Free eBook – How To Market a Startup: 10 Ways to Bootstrap Your Funnel for Success

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Free eBook – How To Market a Startup: 10 Ways to Bootstrap Your Funnel for Success

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Free eBook – How To Market a Startup: 10 Ways to Bootstrap Your Funnel for Success

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Free eBook – How To Market a Startup: 10 Ways to Bootstrap Your Funnel for Success

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By the way, all except for one are available, for free through the Brampton Library.

Book #1

Title: Blue Ocean Strategy

General notes: “Blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.” – https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-strategy/

How this book helped me: I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the real-world examples used to highlight the many elements within a market space that can be shifted, opens your mind and allows you to view your own business/Startup/idea and the market you are in, through a new light. The perspective I gained through this book allowed me to identify a potential gap within the marketing support market space, this gap consists of the evolving needs of clients, market shift involving accessibility of new technology and the existing solutions providers’ lack of adaptation. This also enabled me to structure my business and services in a unique way that would allow me to fill the gap and set myself apart in a market space that traditionally has been viewed as oversaturated.

Who might benefit from this book: whether you are developing or validating an idea for a new business, in the starting phases of launching your Startup or within an established organization and are looking to innovate, gain market share at a low cost, or generate uncontested demand, this book is while worth your time.

How to get your hands on it: hard copy, ebook, and audiobook versions are available for this title, free of charge through the Brampton Library, view them here.

Also available to purchase through Chapters, & Amazon.

Book #2

Title: Blue Ocean Shift

General notes: “Blue Ocean Shift is a roadmap to move you, your team, and your organization to new heights of confidence, market creation and growth.

Whether you are a cash-strapped start-up or large, established company, non-profit or national government, you can SHIFT from cutthroat markets – red oceans – to wide-open new markets – or blue oceans of uncontested market space – by following a simple five-step process that brings your people along so they own and drive the process.” – https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-shift/

How this book helped me: As a solopreneur in my first year of business I currently do not have any internal staff that I needed to guide through the shift in my organization, instead this book helped me outline my process and develop support materials to help my clients and prospects to move with me in this shift. Allowing them to understand the value such a shift would hold for their business, and aiding me in maintaining a customer-centric perspective while structuring my business.  

Who might benefit from this book: If you or your organization have a set vision in mind and are developing the plan to achieve this transformation, this book will provide you with the process and leadership insights that will enable you to inspire your people through the change and empower them to drive the process.

How to get your hands on it: hard copy, ebook  and audiobook versions are available for this title, free of charge through the Brampton Library, view them here

Also available to purchase through Chapters, & Amazon.

Additional information: you can find more information about the Blue Ocean Strategy, Blue Ocean shift and other topics centered around these concepts through the website: https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com

Bonus: Blue ocean leadership (https://hbr.org/2014/05/blue-ocean-leadership) & avoiding red ocean traps (https://hbr.org/2015/03/red-ocean-traps)

Book #3

Title: Brand Seduction: How Neuroscience Can Help Marketers Build Memorable Brands

General notes: “For many marketing professionals, “science” is a four-letter word. They see brand-building as an unteachable art guided by their intuition and experience. But at its core, marketing aims to seed ideas into people’s minds, make them feel a certain way, and, ultimately, get them to act.

In Brand Seduction, Daryl reveals the latest psychological and neuroscientific discoveries about how our minds process brand information and make decisions, and the important roles our emotions and unconscious play in our selections.

Welcome to the new world of neuromarketing.” – https://books.google.ca/books/about/Brand_Seduction.html

How this book helped me: during the market research and analysis stage of launching my business, I identified the need for strong branding that would differentiate my business from my competitors in the eyes of my prospects. I also identified the need for my branding to invoke feelings of aspiration, empowerment, and achievement in my prospects and clients, as they attempt to tackle the evolving field of marketing. This book explores how different elements that make up a brand are interpreted by people, subconsciously and consciously and includes real-world examples of how organizations of all sizes achieved branding and business success. This book helped me build a brand that sets my business apart and through the hands-on exercise outlined in the book, I was able to craft a brand fantasy that met my business’s structural needs and its goals. The exercises also provided me with a process of taking something that is primarily conceptual and developing it into a tangible element. The finished branding document after completing the exercises, also makes it easier when developing marketing and sales collateral, websites and social media materials as well as the brand’s story and voice when interacting with prospects and clients and can go along way should you need to engage the support of an external graphic artist or a design agency.

Who might benefit from this book: If you or your organization is striving for innovation or making a shift to attain a long-term vision, your brand and identity will need to evolve along the way. The concepts and exercises outlined in this book will provide you with a method to take the key goals from your vision and craft them into a brand that evokes the desired perception from your targeted audience. Through this book, you can understand how the minds of your prospects work and ensure that your organization is communicating in a way that aligns with achieving your long-term vision.

How to get your hands on it: this is the only book on my top 5 list for achieving innovation that is not currently available through the Brampton library, you can purchase it online or in most chapters locations.

Book #4

Title: Growth Hacker Marketing

General notes: “A new generation of megabrands like Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Twitter haven’t spent a dime on traditional marketing. No press releases, no TV commercials, no billboards. Instead, they rely on a new strategy—growth hacking—to reach many more people despite modest marketing budgets. Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they’re primed to generate explosive reactions.

Bestselling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you’re responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.” – https://books.google.ca/books/about/Growth_Hacker_Marketing.html

How this book helped me: similar to Blue Ocean Strategy and Brand Seduction, this book includes real-world examples of how organizations of all sizes achieved extreme growth through no or low-cost initiatives, by analyzing their processes and capitalizing on points where growth is most likely to occur. This was through acts such as client referrals or sharing promotions, for example, the extra free storage space you receive from Dropbox when you sign someone up, or the embedded footer Hotmail used on the free email accounts, that let all of your contacts know that the email(s) they were receiving was from a free account, which they could have as well.  They pinpointed the moments within their processes where growth was mostly to occur and they structured their businesses around these opportunities. The insight I gained from this book, allowed me to flesh out my idea of a marketing automation live demo series, which demonstrates marketing strategies and technology in action, live and on-demand while communication with my prospects in a manner that will allow them to envision this working for their business. My business launch strategy which included no advertising budget but landed several clients also came to me after reading this book.

Who might benefit from this book: honestly, everyone who is running a business, in the process of launching a business, is looking to start a business, or is part of an established organization and oversees or works closely with the marketing, sales or customer service department(s) should read this book. At only 176 pages it is a quick read and even if it only inspires one new initiative to experiment with, it is easily worth the investment of your time.

How to get your hands on it: hard copy is available for this title, free of charge through the Brampton Library, view them here.

Hard copy and audiobooks are also available to purchase through Chapters, & Amazon.

Book #5

Title: The subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck :

General notes: “In this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger cuts through the crap to show us how to stop trying to be “positive” all the time so that we can truly become better, happier people.

Manson makes the argument, backed both by academic research and well-timed poop jokes, that improving our lives hinges not on our ability to turn lemons into lemonade, but on learning to stomach lemons better. Human beings are flawed and limited—”not everybody can be extraordinary, there are winners and losers in society, and some of it is not fair or your fault.” Manson advises us to get to know our limitations and accept them. Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties, once we stop running and avoiding and start confronting painful truths, we can begin to find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and forgiveness we seek.” – https://www.harpercollins.ca/9780062457714/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fck/

How this book helped me: You might be wondering why there is a “self-help” book on this list and perhaps you are even thinking that this post just took a turn for the worst – bear with me, there is a method to this madness. The reason I feel this book is a beneficial addition to my top 5 books for achieving innovation is this; the ability to adjust and align your standard or metric of measuring personal & organizational success.

This book helped me analysis, re-evaluate and set new standards and metrics to measure my success by. When you are looking to innovate it is important that you have a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve and ensure your values and the metrics you measure success align with this new vision.

Who might benefit from this book: those who are striving for innovation whether it is within an established organization or if they are building their own business from the ground up, will find helpful and insightful truths within this book.

How to get your hands on it: hard copy and audio book versions are available for this title, free of charge through the Brampton Library, view them here.

Also available to purchase through Chapters, & Amazon.

Don’t forget to sign up for your free Brampton Library account & happy reading!!!

The post Top 5 Books For Successful Innovation appeared first on Marketing Adventurista.

Let’s first take a look at the elements that make up both a buyer profile and a buyer persona:

What is a Buyer Profile?

Buyer Profiles: A buyer profile or what is now being called an “avatar” in some circles, is a portrait built based on one of the business’s ideal customers. These profiles outline specific personal, professional, and company information. the data that these profiles are composed of, is used to zero in on segments of a broader target audience, allowing the sales & marketing teams to group prospects that match the outlined details within the profile, into a refined audience segment for each ideal prospect the business wishes to target. These refined segments can then be reached with specific messaging that encompasses relevant details that match the information in the buyer profile, such as the job title, professional goals or reference to company size; messaging that will resonate specifically with the segmented audience they are looking to convert.

Buyer profiles typically include information in the following areas:

Personal Information:

• Age
• Marital status
• Family size
• Education level
• What are their personal interests, hobbies, and preferred brands/products?
• How is this person connected? What channels could be used to reach them?
• For visualization purposes, a fictional name, and photo are included?

Company information:

• Industry
• Revenue per year
• Geography
• Company size

Professional information:

• Job title
• Role in the company
• Who do they report to?
• How their success is measured?
• The professional skills required for their role
• Incentives & rewards from their job
• Biggest challenges that this role faces
• What channels do they used to source solutions to professional challenges they face?

Here is a sample buyer profile:

Benefits of a Buyer Profile:

• The information collected allows for a certain degree of personalized messaging, that speaks too and resonates with the audience segmentation that you are looking to target. This is achieved through the use of target-specific information in the messaging.

• They Aid you in seeing your target audience as a real person, with interests and hobbies, a family and spouse, career goals and challenges, and a boss to impress. This allows you to build an emotional connection in your mind with the audience, which in turn will make communication easier. To put this into perspective, compare the ease of getting a friend to do you a favor, to the thought of making the same request of a stranger you have never met before and know nothing about. For the majority of people, the conversation with the friend is a less stressful situation than the same conversation with someone with whom they have no emotional connection.

• The buyer profile also shades light on the channels that will provide the best chances of reaching the segmented audience and why other channels may present problems – allowing you to refine your marketing and sales efforts and optimize your budget.

What is a Buyer Persona?

Buyer Personas: Includes the information gathered when building buyer profiles, however, they typically take it to the next level by being centralized around the purchasing process, and the factors and key players that influence the buying decision.

The key difference, therefore, is the inclusion of buying insights.

By examining the buying insights of your ideal prospect’s purchasing process, the purchase cycle, the internal and external factors that trigger or affect the process as well as the key players that influence the buying decision, you will be able to answer:

• Which buyers to focus your efforts
• The features, benefits, and values with the highest importance to these buyers
• The barriers that prevent these buyers from including your offerings in their evaluation
• The channels or industry resources that these buyers utilize to evaluate the options available
• Who is involved in the purchasing decision and the influence they have

Benefits of a Buyer Persona:

• Through analysis of the of the buying insights, you can optimize the buyers’ journey through your funnel. With the buyer being the centralized aspect, creating a seamless experience for your prospects is of the utmost importance and through this method you can achieve the holy grail of marketing and sales alignment; allowing each to complement the others efforts by making the touch points the priority rather than focussing on the handoff at a certain stage. ultimately ensuring each touch point within the funnel is relevant to the relationship that prospect has with your business, regardless of the source.

• Make the most of your time and budget by identifying which types of buyers you need to influence and the best ways to reach them.

• Create effective messaging that resonates highly with the buyers you are targeting.

How Buying Insights & a User-Centric Mentality Impacts Your Success

Building out the full buyer persona, and revealing the buying insights, requires the ability to pivot from your point of view and step into your customer’s shoes, looking at this process from their perspective and structuring your approach to provide a seamless experience; one that compliments their internal purchasing process. Organizations that have a “user-centric” mentality include this attitude as a cornerstone in every aspect of their business and by doing so, ensure that they move fluidly with the needs of their buying base while staying on top of industry trends. A “user-centric” approach may mean funnel or organizational changes are required, to better align your marketing, sales and customer service efforts with what resonates with your prospects needs and complements their decision-making process, however, it will also remove the need for guesswork in your marketing in sales efforts.

If you have buyer profiles created, layering on the buying insights and making the necessary adjustments will increase your appeal to prospects while improving the communication messaging and timing, ultimately resulting in higher levels of conversions.

The post Buyer Personas vs. Profiles: How To Win More Sales appeared first on Marketing Adventurista.

We live in the most user-centric era yet. Far beyond the belief that “the customer is always right”,  companies now strive to cater the entire purchase experience (or series of experiences) to the personal needs and interests of each individual; ushering in what has been coined as ‘the engagement economy’ by the marketing automation industry leader,  Marketo.

This terminology refers to the shift in customers expectations for relevant, meaningful and personalized brand experiences, when they want them, and on their terms. As a marketing professional, let me tell you this is a tall order – however endeavoring to achieve it is no longer an option. No longer are your direct competitors, your only concern – in this environment of engagement the brand experiences that you are providing your clients and prospects, are being measured against the experience every other brand is delivering.

Going back to “grassroots” or believing there is no need to adapt and evolve will only lead to your customers and prospects viewing the experiences your brand provides as being disconnected and irrelevant. Leaving them feeling that your company doesn’t understand them or their needs.

Through this ten-part series on marketing automation for small businesses, we have explored ways that you can leverage the technology and the functionalities it provides as well as how initiatives that utilize these functionalities can be incorporated and implemented into your marketing strategies. Each post has explored a different aspect of your business and how it can benefit from this technology;  leveraging it to even the playing field and allow you to compete with larger organizations. Personalization code is another function that will enable you to provide the experiences with your brand, that your customers and prospects are expecting, on a scalable level.

Experiencing Personalized Website Visits

Personalization code, allows you to take your user journey to next level, by customizing what each user sees based on behaviors or interests they have expressed on your website in the past. Think of your favorite website, it could be an online retailer, a social networking site, a live streaming site, or maybe a B2B solutions site with a killer resource section.

Have you noticed that the more you interact with the content displayed on the site, the more your visits have been tailored to your interests?

This is because they are employing various methods available to better understand you. It could be as simple as asking you to rate certain products or options on their site. Or maybe having you fill out interest-based questions broken out over a series of visits. Perhaps they are tracking the content you are interacting with and using this to gauge your interests, likes and dislikes as they adjust over time – maybe even to predict future content you will be interested in.

Think all of these options sound creepy, and you wouldn’t fall victim to such ploys? Think again, because the practices I just described are actively in use on such sites as Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix (just to name a few). At first glance, these practices can seem intrusive but there are two sides to this coin, for example, what do you think your experience would be when using Netflix if your recommended lists were absent? As of March 2016, there were 4,335 movie titles and 1,197 TV shows available on Netflix, imagine having to sift and sort through all of that content manually? What about the helpful notifications we receive when a new movie or TV show that falls within our interests has been added? Without tracking our viewing habits, likes and interests they would not be able to alert us that the movie we had been dying to see in theatre but missed out on was now available to stream from the comfort of our couch.

The same can be said for Facebook, with “510 comments, 2,93,000 statuses and 1,36,000 photos posted every 60 seconds.” our timeline or news feed would be bombarded with content, regardless of its quality, our interests or current engagement levels. Although it has been suggested that the engagement algorithm Facebook introduced was to pressure businesses into spending advertising dollars by limiting their organic reach, it would be short-sighted to say this hasn’t had a profound impact on the experience Facebook users are currently enjoying. This stems from the fact that, the more you engage with a business or “friends” content the more Facebook will serve you related content.

You may be thinking, this is great, but how is it relevant to my business?

Well, let’s take a look at a few ways personalization codes can be implemented in your business and marketing strategies.

Content Marketing

If you are in the B2B environment chances are high that you employ a lead-based sales approach which will incorporate a nurturing aspect of some sort; working to move your prospects through the stages of your purchasing process or sales funnel. Content marketing strategies have become a popular method for nurturing engagement in leads, by providing them useful content that is informative while including what is considered a soft sell for your products or services. However, as you build your content library it can be hard for prospects to find the next piece that will be of greatest interest to them; enter your personalization code. This will allow you to categorize your content based on the area of interest it serves most, as well as the areas it is closely related to and when a prospect who has interacted with content from certain areas of interest is completing one piece, your website will suggest or display other content that is directly related to their expressed interest with the goal of encouraging them to continue engaging with your website. This can be achieved by suggesting numerous content pieces that will nurture your leads, while informing/educating them along the way, not to mention creating multiple reasons for your sales representatives or account managers to reach out.  Content types that could be displayed through personalization codes are:

• Suggested blog posts or articles
• eBooks or white papers
• Live or on-demand webinars
• Case studies or testimonials from similar clients who have converted
• Document templates
• Live demos
• Upcoming events or conferences

Standard Content

Not specifically using a content marketing approach? That’s fine, if you do have testimonials and case studies broken out by type of purchaser (or that apply to specific buyer personas), or certain products/service or packages that speak specifically to one of your target audiences, you could help generate interest from them and hopefully accelerate them through your purchase cycle by displaying the information that will directly appeal the most to them and will be of greatest interest. This can be achieved through personalization code as it allows you to completely customize the entire web page(s) the user visits based on the target segmentation you set up.

Online Retailer

Why not take a page out of Amazon’s book and use personalization code to drive increased revenue through the sale of related products, upselling products, and by displaying the products specific audience segmentations are most likely to buy.

Related products: by using personalization code you can categorize the products you sell online and the products within related categories that are normally sold together. For example, if someone is looking to purchase a digital camera and is viewing a specific model’s detail page, there could be a section of the page, that highlights products that are typically purchased with the camera, like the memory card, tripod, external flash, cleaning kit, protective travel case etc. These can be a mix of the products from the same supplier that manufactures the camera and are specifically built for that model, as well as top-rated accessories from other companies that can be used conjunction with the camera.  This simplifies the purchasing experience for your buyer, by limiting the need to hunt for the related products, and discouraging purchases from competitors (online and in-store), through saving them money on shipping fees, you can encourage them to spend more on your site.

Upselling: personalization code can also be used to upsell products on your site if a user within a certain audience segment is viewing a product below their typical spending point. For example, if someone within your audience segment who fits the demographics of a high-end purchaser is viewing a low-end camera model’s detail page, the same field used to recommend related products could instead display the top 5 camera models or the next 5 highest priced camera models with the statement “people who viewed this camera, purchased one these:”  with the goal of turning a $500 sale into a $1200 sale. If you really wanted to maximize your revenue you could combine these two approaches by then displaying the related products once the user is viewing the $1200 camera; encouraging them to then purchase the accessories that belong to the more expensive item in addition to the upsell.

Customized experience: with online retail giants such as Amazon, the competition for prospective buyers can be fierce and driving them to your website is only a small part of the battle. Once you have their focus, you need to engage them quickly before their short attention spans point them in another direction. Personalization code can also help you achieve this by completely customizing the pages they see including the products that are featured. If you are really into tech gear and you land on a website with the latest PC’s, and other tech gadgets up front and center  you typically will begin to engage with the products that are displayed to you and thus begin moving through the conversion process where recommended related products or high-end products can be displayed along the way.

Buyers can become overwhelmed with all of the options available or disengaged by products that don’t appeal to them; personalization code allows you to customize their experience with your brand by providing them with a personalized user journey.  By providing these experiences, your website becomes the personal shopper they never knew they needed, but now, can no longer live without.

Haven’t read the rest of this blog series? No better place to start than the beginning! How To Master Marketing Automation For Your Business

The post What is Personalization Code & How To Use It appeared first on Marketing Adventurista.