Why Book a Demo shouldn’t be your only call-to-action

"Book a demo" is not a one size fits all call to action!

Imagine selling a chatbot to marketers who are in charge of their company website and to engineers who implement the code on the site. Two VERY different audiences.

What happens if you have the same CTA "Book a demo" on your sales website? Check out the video below what happens next:

Interview with Headspace COO on entrepreneurship & mental health

As Vice President of Marketing at Techstars, I got to interview interesting founders. I was super excited for this one: Karan Singh, Chief Operating Officer & Chief People Officer of Headspace.

Headspace is one of my favorite meditation apps, plus as a founder, Karan is amazing. He truly leads from the heart but always with brain. He was the founder of Ginger that got acquired by Headspace and decided to stay on.

Check out our conversation on leadership, entrepreneurship, and mental health.

Reinventing your career over 50 with Bobbi Brown

I’m a member of Chief, the membership for Executive women. We get to see super exciting speakers such as Melinda Gates, Amal Clooney, and more.

I was chosen to ask Bobbi Brown a question which was super exciting. I used her makeup when I was younger and now that she started a new beauty company called Jones Road Beauty, I use that too. But I was excited about more than that. She had a successful gig but she decided to leave it all behind and start something she loved in her 60s. Pretty impressive to walk away from something solid and to go after your dreams.

Hear what she says when I asked her: “What is your advice to women over 50 that want to reinvent their careers?”

Lead Magnet - Email List Building Free Training

Learn how to grow your email list of leads (without paying for ads) .. from downloadable lead magnets to email marketing.

Check out my free 4-part video series:

How Much Should You Pay an Instagram Influencer

How Much Should I Pay For an Influencer?

Use this free calculator to monetize your Instagram Influencers:

https://influencermarketinghub.com/instagram-money-calculator/

Here’s an Example of what you will get:

Ansoff Matrix

Russian American, Igor Ansoff, came up with a strategic planning tool called the Ansoff Matrix. It provides a framework to help marketers devise strategies for future growth. This doesn't just help marketers but also executives and other professionals who want to understand potential risk.

I know, not a very "sexy" looking framework, but it gets the job done. This is also sometimes called the "Product / Market Expansion Grid". Lets look at each quadrant:

• Market Penetration is the name give to a growth strategy where the business focuses on selling existing products into existing markets. Less risky.
  • Create a new marketing strategy to encourage more people to choose your product or service.
  • Introduce a loyalty scheme.
  • Launch price or other special offers.
  • Research your products to see which should get further investment, which should be optimized and which should be discontinued.
  • Know what your competitors are doing.

• Market Development is a growth strategy where the business seeks to sell its existing products into new markets.
  • Target different geographical markets at home or abroad. Or different target audiences.
  • Research and try out different sales channels. 
  • Really understand how to position your product.

• Product Development the strategy where a business aims to introduce new products into existing markets. Slightly risky.
  • Change your offering but repacking an existing product or extending your service offering.
  • Develop a related product or service.

• Diversification is the name given to the growth strategy where a business markets new products in new markets. Most risky.
  • Research, research, research. Understand your competitors, consumer needs and the market.

The Ansoff Matrix is usually used at the beginning of expanding your business. This gives you a good starting point in your future brainstorming sessions.

Demand Generation and Lead Generation

A lot of marketers use these two terms interchangeably: Demand Generation and Lead Generation. Yet they are two different marketing tools. However, they do work hand-in-hand.

Marketers are asked to demonstrate a Return-On-Investment and tracking where each dollar is spent. So, it is imperative to understand what demand generation is and what it can do for your organization and what lead generation is and what it can do for your organization.

Lets start with Demand Generation.

Demand Generation captures the umbrella of marketing programs that gets customers excited about your company’s product or services. It is where compelling messaging meets measurable results.

With demand generation it is important to target the correct audience you want to reach. The content provided doesn’t only focus on the offering but on the industry as well. While it’s brand awareness, it also creates interest and can change the prospects perspective by providing educational whitepapers, blog posts, and videos.

Now that your demand generation campaigns are in place, what happens next? This is where lead generation comes into play.

You’ve attracted these strangers through your demand generation programs, they have become visitors to your website and you have collected their information in order to build a marketing database for email, sales or telemarketing follow up. The direct outcome of lead generation is new contacts available for sales or continued nurturing programs. The best way to describe this is through a funnel diagram:

As you can see, Demand Generation sits on top of Lead Generation (and feeds into the funnel).

In the Demand Generation phase you’ve positioned yourself on websites such as YouTube, Technorati, Facebook, Instagram, and hundreds, or thousands, more.

Interest has been created and the stranger you attracted has now reached your marketing database. Through forms, call-to-actions and landing pages you have gathered their information in order to properly interact with them and convert them into a lead. Track and manage the leads to find out which ones are the right ones that can be handed over to the Sales team. Now it’s the sales teams turn to close the lead. Don’t think this means the marketer is done with his or her work. The marketer should watch closely to see what Sales is doing with this lead. It might come back to marketing for more nurturing, it might get closed, it might be a lead that at this time or never will turn into a sale. Once a lead turns into a customer or client, retention is often times shared by customer support, sales and marketing. Delight the client / customer with ongoing education and attention for up-selling, re-selling and creating a champion for your product or services.

Lead generation and demand generation go together, find the right mix for your organization!

Is Your Biggest Customer Your Best Customer?

Thinking that your BIGGEST customer is your BEST customer can be very dangerous. Just because the biggest customer spends the most money, doesn’t necessarily make them the most valuable and the one all efforts should be focused on. A lot more comes into play when looking at the most valuable customer (see the list below of an example of what some companies look at). Biggest does not equal valuable, it can be, but all angles need to be looked at.

A best customer is someone that speaks favorable of your company. Someone that can spread the word about your company and your product. Someone that continuously buys over the years. And yes, also someone that might be the biggest customer.

It is ill-advised to focus just on one customer, in this case the biggest one, because if you put all “your eggs in one basket”, you might end up with a big problem. What if this customer leaves you? What if this customer becomes disgruntled with you and/or your product? Having focused on just this one customer will leave you in a world of hurt if they leave you or no longer like what you are selling.

At one of the companies I’ve worked with, we looked at the following factors to decide who our “best” customer is:

1. Purchase size: Yes, purchase size is a factor
2. Buyer persona: Is this the right group of people we want to go after (title, department, company size, industry)? Can they spread the word about us in the industry we are interested in?
3.  Loyalty: Are they saying positive things about us? Can we use them as a reference / testimonials?
4.  Re-purchase: Will they buy from us again when their contract is up?
5.  Re-selling: Will they purchase our extras (more seats for the software, educational components and consulting)?
6.  Geography: We are a small start-up company with only one sales person. Having customers in different countries becomes very difficult with the time zone change and multiple languages. So, we are looking for US and Canada customers only.

For my company example, we need to look at all six of these combined (not just one – the biggest customer) in order to figure out if someone is considered a “best” customer for us.

How to Add an Facebook Admin to your Page

This is the standard way of adding an admin to your Facebook page. Go to Settings at the top of your page and click on "Settings":

Then select "Page Roles" on the left sidebar:

Once there, add the email address of the person you'd like to made admin - the email address has to be the email address they use on Facebook. You also have to select their level of access your page:

Now our part is done. The person that you just made Admin should get an email from Facebook that looks like this:

This person that just has to hit on "confirm" and voila! Your new admin is added to your page.