpoint into whatever I write in a practical and valuable way. Therefore, the writer’s block I face is not a general sense of not knowing what to write but rather how to ensure there’s a different perspective. Once I get a sense of that perspective, writing content is often much easier.

My take is that I could find this AI text generator helpful for creating foundational content such as definition pages or articles. It could also help when you are generating product descriptions for multiple products and you get to that point when your brain is starting to turn to mush. When I worked on product description projects in the past, it was quite brutal, especially when describing products that are quite similar in an exciting way.

4. How do AI content tools affect your SEO? Is there a negative impact?

Arguably, the most significant debate regarding AI content tools is whether there is a negative or positive impact on your search engine optimization goals. The question we all have is if you use AI content generators for your content, how do search engines like Google view it?

As with most questions related to content processing with search engines, we cannot say for sure if your AI-generated content will affect your search visibility negatively. What we do know is that Google, in its recent People-first content update announcement, talked about how it’s working harder to make search more human and useful.

In the update, Google mentioned a few questions to answer when creating content with a people-first approach:

Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise from having actually used a product or service or visiting a place)?
Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?

Looking at the questions above, we can tell that if you were to use the AI text-generated content without any modifications, it might not meet the criteria, especially when demonstrating first-hand expertise and depth of knowledge. So, essentially, the potential downside of using an AI text-generating platform is that your content might not be as helpful.

There could be a keyword optimization benefit

On the other hand, because AI content software capitalizes on the keywords or topics that you provide, they might be able to ensure that your keyword is well optimized or utilized throughout a document in a way that a human could miss. However, because a human isn’t writing, the system may fail to use alternatives to the keywords or key phrases, which is how we naturally write. So, once again, we may fail to create the people-first approach we need to produce humanly helpful content.

You could have keyword stuffing

Using an automated content generator system could, in turn, make your content sound very robotic and not like most of us write or speak naturally. Furthermore, if the keywords tend to appear like you are keyword stuffing, then conceptually, it could affect your website SEO since that’s considered a black hat SEO technique.

Your content might not be unique

Suppose your content is so general that it’s like what’s found on the internet because it’s machine-generated; it might not also help your search visibility. Search engines prioritize original content that answers users’ questions in a more targeted way. A search engine might not show your blog that covers the same thing as another on the first page.

5. Is it wise to replace human content writers with AI content generator software?

With all that said, I believe the question that we are looking to answer is if it’s worth replacing human content writers with AI text generator software.

The short answer is no.

However, it doesn’t mean that AI content writing tools don’t have their merit. On the contrary, its basic functionality can serve as a way for content strategists and managers to spend more time reviewing content and less time creating outlines.

AI content generators are also beneficial for foundational content or anchor pages. These are foundational pages that answer questions like what is? Why do I need this? How do I do this, etc.? These pages, while necessary, often have basic information. Since the information is basic, artificial intelligence content writing tools can help create a baseline. Then, you can edit that baseline to create the final version of your foundational content.

Artificial intelligence content writing tools add to human intelligence but are not a replacement.

The great news is when in doubt, you can always use our free message review service to get a human check on your marketing copy.

Learn more here».

Overthinking? These startup business planning tips help you get unstuck

Hellen Oti — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 12:00:28 +0000

The only guarantee with any plan is that it’s 100% inaccurate.

You’ll never know if you’ll truly meet your business sales goal. Or if your marketing campaign will perform the way you planned.

It’s not to say we shouldn’t plan. That’s what I do for a living. I help businesses plan because it’s harder to stay on track if you don’t plan.

The trick is to understand that your startup business plan is a roadmap, not an absolute.

So you must make room for discoveries and exciting pivots!

If you are a planner like me, you can probably keep planning till the cows come home and struggle to get to the execution part. It’s simply because every business plan looks flawed, as there’s always another way to execute the same thing.

How do you create a good balance between planning and execution?

Here’s an easy business planning reminder:

Plan so that you are sure of what you’d like to do but don’t plan so much that the planning becomes a bigger project on its own.

Startup business planning tips to help you balance execution and planning

1. Always know your goals

If you must execute something without a detailed plan, spend some time creating a list of goals or what you hope to achieve before doing it. Then, at the very least, you can come back and analyze your results.

2. Create an easy roadmap

If you don’t like planning, create an easy roadmap using these three questions:

Who’s going to get this done?
Why is this important?
What will I do to get this done?
When will I get this done?

3. Always make room for contingencies

Whenever you create a startup business plan, never plan without making room for contingencies. For instance, if you know you have 40 hours a week to work on something, plan as if you only have 30 or 25 to make room for when other things come up.

4. Reach for the skies but be realistic

Making sure your business plan for your startup is realistic can ensure that you follow through with your plan. It’s great to reach for the skies, but if you are consistently not reaching your goals, you might end up giving up altogether.

5. Set smaller goals and have stages

Always break up your big-picture dreams into smaller goals and smaller stages. For example, it might take a long time to get to your full vision if you are trying to build a complex product.

Instead of waiting to have everything before you launch your business, break your vision up into the following:

What can I do right now with no help from anyone?
- Can it generate some cash to fund the next stage?
What can I do with a bit of help with other resources that are affordable to me?
Then break up your funding goals:
- What can I do if I had a quarter of the funding
- What can I do if I had half of the funding
- What can I do if I had all the budget, etc.?

6. Remember, business projections are not crystal balls

No matter how accurate our data is, business projections will always aim to predict what might happen in the future. They are not guaranteed.

7. Generate different scenarios for your sales plan

Set your sales goals by looking at the worst possible scenario. Then the best-case scenario. Let’s say you have two products with two different prices. A cheaper product and a premium product. You want to look at your sales projections for both products. However, if you must plan with just one product for your forecasts, you are better off assuming that most customers would buy the cheapest-priced product.

8. Don’t get caught up with the different goal-setting methods

When looking into goal-setting methods like OKRs, SMART, WOOP, and HARD, just pick your poison. The goal-setting method is not as crucial as using something you understand and can easily measure yourself.

Startup business plan execution tips to remember

1. Follow your plan

There’s no point in creating a business plan you don’t intend to follow.

2. Create a system for tracking your progress

Your project or task tracking system can be a project management software product or a simple Excel spreadsheet. Whatever works for you is fine. Don’t let the software get in the way of getting work done.

3. Who’s leading?

Know who’s in charge always. Every task should have a manager or team leader responsible for bringing a project to completion. If you are the lead, ensure that that’s clear.

4. Pay attention to discoveries

Look out for discoveries in your data that you might not have anticipated.

For example, you might have planned to run a sales promotion for one product, only to find that another product seems to be organically getting a lot of sales. Depending on the situation, it might make sense to switch over instead of sticking with your original plan.

5. Start tasks only if you have the resources to complete a task

Don’t start tasks knowing full well that you can’t finish them. Starting tasks you can’t complete is demoralizing. If there are projects that require more resources, table them and start them when you are prepared rather than starting and then stopping in the middle.

6. Deviate from your plan if needed but plan to come back

If you deviate from your original startup business plan to work on something else, leaving something uncompleted, always have a plan to return to it.

7. Don’t jump on every trend

Only jump on trends that make sense for your business or product. Of course, there will always be something trendy to try. But, if you are not careful, you might jump from one idea to the other, never quite rooting yourself in anything.

8. Don’t underestimate real-time feedback

On the ground, feedback is always essential. You’ll know how well your original ideas perform from how your intended audience responds to an initiative; however, if you are introducing something new, remember that it’s your job to make it catch on.

Contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of things that seem “viral” today but took time to catch on.

Remember, every new initiative must have a communication plan that looks something like this:

Introduce the concept: talk about what it is, why anyone should care, and what it will do for them

Educate: dive deeper into the idea or initiative. The education stage will most likely happen over several months

Sustain: once you introduce the concept, you must sustain the communication around the idea. So if you use a term, use it at any chance. For instance, I use humanized marketing whenever possible because my business focuses on helping companies to be more relatable. And because I do so often, that’s the first thing most new customers mention

Feedback: get feedback from the concept by encouraging participation or customer feedback.

To summarize

There’s a fine line between ensuring you are operating with a solid business plan for your startup and not stopping progress just to be perfect. When in doubt, just ask yourself if you know what you’d like to do for the next three months and if you have it documented for accountability.

Your documentation can be short such as a one-page plan, or can be longer to include a tactical plan. All that matters is that you document, follow through, and adjust along the way.

Because as we all know, no plan is perfect, no matter how detailed.

Other helpful reads:

How to Calculate a Loss on a Long Sales Cycle

Hellen Oti — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 23:45:13 +0000

Summary

Some industries tend to have longer sales cycles than others. Usually, Business-to-business products and services have a longer sales cycle than Business-to-Consumer products.

As a business, since you have a finite number of resources, it’s helpful to figure out ways to shorten a sales cycle or decide to call it quits when a sales cycle is too lengthy.

In this article, we’ll examine how to calculate the cost of continuing to run a long sales cycle.

The sales process is a balancing act.

You’ll win some and lose some.

However, each sale also comes with associated costs. A long sales cycle can result in a loss in profits.

Whenever a salesperson spends time on a long sales cycle, you lose some resources in the process.

What makes a sales cycle long?

Your sales cycle length will depend on several factors, including the complexity of the product, the cost, and the number of people who have to decide on the purchase.

For instance, a $100 product is likely to have a shorter sales cycle than a $10,000 product.

With a long sales cycle, it’s essential to develop strategies for shortening the sales cycle so you can get to a yes or no sooner to free up your resources.

Here’s the question!

When should you withdraw from a sales deal that’s gone on for too long?

This is a complicated question to answer.

Sometimes long sales processes happen because of life circumstances beyond anyone’s control, including when a key player leaves a company.

While figuring out when you need to turn your attention away from a particular sales deal is not an exact science, you can create a process for identifying indicators when the long sales process is not worth the effort.

Evaluating a Long Sales Cycle: Start with Your Lead Grades

At the basic level, start with your opportunity grades.

It’s easy to figure out if you should still spend a lot of effort on a grade (C) or (A) level opportunity. But that’s only the beginning.

Sometimes the grade only tells part of the story.

For instance, you could have an opportunity with a (B-), but you can tell from the personal connection that you’ve built with the project sponsor that they are working hard to get your deal to close and might be running into some issues along the way.

In that case, you can’t base your decision to pull out of an active sales cycle on just a grade. You’ll have to consider that personal connection as well.

But what about a case when the project sponsor is trying but not making headway, and the sales cycle seems to take up a lot of your time?

When should you call it quits?

At Brisque, we believe in creating a fact-based system for making decisions. As a result, here’s how to decide if you should keep running a long sales cycle.

Here’s how you can calculate when you are making a loss on a long sales cycle.

To do this, you’d need to have the following information (I’ve included samples):

Average Sales Representative Salary: $55,000/year or $26.44/hour
Hours spent on the deal: 26X4 = 104 hours (4 hours a week for 6 months ~ 26 weeks)
Deal Amount = $100,000
Average deal amount = $50,000
Customer Retention Time Period = 5 years
Sales Travel expenses: $2,000
The average number of customer purchases per year = 1
Profit Margin = 40%

Start by calculating the customer lifetime value of your potential sale

The customer lifetime value is a useful metric that helps you understand the lifetime monetary value of a customer to your business.

Here’s the formula for calculating your customer’s lifetime value.

Customer Lifetime Value = Average value of a sale X Number of Purchases X Retention Time Period X Profit Margin

When to use the average value of a sale or the deal value

When you are trying to find the customer lifetime value of a particular deal, you can either use the average value of a sale which is the traditional calculation of a customer lifetime value.

You can also choose to use the deal amount since our analysis is to find out if a particular deal is worth the effort. The distinction is between knowing when you should use the deal amount and when you should use your average sale amount for this analysis.

Use deal amount if your customers pay the same amount year-over-year

As a rule, if you have a business where customers pay the same amount year-over-year, then you can use the deal amount in your analysis. Subscription businesses are an excellent example of a type of business where the deal amount may remain the same every year.

Use average sale price if pricing is not the same year-over-year

On the other hand, if you have a business where the sale price decreases or fluctuates in any way, then you use the average price since it’s difficult to know the exact future amounts.

Technology companies with a high upfront implementation cost and a lower maintenance fee would fall into this category. Same as any consumer-based product with different product prices.

In this example, we’ll assume that the business is a subscription-based business where customers sign a yearly contract and pay the same amount year-over-year.

As a result, we can use the deal amount in the calculation to figure out our customer lifetime value for the deal.

Modified Formula

Customer Lifetime value = Deal amount X Number of Purchases X Retention Time Period X Profit Margin

=($100,000 X 1 X 5 )X 40%

= $200,000

Based on this calculation, if you win the deal and the customer stays with the company over the average period of 5 years, you would make $200,000 from the customer.

Now, let’s take a look at how much of our resources we’ve spent so far on the deal.

Sales representative salary cost: 26.44/hour X 104 hours = $2,749.76
Travel costs: $2,000
Total deal expenses: $2749.76 + $2,000 = $4,749.76

By looking at the customer lifetime value vs. the expenses incurred so far, one can argue that the sales representative should keep working on the deal.

But not so fast!

While this calculation helps you gauge your expenses, you may end up ignoring your opportunity cost of not working on other deals during that time.

How to calculate your opportunity cost on a long sales cycle

To calculate the opportunity cost of potential sales, here’s what you’d have to look at:

Average sales cycle length: 2 months
Average deal size: 50,000

In this case, an average sales cycle lasts for about two months and typically is a 50,000 deal.

Since the sales deal has been running for six months, you could have technically worked three smaller deals within that time (6months / 2months = 3 deals).

So back to our customer lifetime value calculation, let’s calculate the customer lifetime value for three deals at 50,000 each.

Again, we will use the modified customer lifetime value calculation, which uses the deal amount.

Customer Lifetime value = Deal amount X Number of Purchases X Retention Time Period X Profit Margin

= ($50,000 X 1 X 5) X 40% = 100,000 (1 smaller deal)

Customer lifetime value for 3 smaller deals

= $100,000 *3 = $300,000

Therefore, to calculate the opportunity cost of the long sales cycle:

You use the standard opportunity cost calculation:

Forgone outcome – chosen outcome

That equates to the following:

The opportunity cost for lost sales due to the long sales cycle

300,000 (customer lifetime value for potentially lost sales) – 200,000 (customer lifetime value for long sales cycle)

= $100,000

In essence, the opportunity cost of the long sales cycle is $100,000, and we also have expenses of $4,749.76.

Total cost of continuing the deal = 100,000 + 4,749.76 = $104,749.76

You can conclude that it’s time to close out the long sales deal because you are now running at a loss.

Final Thoughts

You should have a ‘make or break’ sales cycle length process where a salesperson must decide to pull out of a sales deal or continue the process. The ‘make or break point’ is often dependent on your average sales cycle duration.

Even when you decide it’s time to stop actively pursuing a sales deal, you can continue to have automated nurturing running in the background, should the prospective client ever decide to reengage.

Key Takeaways:

An easy starting point for evaluating if your deal effort is worth it or not is to look at your lead opportunity grade.
First, find the cost of continuing to run a sales cycle by calculating your sales expenses.
Then, calculate the opportunity cost of potential lost sales for the duration of the sales cycle.
Your final deal cost is your opportunity cost + your sales expenses.
You don’t have to “kill” deals completely. You can decide not to actively pursue the deal but continue to have an automated follow-up.

Read Also:

12 Rules of Brand Differentiation [Infographic]

Hellen Oti — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 17:43:37 +0000

Summary

How do you stand out when there are many businesses that offer the same products and services that you do?

Use these brand differentiation examples and rules to guide your brand strategy process.

Here are the 12-rules of brand differentiation to remember when creating a brand differentiation strategy

Rule #1: Focus to amplify

You’ll never differentiate your brand if you are trying to do everything. Instead, you amplify your reach by narrowing down your focus.

Rule #2: Give to receive

The best way to build a powerful brand is to differentiate yourself by showcasing what’s unique about your business. The more you showcase your expertise, the more you differentiate. Don’t worry about sharing too much for free.

Rule #3: Make your brand marketing message compelling

Your brand marketing message should easily and quickly communicate what’s different about your business.

Brand differentiation example for improving your brand message

The main point to note here is the fact that when it comes to your brand message, you need to go back to point #1 of focusing. If you can decide on one key area or feature to lead with, it makes it easier to differentiate your product and associate your brand with a particular functionality.

Rule #4: Build meaningful connections with your customers

The more connected you are to your customers, the more they trust you and the more loyal they are to you. To connect, focus on using relatable marketing strategies that are based on your customer’s challenges.

Brand Differentiation Example for building meaningful connections

Create marketing campaigns that encourage customers to share and use what they share as a form of marketing. An example of a brand that does this successfully is Duolingo. They have their fans draw different images based on the characters used on the Duolingo application. Retail brands also use customer images in place of paid promotional photos.

Rule #5: Don’t copy competitors instead, learn and identify gaps

Learn from your competition, but don’t copy your competition. Use your research to identify gaps in the marketplace and use that to set yourself apart.

Questions to answer with your competitor research:

Are there any industry reviews about your competitor’s solution that mentions things that customers wished your competitor did?

Are they targeting a specific market and ignoring another potential need?

Further reading: How to Figure Out the Type of Marketing Challenge You Have

Rule #6: If no one has done it before, don’t be afraid to be the first

Don’t worry about how things are always done. If you want to stand out, you can’t do so by following the status quo. Try something new!

Rule #7: Stick to the course but pivot when needed

You’ll have to try out a new marketing strategy for some time before you can determine if it’s working or not. However, quickly change things if your data says so (usually, you’ll need about one to three-month data).

Rule #8: Be transparent about what makes you different

If you have a unique process, share the process (in a way that gives enough information but doesn’t give away your secret sauce).

Rule #9: Your employees are part of your secret sauce

This is especially true for service businesses; showcase your employees as much as possible to help your audience build a connection.

Rule #10: Your brand differentiator has to be experienced

Always ensure that what you decide to use as your key brand differentiator is also part of your product or services. Customers must experience what’s different about your business. It’s not enough to say that you are different.

Rule #11: When in doubt, ask your customers

If you are unsure what’s truly different about your business, simply ask your customers by conducting a brand perception survey.

Rule #12: Listen and empathize before selling

The more you connect, the more you differentiate, and the more you create loyalty. Before you sell, make customers feel like you have listened to understand their pain.

Bonus Rule: Combine human and data intelligence

Data tells only half of the story. Humans are complex.

Use data to help with decisions while also paying attention to on-the-ground information.

What are your rules for differentiating your brand?

Share in the comments below!

12 Rules of Brand Differentiation Infographic

How to Create a Lead Scoring Model & Grading System

Hellen Oti — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 14:18:24 +0000

Summary

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the steps and examples of how to create a lead grading and lead scoring model or a lead rating system.

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It’s clear that not all leads are the same. When you have many leads, you need to evaluate and determine if it’s a great opportunity or not. Ideally, you also want to create a lead scoring and grading system that can help you prioritize and qualify your leads.

Luckily, many lead scoring systems or software solutions can help you automate the process for your lead scoring and lead grading. However, for easy understanding, in my lead scoring example, I’ll run through the manual process of setting up the lead scores and grades.

Before we get into the specifics of setting up your lead grading and lead scoring framework, let’s first look at some fundamentals of lead scoring and grading.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a numerical score or number to a lead based on lead activity, lead type, or a preset qualification criterion. Lead scoring can also happen automatically within lead scoring systems that have created their own lead scoring rules to score leads automatically.

Why is Lead Scoring Important?

In a perfect world, every lead will be ready to buy with a credit card in hand. However, the reality is that you’ll have leads at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Lead scoring and qualification is an effective way to help you sort out leads.

Here are the reasons why a lead scoring process is beneficial:

1. Lead Scoring Helps You Prioritize

A lead scoring process helps you prioritize the leads to follow up with. For example, if you have 100 leads, you can use your lead score to determine which leads to follow up with first, starting with the leads with the highest lead score.

2. Lead Scoring Improves Lead Nurturing

A lead scoring model helps you nurture your leads with contextual, relevant marketing information based on their lead score or level of engagement. For instance, leads with higher lead scores can get content geared towards closing a sale, while lower lead scores can receive educational content.

3. Lead Scoring Helps with Sales Forecasting

A lead score can be effective at helping to determine if your deals are likely to close or not, to help you with your sales forecasting process. Leads with higher lead scores tend to be more engaged and are likely to close faster.

4. Lead Scoring Helps with Qualifying and Disqualifying Leads

If you have a lead scoring process with lead qualification included, your lead score can quickly help you qualify or disqualify leads if they don’t meet your ideal customer profile.

When Should You Use Lead Scoring?

As mentioned above, use lead scoring whenever you have a sizeable number of leads and would like some intelligence on your leads.

Regardless of a lead’s stage in the buying cycle, not all leads are the same.

You’ll have some leads that are more engaged and are ready to take the plunge than others.

At times, you’ll have very active people with your lead nurturing activities, including clicking emails and downloading resources but don’t convert to ask for a sales call even though they are actively looking and in the market. The main benefit of lead scoring is to help you identify some of these opportunities so you can proactively reach out to those leads.

What’s The Difference Between Lead Grading, Lead Scoring, And Lead Rating?

It’s very easy to confuse lead grading, lead scoring, and rating because they are associated with qualifying, tracking lead engagement, and prioritizing leads.

Lead Grade vs. Lead Score vs. Lead Rating

The main difference between lead rating and lead score is, a lead grade focuses on lead qualification or if the lead meets your target customer profile. On the other hand, a lead score can combine qualification and lead activity to generate a score. You can also generate a lead score based on lead engagement only. A lead rating combines lead qualification or lead grading to create a rating.

A-F Lead Grading

Some of the common types of lead grades include a traditional classroom grade scale (A – F). Like a classroom situation, you can get very detailed with this by deciding to have A, B+, B, B-, C, C+, C-, etc. You can also choose to keep it standard using A, B, C, D, E, and F. More to come on this when I run through my lead grading example below.

Hot, Warm, Cold Lead Rating

You can also choose to rate your lead as hot, warm, or cold. A lead rating of hot, warm or cold,

refers to the lead activity and qualification criteria or if the lead meets your target customer profile.

Here’s an example, a lead is rated as “hot” because he met the lead qualification criteria based on his company size and job title. However, after a salesperson has a conversation with the lead, the salesperson determines that the lead is not ready to buy soon and therefore changes the lead grade from hot to warm.

Why you should use a lead rating system

A lead rating system helps you determine which leads your sales team needs to pay close attention to and which leads need to be nurtured by marketing. Generally, leads rated as hot will be sales pipeline deals that the sales team is actively working on. Nurture warm leads with content marketing initiatives. For leads marked as cold, the goal is to re-engage these leads or, at some point in time, remove them from the system if needed. Often leads marked as cold might also have inaccurate data.

How Do You Score a Lead?

A lead score given to a lead can be based solely on lead activity or engagement only, or it can be a mix of both lead activity and qualification.

Some lead scoring systems use predictive lead scoring that uses a machine-learning algorithm to score your leads based on lead activity automatically. There is often the option to also create a custom criterion for lead grading and lead scoring.

How Does Lead Scoring Work?

The easiest way to understand how lead scoring works is to look at a lead scoring model example, which is essentially the rules used to determine a score to give a lead. In this guide, we’ll run through a few examples.

What is a Lead Scoring Model?

A lead scoring model is a methodology or framework for scoring leads. It is the lead scoring formula or leads scoring rules used to give your lead a numerical value. Your lead scoring model will have to be customized to meet your current business lead qualification and lead activity criteria. Essentially, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all lead scoring model.

How Do You Create a Lead Scoring Model?

Creating a lead scoring model starts with thinking about all the potential buyers’ activities to become a lead. You must also think about the lead engagement activities you have in place after capturing lead information.

The idea is to gather as much intelligence on a lead as possible to determine if the lead should have a high or low score. There are quite a few marketing automation and lead scoring systems such as Salesforce Einstein, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Bitrix, and Zoho that have inbuilt lead scoring models to help get you started. You can also create a custom lead scoring model or formula using these systems.

Here are the basics of a lead scoring model:

A lead scoring model assigns a numerical value to a lead or contact in your system based on predetermined lead scoring rules. The lead scoring rules can be manually determined, or it can happen automatically using predictive lead scoring or an in-built lead scoring algorithm.

Types of lead scores

You can assign a lead two types of scores:

A positive score

A positive score is assigned to a lead when the lead performs a desired action

A negative score

A negative score is assigned to a lead when the lead performs an undesired action

I’ve listed some types of negative and positive actions to help you get started with creating your lead scoring template. These scoring rules are examples. As usual, you’ll need to tweak it to match your current business process and goals.

Lead Scoring Model Example: Positive and Negative Lead Scores

Positive lead score rules and sample lead scores

In this example, the lead engagement score threshold for review is 150. That means every time a lead scores 150 points, it’s supposed to trigger a follow-up activity either manually or automatically to proactively attempt to move the lead to the next level in the buying process.

Activity type	Activity	Score
Web page visit	Blog page view	+ 10
	Demo page view	+ 75
	Pricing page view	+ 75
	Contact page view	+ 50
	Product page view	+ 35
	Resource page view	+ 25

Email marketing	Email open >1	+ 5
	Email click >1	+ 15

Purchasing intent	Demo form fill	+ 150
	Pricing form fill	+ 150
	Contact form fill	+ 100
	Added items to cart	+ 150

Resource download or subscription	Awareness stage content	+ 25
	Consideration stage content	+ 50
	Decision stage content	+ 75
	Blog Subscription	+ 25

In-person events & Webinars	Event registration or on-demand view	+ 50
	Event attendance	+ 25


Social media	Facebook clicks	+ 5
	LinkedIn clicks	+ 5
	Twitter clicks	+ 5
	Instagram clicks	+ 5
	Facebook follow	+ 15
	LinkedIn follow	+ 15
	Twitter follow	+ 15
	Instagram follow	+15

Negative lead score rules and sample lead scores

Activity type	Activity	Score
Email marketing	Unsubscribe from all emails	– 150
	Customer unsubscribes from customer communications email list	– 50
	Unengaged with last 5 emails	– 50
	Blog subscriber unsubscribes from the blog email list	– 150
	Bounced email*	– 150


Social media	Facebook unfollow	– 15
	LinkedIn unfollow	– 15
	Twitter unfollow	– 15
	Instagram unfollow	– 15

* A bounced email address should always trigger an addition to a cleaning list for removal or updating.

What Does a Lead Score Mean?

A lead score gauges the level of engagement. The most important aspect of interpreting a lead score is to have a set threshold. In my example above, I set a threshold of 150. That means every time that a lead meets the 150-score, it indicates that the lead has enough engagement activities to warrant a follow-up action. Additionally, deciding your threshold helps you with setting your lead scoring rules. In my case, since I know that I am trying to get to a 150-score threshold, things that indicate an intention to buy should be assigned a 150 value. Then, I work my way from there.

Here are things to analyze to help you with your point generation system:

How many pages on average do leads visit before they complete a form or make a purchase?

For instance, if most leads complete a form or make a purchase after 5-page visits, that can help you with your lead scoring. You can decide to give each page visit a point of 30 (150/5) – and let that trigger a follow-up action if the lead doesn’t complete a form or make a purchase.

What types of pages do my website visitors visit before completing a form?

Action: Categorize your page types into product pages, blogs, resource pages, etc.

What website page visits demonstrate an interest in buying or getting more information? E.g., a pricing page visit will show an interest in knowing more about pricing options.

Lead Scoring for B2B vs. Lead Scoring for B2C

Lead scoring models may work similarly for B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) businesses. In both cases, you assign a numerical value based on their engagement activities. However, the core difference in lead scoring for B2B is that a sale may not happen directly online. As a result, in the B2C world, while a conversion might be considered a sale online, for B2B, a conversion could be a form fill indicating interest, e.g., a pricing information form fill.

How does lead scoring affect lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the process of gradually providing helpful content and engagement activities to a prospective customer to guide the person through the buyer’s journey to a sale. Lead scoring and lead nurturing work together to ensure that you use intelligence gained from customer interactions to determine what and when to send specific information to contacts. In my example above, whenever a lead meets the set lead threshold of 150, this can trigger a particular set of lead nurturing activities since it indicates an interest to know more.

When used effectively, lead scoring can provide useful added intelligence to lead nurturing activities to help with proactively closing more sales.

How to create a Lead Scoring Model Using BANT

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) is an industry-standard benchmark for qualifying leads or prospective customers. It’s a handy starting point for creating a way to qualify your leads. For example, to create a customized lead scoring model that considers lead engagement and lead qualification, you can use BANT.

Before diving into that, let’s first define the BANT criteria.

Budget

A budget simply refers to a prospective customer confirming that they have the budget to buy your product. Note that there isn’t often a way to confirm if this is true or not. You simply have to take the person’s word for it. In most cases, prospects are unlikely to lie about having a higher budget since it doesn’t serve their best interest.

Authority

Authority refers to if the lead has the authority to make the decision to make a purchase or not. Using authority to qualify an opportunity is quite tricky. The reason is that in business-to-business sales, there is sometimes a selection committee that determines which products to go with.

Usually, when companies have product selection committees or teams, there are often three groups of people who may be part of the sales process:

Decision Maker: The final decision-maker who has to agree, or the deal may fall through
Influencer: The influencer, whose recommendations are held in high regard and can influence a sale
Researcher: The researcher puts together a list of possible solution vendors. Sometimes outside of the initial list, the person might not be involved in the final selection process.

In some cases, all these three roles fall under the purview of one person. The same person who does the research makes the final decision. On the other hand, sometimes the researcher could be the influencer who also has to convince upper management to make the final decision. There are many flavors of this equation. As a general rule of thumb, bigger businesses tend to have more separate roles, while smaller companies may have one person wearing many hats.

Need

A need is when a lead has a clearly defined problem. A potential customer having a need is very critical to a sale. If someone doesn’t have or see the need for a product, even with a budget, authority, or a timeline, your deal may drag on longer than it should. So again, the key here is to make your product a must-have instead of a nice to have.

Timeline

Timeline is when the prospective customer plans to make a purchase. Knowing a prospect’s timeline is essential in both your marketing and sales communication plan. For example, a prospect who is ready to buy in one year should have a different outreach plan from the one ready to buy in three months. On the other hand, a lead who doesn’t have a timeline in mind is very early on their sales journey, and you should nurture them as such.

Note that you should not include leads without timelines in your forecastable pipeline.

What’s the difference between your prospect’s timeline and an actual deal timeline?

A prospect’s timeline is when a prospect believes they’d like to purchase a product. In most cases, this timeline is an estimate at best. When calculating your deal timeline, you should look at when the person became an active opportunity. Meaning someone you feel met your opportunity qualification criteria to be included in your pipeline projections and be actively pursued by your sales team.

In essence, your deal timeline is your prospects said timeline plus or minus whenever the deal closes. Closing in this circumstance refers to both a close win deal and a close lost deal.

Do You Have to Have All Four of The BANT Criteria for A Lead to Be Qualified?

Budget and need are the basics for qualifying a lead

While each product and industry are different, for most products, having a need and budget is usually enough to qualify a lead.

What about timeline and authority?

Timeline and authority are essential but not as critical as the prospect needing your product and being able to afford it. Timeline is important because it helps you forecast and drive the conversation better. Authority, on the other hand, especially at the beginning of a sales process, is not as important. As I mentioned before, if there is a selection committee for the decision-making process, the other members will eventually be looped in. With that said, the level of authority that a prospect has to make a final call can affect the speed of a sales process.

How to Create a Custom Opportunity Grading Criteria Beyond BANT

Using the BANT opportunity qualification is an excellent start in the lead qualification process. I would, however, challenge you to create a custom lead scoring and grading system beyond the BANT qualification criteria and evaluate if you believe you can win a deal or not.

When creating your opportunity grading criteria, the critical thing to note is ensuring that the custom criteria you add are not due to anyone’s gut feeling.

What you want to do is to identify patterns that affect a sale’s close rate. Some things to look at include:

For deals that close the fastest, what kind of needs do customers have?
Which job titles do we have the most uncomplicated sales process with?
What type of content offer tends to get us the most close-win deals?

Here’s a sample custom lead scoring model and grading beyond BANT

We’ll use a fictional project management solution that I’m calling “TIME” in this example. It is a business-to-business lead scoring example since the product is for businesses needing a project management solution.

The TIME Sales and Marketing Team has determined that they tend to win business with project managers that have a Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification than those that don’t. So, as a result, they’ve included that into their lead qualification criteria.

Now, TIME has modified its prospect qualification process to include the PMP certification. However, as we saw before, not every lead qualification criterion carries the same weight. As a result, you must rank your qualification criteria in order of importance.

Based on TIME’s previous history, they’ve decided to rank their lead qualification criteria this way:

Problem
Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification
Budget Approved

According to the ranking, the team at TIME has determined that a prospective customer having a clearly defined problem is the most crucial element in their marketing and sales process.

Next is followed by the fact that the person has the PMP certification. Then, finally having a budget approved. Of course, each business will be different in how you rank your lead qualification. In most cases, however, a prospect defining a need or having a problem is the key element.

Creating Your Custom Lead Scoring Model with Lead Grading (Qualification)

To help you build a lead scoring model that incorporates your lead qualification criteria, you have to give the lead qualification areas a score. So, first, you have to determine your perfect score and then work your way from there. Since I used 150 in my previous example, I’ll change this up a bit and make the perfect score 100.

Lead Qualification Scores:

Problem: 60
PMP: 25
Budget: 15

Why ranking your lead qualification matters

As you can tell from my scores, I gave certain lead qualification elements a higher score than others. That’s because they are more critical. So, by ranking your lead qualification, you can create a scoring process that reflects the level of importance.

For instance, having a budget is essential, but if you only have a budget, you won’t get the same score as someone who has an identified problem.

How to combine your lead score to create a lead grade

Finally, you can combine your lead scoring that’s based on your custom lead qualification to create a lead grading process that looks like this:

Has a Problem and PMP and Budget = A (60 + 25+ 15 = 100)
Has a Problem and PMP Only = B + (60 + 25 = 85)
Has a Problem and Budget Only = B- (60 +15 = 75)
Problem Only = C+ (60)
Has PMP and Budget Only = C- (25 +15 = 40)
PMP Only = D (25)
Budget Only = E (15)
Has no Problem and No PMP and No Budget = F (50-30-20 = 0)

This grading process results in the decision tree illustration shown below:

Lead Grading Decision Tree Example

Set this up in your lead scoring system

You can set up this type of lead scoring and grading process to run automatically in your lead scoring system, such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Marketing Automation System. Just follow the scoring rules listed here as a starting point to help you create your own.

Combining Lead Scoring, Lead Grading, and Lead Ranking

You can opt to use all three lead assessment factors of a score, a grade, and a rank. It’s straightforward to combine all the elements to create a very robust lead intelligence system. However, while it’s easy to automate lead scores and lead grades, you should manually determine the lead rating based on human intelligence rather than a system automation. Basically, a lead with a score of 100, and a grade of an A, could have a warm rating because the lead doesn’t seem very engaged throughout the sales process.

Here’s what that could look like based on the TIME example.

Lead Score	Lead Grade	Lead Rating (based on the sales team information)
100	A	Warm
85	B+	Hot
75	B-	Cold
60	C+	Cold
40	C-	Warm
25	D	Cold
15	E	Cold

This type of grading system shown above is easy to set up to run automatically in a Customer Relationship Management or Marketing Automation System that allows you to run automated workflows. If you don’t have an automation system, you can also just have this information handy and manually update each opportunity.

Best Practices for Lead Scoring

Always have a lead score threshold in place. That is the ideal score that a lead should reach that demonstrates a certain level of interest.

Automate your lead scoring process by setting up rules in a lead scoring system or use a system with predictive lead scoring.

Setup a separate automation trigger that starts a specialized set of lead nurture activities after the lead reaches your set threshold.

Ensure that you are adding and subtracting points based on the level of engagement that a lead demonstrates.

Implement a manual review process as part of your automation. There might be engaged leads who don’t take the next step despite your best efforts with automation. The only way to ensure that you are proactive with your lead outreach is if your sales team is reaching out personally.

No sales process for two businesses is the same. So always tweak lead scoring systems to match your unique sales process.

Final thoughts on lead scoring

A lead score, a lead grade, and an overall lead rating offer you a way to maximize your productivity when engaging with leads or prospects quickly.

At the end of the day, while we try our best to use automation systems to help us avoid manual work, it can’t replace human intelligence. A prospect is a person who is a bit more complex than a score or a grade.

Always use additional information based on what’s happening in real life to decide how to engage with potential customers.

Keep deals alive by using automated lead nurturing when a lead has a low engagement score. However, never make a prospective client feel unimportant because they don’t meet a specific lead score or lead grading criteria.

Want to save this guide for easy on-the-go access? Download it here »

I’d love to hear from you.

What kind of lead scoring and lead grading system are you currently using?

What’s worked, and what’s not worked so well? Share in the comments below.

Low Budget Marketing – How to Get Scrappy [Infographic]

Hellen Oti — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 08:01:33 +0000

In March of 2000, in an unprecedented move, Salesforce hired actors to stage a protest outside of the Siebel Systems conference. These actors held signs with anti-software messages that were centered around “The End of Software.” This marketing technique garnered media attention, getting coverage in The Wall Street Journal, and by January 2021, Salesforce had generated 5.4 million in revenue.

The Salesforce marketing campaign was effective because of its creativity and not necessarily because of the spending.

Often, I find that many businesses attribute not having great marketing results to not having a big enough spend to outdo their competition. Indeed, marketing often requires a spend. However, I’m amazed by the free or low-cost untapped opportunities that are sometimes overlooked.

The truth is, some of the most creative marketing strategies are born out of necessity.

Let’s look at a few marketing options, even when you have a low marketing budget that might not cost you anything.

Here are a few ways to jump-start your creative marketing strategy and ideation process even when you have a low marketing budget

Create a list of top 10 things I would do if I had an unlimited marketing budget

Plan, dream, strategize like you have an unlimited budget, and then execute those ideas creatively based on the merit of the marketing ideas presented.

Create a top 10 list of free marketing ideas that I could utilize today

The top 10 list of free marketing ideas is the most surprising list of all. You’ll be surprised by the open opportunities that you are not taking advantage of.

Targeting a different audience could open up creative marketing possibilities.

More money is not equal to better results. All marketing problems cannot be solved just by having more money. Often there is a deeper-rooted issue beyond the capital. Are you targeting the right people?

Focus on Marketing Amplification instead of Multiplication

Determine the marketing channels that are working well and figure out how you can amplify your efforts instead of multiplying your efforts across multiple channels. This will help your marketing dollar go the furthest.

Identify a niche that the majority of your customers fall into. Examples of niches are industries, job titles, or company sizes. Spend time focusing on that niche and spend a lot of your marketing budget there.

Leverage relationships! They are free
- Use customer evangelists and partners instead of paid influencers.

Budget Allocation: Allocate a budget for creativity. Contrary to popular belief, innovation doesn’t just happen. It’s planned.

Only your imagination limits a zero-marketing budget.

Want more ideas? Book an ideation session ».

8 Things to Know When Building a Marketing Process

Hellen Oti — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 19:10:55 +0000

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As a junior marketer, life was simple.

I had assigned tasks; I completed the tasks to the best of my ability, and that was it. I didn’t have to worry so much about what happened next. When I started leading marketing teams, I realized that if you wanted to track what’s happening and improve results, you need to follow a system.

The marketing system that you create doesn’t have to be rigid.

You just have to have a set of steps that you perform in a certain way to ensure that you can achieve consistent results. Without a marketing process, you can kiss following your marketing plan goodbye.

In this post, I share marketing process tips that I’ve learned along the way. Before we dive into that, let’s look at what a marketing process is.

What is a Marketing Process?

A marketing process is a set of steps and actions to execute marketing tasks based on a marketing plan. A marketing process often consists of multiple activities tied to marketing campaigns or specific deliverables (tangible outcomes). Then, you execute your marketing activities using specific channels or mediums.

Here are a few lessons that I learned from building marketing processes

1. Ensure that your entire marketing team is involved in the process creation

Sometimes you must create the process then explain or mentor your team through the marketing process. If you have a more experienced team, you can delegate the process creation task. Have each team lead come up with their strategy for managing their team tasks and projects. In turn, you get more internal buy-in than when you don’t put the team leads in charge.

2. Plan for disruptions

I used to have a full marketing team calendar because I felt like we needed to maximize our time.

That thinking turned out to be flawed because it’s life!

Things will come up that you don’t anticipate. To help combat this, you want to build disruptions into your plan.

Here’s how you build disruptions into your process

So, let’s say your team can technically execute your marketing plan if they are operating at 85% capacity.

And I say 85% capacity because most humans cannot operate at 100% capacity (they have to rest, take potty breaks, answer emails, and sometimes just daydream and not be as productive).

Essentially, you want to take into account ad hoc activities that may come up. In that case, you want to subtract at least 15% from the 85% capacity, leaving your team operating at a 70% capacity.

Therefore, you would adjust your teams’ goals and activities planned accordingly. If you were planning ten campaigns at 85% capacity, you might need to scale back to 8 to make room for other activities that may come up later.

Read: Brand Strategy vs. Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Activity: What Is The Difference?

3. Marketing Deliverables! Deliverables! Deliverables!

Your marketing process needs to work towards a marketing deliverable.

It makes the steps feel like you are working towards having something tangible to attribute to the actions taken. It doesn’t have to be anything major it could be a newsletter deliverable that has a process of:

Having a newsletter meeting with teams to decide what to include
Creating first draft of the newsletter
Have the team review the first draft of the newsletter
Create a finalized version of the newsletter
Schedule the newsletter to go out
Review results from newsletter a week after delivery and note areas of improvement or what worked well.

4. Track Your Project Time

You can create a repeatable process if you estimate how long it will take to execute specific tasks.

I personally don’t like to be micromanaged or micromanage others, so the easiest way to track time is based on the number of days it takes to complete a deliverable. Back to my newsletter project example, it may take a person about an hour or two to design the newsletter.

Rather than tracking the time at the granular level (hours), I like to know how much time something takes in days. For instance, if the only work you did in a day on the newsletter was for 2 hours, and then you went on to work on other tasks that are not related to the newsletter, I would still count that as a day.

In the end, I like to know the number of days instead of hours because I believe it gives people the flexibility to plan out their workdays as they see fit.

Additionally, it also offers a bit of a buffer to allow people to make up for the time if they go off track because they were attending to something else.

Read: How to Evaluate Creative Marketing Strategies or Ideas

5. Grouping tasks will save you a lot of time

Once you have a process in place, you want to make sure that you group similar tasks into one step if possible. If you are editing a blog, you can also make on-page SEO changes to the blog. When you finish the editing process, you’ll have a blog post that’s optimized.

6. Always know your start and due dates

Due dates for projects are often easy to remember.

When you need to start is what you can miss if you get tied up with something else. When you miss starting dates, you are likely to have to rush through to meet deadlines. As a result, for each marketing process and step, always work your way backward to determine your start date. That way, you can have something planned on your calendar to ensure that you can start on time. It will save you all-nighters and stress later.

Marketing Process Pro Tip: If you plan your start date with a bit of a buffer, you’ll know if you can extend the start date or not.

Try to add +3 days or +1 week. That way, if you happen to work on something else that’s urgent, you can push back the start day a little if needed. When it comes to due dates, you can have two types of due dates:

Go live dates – that is when things are published; everyone sees it.
Internal due dates – or dates when tasks need to be completed internally. This also needs to have a buffer to help prevent rushing at the end to meet go-live dates.

7. Always Document Your Steps

It may feel like everyone on the team knows what they should do, so there is no need to document your steps or create a working document to track steps. Even if everyone knows, you want to document your steps for two main reasons:

Reason #1: it makes it easier to train teams later on

Reason #2: it might be difficult later on to figure out areas in your steps that cause bottlenecks in your process if you don’t document.

Documenting your steps doesn’t have to be done in any fancy fashion. Use whatever medium you are comfortable with. I tend to prefer using spreadsheets because I can easily make notes and sort the steps as needed. You can also use a project management solution for this.

Read: Creative Ways to Track Branding Campaign Success

8. Follow Your Process

Finally, a marketing process is only a process if you follow it. If you deviate from your process a lot, you won’t end up with a process.

If you want your marketing steps to be a process, you have to follow it as closely as possible. However, it’s not to say that you should become inflexible and rigid. With that said, you should strive to make the times that you stray from your process the exception and not the norm.

Final thoughts on creating a marketing process

Creating a marketing methodology or process that works for your business takes a lot of constant refining and tweaking. There is nothing like a one-and-done marketing process. You have to constantly assess what’s working and what’s not working so that you can do things significantly better each time you execute.

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How to Not Sell Your Products

Hellen Oti — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 12:00:01 +0000

Summary

When you use humanized marketing instead of product-focused marketing, you gain more customer brand ambassadors who’d be happy to recommend your product every chance they get.

I discuss some of the core differences between focusing on your product and focusing on your customers to create deeper connections.

——–

On a good day, you’ll find me writing, with a big mug of tea nearby. While I enjoy my coffee, there’s nothing that I find as soothing as tea.

Recently, in a conversation with family, I found myself recommending a tea brand that I love. I was surprised by how much time I spent talking about why I loved the tea brand, and for me, it extended beyond the tea itself to the story of how the company got started.

As a Humanized Brand Strategist, I help businesses discover more ways to find customer brand ambassadors. When I was busy evangelizing for the brand, it happened so naturally that it was great to see the impact of connecting deeply with a customer personally.

Your marketing goal at every point is to get more and more people like me to talk about your brand and product without being forced to.

It’s not about if a customer is willing to give you an excellent testimonial for your website. It’s about if a customer will refer you to another person without your influence.

At the core, customer brand ambassadors are a very cheap but effective form of marketing.

Think about it?

Who do you trust more?

A friend or family who recommends something to you or a TV advertisement? Nielsen’s recent study shows that 92% of customers trust a recommendation from someone they know over advertising.

That means you have a better chance of making a sale every time the recommendation comes from your customer.

Ready to Go Beyond Word-of-Mouth Marketing? Here’s What to Do Next

How do you get more customers to become brand ambassadors?

It all starts with a connection.

Here’s the simple answer: use relatable marketing or marketing that’s not focused on your product.

Why is this important?

Here’s the formula for building brand ambassadors:

Create a connection > building trust >>> brand ambassadors.

When we market our products, our role is not to sell a product but rather to create a connection between the product and the customer. You might be wondering, what’s the difference? I’ll explain using the table below.

Brand Strategy vs. Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Activity: What’s The Difference?

Product-Focused Marketing vs. Humanized Marketing

Here are the differences between product-focused marketing and humanized marketing.

Product-focused Marketing	Humanized Marketing (Relatable Marketing)
It focuses on selling	It focuses on educating
Talks about how fantastic your product is	Talks about how much better your customers life will be with your product
It makes the customer feel like you are talking about the benefits of your product	It makes the customer feel like you know them and their pain that they experience
Focuses on the bells and whistles	Focuses on the problems that the product solves
Sounds very fancy and relates very well to product enthusiasts	It is straightforward and is understood by almost anyone
Is heavy on industry jargons	Stays away from clichés and terminologies that don’t make the message clear
It is dependent on new product releases	It is dependent on discovering more challenges that the product solves
You guard your product heavily due to fear of competitors stealing ideas	There’s a concentration on explaining the product in the simplest way possible, and you don’t worry about competitors since the only focus are your customers
It doesn’t let customers in for fear of not “looking-professional”	Let’s customers in to get to know the people behind the company

Essentially, when your marketing is much more focused on your customers than it is on your product, you tend to create a better emotional connection.

Creative Ways to Track Branding Campaign Success

How do you invoke more of an emotional connection to create brand ambassadors?

Use the three pillars of humanized marketing listen, empathize, dream (LED), to analyze your marketing by answering the following questions.

1. Listen: Listen to understand your audience

Do you understand the pain?
Do you know what your customer’s life looks like?
Do you know what your customer cares about the most?
Why would your customer listen to what you have to say?

2. Empathize: Empathize by describing the effects of the pain

Do you understand what the customer feels?
Do you understand how the customer is currently dealing with their pain?
Do you understand the barriers that are leading to the customer not making a move to another product?

3. Dream: Help customers envision your dream

Is your selling strategy focused on education?
Do you use storytelling to create better connections?
Are you thinking like a consultant?
Are you talking about everyday scenarios on how your product helps?
Are you truthful?
Are you focused on what makes you different instead of your competitor?
Do you care about the customer, or do you just say that you care?

Free Template: Brand Perception Survey Questions and Measurement Score

Final thoughts on building customer brand ambassadors

Don’t count your number of customer brand ambassadors based just on how much your accounts are growing or how many name brands you have.

Count them based on how engaged your audience is with you.

In your Customer Relationship Management System (CRM), ensure that you track every customer referral.

When you do, mark the lead source as a customer referral and note down the name of the customer referring business to you.

In the end, you’ll end up with a database of customer brand ambassadors that you can continuously engage with to deepen the existing relationships.

Additionally, the more you learn about your customer brand ambassadors you can attract more customers like that using the information you gain.

How to Figure Out the Type of Marketing Challenge You Have

Hellen Oti — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 22:29:03 +0000

You may think that your biggest marketing challenge is not having a big marketing budget. However, the truth is, money often isn’t the problem with most marketing initiatives.

Even with a smaller marketing budget, if your marketing is targeted at the right people and has the right type of messaging that resonates with your audience, you are sure to make some headway.

As a company facing a marketing problem, it helps to understand the type of marketing challenge you have, to help you know how to fix it.

There are Four Main Marketing Challenge Types or Categories

1. Necessity Challenge

When your marketing problem is because there isn’t a need for your product, this can be the biggest challenge to overcome.

In most cases, the only way to overcome this challenge is to pivot to something else.

A way to avoid this type of marketing challenge is to ensure that you always validate your product hypothesis with real data—conduct market research to determine if your solution is a pain worth solving.

That is, are there enough people willing to pay for that product?

If you didn’t conduct the market research needed and are now facing the necessity challenge after selling your product, all is not lost.

You can still run the study.

In this research, what you want to find out from customers is the real problems they are currently solving in another way. When you discover what that thing is, you may be able to tweak your product to meet that demand quickly, or you may need to abandon your original idea altogether.

The most important thing here is to act fast and make decisions swiftly. The longer you wait, the more resources you’d have to use trying to market something that doesn’t have a vast market.

2. Demand Challenge

So, we covered the necessity challenge.

However, what if you have a product that has a need, but you just don’t have enough eyeballs on the product?

That means that you have a demand challenge.

You are not able to create enough pull-through demand to get people interested in your product to buy your product from you.

For most businesses who have been able to validate their product’s need, the demand challenge is often one of the biggest ones.

You’ll know if you have a demand challenge if you have many repeat customers who love your product but not enough volume.

However, there is a caveat to this!

It only applies if you are going after a market that is not so niche that you may have already captured the market share that you can gain.

If your goal is to create significant demand and volume, always use your market research to ensure market demand.

The demand challenge also often denotes that you need to invest in brand awareness marketing to get people to know about your company and products.

Having a brand strategy is critical in this case.

How do you solve the demand marketing challenge?

Demand marketing challenges are often a lot easier to resolve than necessity marketing challenges.

With demand marketing problems, the company often needs to invest in more of the right kind of marketing. What I mean by the right type of marketing is marketing that has a well-thought-out data-driven marketing strategy behind it.

Don’t just dive into action and start spending on marketing just because you want to generate demand.

I’ve seen many businesses burn through their marketing dollars as a result of this.

Here’s a typical example that I see.

A company starts advertising because they believe that they need to promote visibility. They spend a lot of money on advertising and then don’t see the results they are looking for.

Why do you think this happens?

Because spending money on advertising is the easy part of advertising. The strategy behind it (what you are advertising, the content, the messaging, who you target), that’s what makes the difference.

I often advise businesses to first test out marketing initiatives organically to discover what works, before spending money advertising. Smart advertising is when you are amplifying the reach of something that you know already works.

Key takeaway: Invest in creating a tailored, targeted strategy for your specific business. It may take a little bit more time, but it beats wasting your advertising dollars without a strategy behind it.

3. Brand or Product Positioning Challenge

A brand or product positioning challenge is a challenge similar to the demand challenge but is somewhat different.

In the positioning challenge scenario, you may create demand and have customers willing to go through a sales cycle with you but end up going with a similar competitor even if you were the better option.

When that happens, that means that you have a brand positioning marketing challenge. A brand positioning marketing challenge implies that target customers can not differentiate your brand enough to tell what’s unique about your business.

When customers can’t tell the difference between your solution and that of your competitor, they could decide to go with a competitor with a better brand recognition since they might appear to be the “safer choice.”

How do you solve the brand positioning challenge?

Brand positioning challenge is one of those challenges that you have to roll up your sleeves and dig in!

If you have a brand positioning challenge, it’s time for the dreaded (or loved), depending on who you are talking to – rebranding.

Unfortunately, there is no way around this.

I see many businesses trying to find workarounds to spending the time to reevaluate their brand strategy just because they feel like it’s too much work.

Additionally, sometimes the longer a business has been in existence, they feel like they’ve already created a brand and don’t need to go through a brand strategy creation exercise.

The reality, however, is that every business should be conducting regular brand perception analysis studies to ensure that they are consistently creating the brand experience that they’d like to create in the marketplace.

Your intended brand experience doesn’t just happen just because you keep operating. It happens if you are intentional about it.

In the Brisque brand strategy creation process, we rely heavily on customer data. If you don’t have customers, you can use industry data to determine how you should position yourself.

It’s critical to base your brand positioning on your current or target customers’ information if your goal is to create a better connection.

As you conduct your customer research, here’s what you should look to discover:

What problem was your customer experiencing that led to your product?
What made your customer select your product?
Why does your customer keep using your product?

Here’s a Bonus! These questions are also the questions that you need to create a customer case study or success story. Simply add a checkbox at the end of your survey asking to feature the customer on your website.

Always think differently!

As you look to create a new brand position, do not copy what your competitor is doing. Here’s the deal: if you want to stand out, you can’t do that by copying your competitor.

It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been in the industry. You have to trust yourself, your product, and what you have to offer enough to create your unique voice, identity, and story, even if it strays away from what many of your competitors are doing.

Focus your competitor research on finding out your competitors blind spots and not figuring out how you can similarly position yourself.

Questions to answer with your competitor research:

Are there any industry reviews about your competitor’s solution that mentions things that customers wished your competitor did?
Are they targeting a specific market and ignoring another potential need?

Refrain from asking your marketing teams to come up with similar campaigns to what your competitors are doing. It’s not going to help with differentiating your product or business.

4. Pricing Challenge

Sometimes, when it’s all said and done. You may have a marketing challenge just because of how you price your product.

There is a reason why price is part of the 4Ps of marketing.

If you don’t price your product right, there might be a need or demand for your product, but you may not gain enough customers (if priced too high), or you may gain a lot of customers but still not meet your growth goals (if priced too low).

See the pricing strategy illustration below for reference.

How to figure out the right type of pricing model

There isn’t a magic way to do this.

You have to experiment with different pricing structures to find what’s profitable.

Remember that there is psychology to pricing. As a result, a $10 difference in price, no matter how minute, can sometimes be the tipping scale.

So, test different prices and different models.

You may end up with a profitable price range to help you go up and down as needed. For businesses with products that you can try first, test a model where you offer free trials or free samples to see if it’s worth it.

The humanized approach to solving your marketing challenges

As you play detective and investigate your marketing challenges, remember that you are first and foremost marketing to people.

People’s needs and wants evolve.

The only way you can be at the forefront of continually providing products that customers see as a necessity, create demand, and get enough people to pay is to focus on listening.

Listen first to what the marketplace is saying.

Invest the time in the research. Do not make assumptions about your customers no matter how long you’ve worked with them.

Your customer data will tell you all that you need to know, and you’ll make amazing discoveries that you may have overlooked otherwise.

In the end, the only people that matter are your customers.

Hellen Oti2023-10-12T19:39:27-04:00

The A-Z Guide for Creating a Lead Scoring System

Ready to Go Beyond Word-of-Mouth Marketing? Here’s What to Do Next

Hellen Oti — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 19:35:07 +0000

I am often amazed by the number of businesses I talk to who have run their business with little to no marketing. For these businesses, the only form of marketing that they’ve had has been word-of-mouth marketing.

It’s genuinely incredible how having a great product and service can help your business take off. It creates brand ambassadors who continually bring business to you and are cheaper than any paid influencer you may ever have. A Nielson advertising study revealed that 83% of people trust recommendations from people that they know.

When I talk to the businesses that have been in business for many years without marketing, they are coming to the game with an advantage that a traditional startup wouldn’t have: a brand presence and social proof from their customers.

However, if I had consulted with those businesses in the early days, I would have advised them to concentrate their efforts on building a scalable marketing process as well. We would have discussed using customer feedback to make the product better and creating marketing campaigns to attract and convert more customer brand ambassadors.

It can feel like you just need to focus on sales in the beginning for most startups. As a result, you might use sales outreach efforts, including cold emailing or calling, to generate demand. As you are doing this, if you also have other long-term marketing activities in place, such as improving your online visibility by publishing educational content, you’ll tip the scales with time.

You’ll have more people coming to you who have already learned about your company and brand. They’ll have questions, but you may not have to do as much selling. Your sales teams can also pivot and concentrate their efforts on building better relationships with your existing customers if they have enough pipeline business coming in. By not concentrating on long-term marketing activities, you may never tip the scales.

Why You Should Care About Brand Building and Creating a Marketing Process

To get to an equilibrium with your marketing costs, it’s important to focus on long-term marketing activities. Essentially, from that point onwards, your customer acquisition costs are supposed to decrease. If you find that you keep having to increase your marketing acquisition costs to get new customers, you are most likely not spending the time to create a repeatable marketing process by learning from what’s working.

Here’s how to get started with building a repeatable marketing process

If you are at the point where you see the need to build a scalable marketing methodology or process, here’s what you need to do:

1. Be ready to take a step back with an open mind

This step is very critical. Don’t assume that you know everything that there is to know about your customers and your industry. You’ll be surprised what you discover if only you let yourself explore the possibilities.

The idea here is to discover:

More reasons why customers select your product
The day-to-day challenges that you solve for your customers
What your competitors might be missing or not addressing.

2. Revaluate your brand strategy

In line with taking a step back, now is an excellent time to reevaluate your brand strategy and positioning. It’s important to validate your idea of your brand with what your customers think about your brand. If you do, you can start to create a brand experience in the marketplace that matches your value proposition. In my previous post on how to perform a brand perception analysis, I cover this in more detail.

Essentially, your customer brand perception analysis can be as simple as a three-question survey that covers:

Challenges that your customer was facing that led them to look for a solution
Why your customer selected your product/company
Why your customer stays with your company

Our brand perception analysis guide can help you with this process.

3. Don’t be afraid of the hard work and time that it takes to create a marketing process

There is no way to sugarcoat this. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts here. You just have to dig in and do the work. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll start reaping the benefits.

4. Don’t jump into busy marketing work!

Another thing to remember is that even though you have to play catchup, remember that marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. The winner is often the company that can maintain a steady pace throughout the race and not burn out towards the end. That means that when you get started, you have to pace yourself. Try a few different marketing strategies, see what works, make adjustments, and add on as needed.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start slowly and then build up as you go. You may get overwhelmed and jump ship if you do too much too soon.

5. Invest time into creating a marketing strategy and plan

Don’t miss this step!

Invest time into creating a strategy and plan. Don’t just say, “well, we should be posting on social media, so I’m going to start posting now!” And then start posting without a clear direction or strategy on what you are trying to do.

Pro Tip: As you create your marketing strategy and plan, don’t forget to create a marketing roadmap and marketing calendar to help you stay organized and keep your eyes on the prize.

6. Don’t be afraid to be bold with your marketing

Find a unique angle to help you stand out. Don’t get too obsessed with what your competitors do. Find out what works for you and stick to it. Copying your competitors will just not do the trick. As I mentioned previously, when you are researching your competitors, focus on trying to discover what they might be missing and not on doing what they are already doing.

Here are some tips for conducting competitor research that helps you stand out:

Look at online review websites to discover customer complaints.
Read industry reports on their products.
Analyze their marketing messages to uncover the pain points that they address and what they might be missing

7. Start with your low hanging fruits

Your low-hanging fruits will be easy but impactful marketing activities that you can tackle right away. An example is using your Google Analytics to discover the keywords that your website already ranks for, then start optimizing those keywords if they are relevant.

Pro Tip: Marketing activities that you have resources for, you’d rank as important, have a high level of urgency, and have a low level of difficulty will often fall into your tackle right away list.