What VW Can Teach Us About Managing a PR Crisis

Efficiency and quality is at the heart of German engineering. This much seemed to be true until last week. Germany and the world watched in shock when Volkswagen announced that some of its cars had been programmed to circumvent EPA testing.

Recalls and mistakes are something that the world has come to expect from companies like Toyota. But few people, including the CEO of Volkswagen, ever expected to hear this kind of news from a German auto manufacturer.

Though the scandal is far from over, Volkswagen has handed this crisis well. The company immediately chose to take the high road. It has offered its vehement apologies–twice. It has also promised a full investigation into the extent of the damage.

Even Martin Winterkorn, the CEO, stepped down from his role in the immediate aftermath of the scandal. He announced that he was unaware of wrongdoing on his part, but he preferred to act in the best interests of Volkswagen regardless of whose fault the issues are.

Startups and small businesses can learn a lot from how VW has managed this PR crisis.

Lessons Learned From the Crisis

The most important thing that any business can do to survive a proven crisis of this magnitude is to avoid finger-pointing. It must accept responsibility for its collective actions. Winterkorn’s announcement cemented the company’s claim that although the devices were happening under his watch, he never authorized the devices to be installed on the cars.

The fact that Volkswagen did not try to shrug off the responsibility that it has towards both drivers and the environment may allow to it recover quickly.

The amount of transparency that both Volkswagen and the German government have called for is another an important lesson to learn for any small business. Volkswagen is not attempting to get in front of this scandal; instead, the company, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, would prefer to investigate the issue to avoid any future surprises.

Working to get ahead of the damage has its place in crisis management. But, if it looks as though Volkswagen is using its investigations to cover up further damage, this will only further damage the brand’s credibility.

What is also important is that Volkswagen has apologized publicly for the company’s actions. But it did not just issue a standard form apology–it has apologized twice and meant it.

VW Scandal in China

The company’s solid apologies have helped it out of PR crises in the past. In 2013, VW China was accused of selling cars equipped with faulty gearboxes. China is an instrumental market for Volkswagen; its cars have dominated the streets from Beijing to Shanghai for decades.

When the 2013 scandal broke, it was handled masterfully by Catherine Peng. Peng had been the VP of PR & Communications at Volkswagen Group China for only two months. She was also on Advertising Age’s “Women to Watch China 2014” list for how well she handled the crisis.

Peng’s message to businesses working both in China and around the world is that an apology is the best policy. She says that when a company apologizes sincerely and quickly, it is easier to fix the problem and get back to business.

A Business Owes Its Customers

The final lesson that Volkswagen offers to other businesses is how important it is to remain grounded. People have high expectations of companies. The more successful your business is, whether it is big or small, the more customers expect of you.

So when mistakes happen, and mistakes do happen, you should emerge from the scandal both cautious and humble. A business owes its success not just to its policy makers and employees, but to its customers as well. It is not enough to admit that the customer has been wronged; it is also important to show the customer that your businesses mission is not to exploit customers, the environment, or anyone else.

It’s true that Volkswagen owes a lot of people a lot of apologies. Volkswagen owes an apology to its American customers, to the planet, and to the country of Qatar, which lost billions of dollars when Volkswagen’s worth dropped by 25 billion in one day.

The Road Ahead

There is more damage to come. Volkswagen will owe millions in fines, spend more on recalls, and even be taken to court. But because Volkswagen took immediate accountability for the mistakes, remained humble, and offered sincere apologies, the world’s second-largest auto manufacturer will make it through this crisis. These are the biggest lessons anyone can learn from Volkswagen today.

The post What VW Can Teach Us About Managing a PR Crisis appeared first on AllBusiness.com.

5 New (And Effective) Ways To Measure Event ROI

Events drive leads for sales and are a powerful networking tool that enables companies and brands to connect with their audiences and clients face to face. At least, that’s what we know. But as any marketer, sales rep and event organizer will tell you, qualifying those collected leads is anything but certain.

Why?

Because not all leads are created equal, and every individual at your event has their own unique journey to the final sale.

According to Statista, only 14% of B2B marketers’ budgets are being allocated for in-person trade shows in 2015. Because of this, event marketers are pressured to find the metrics that matter when it comes to proving value.

Traditionally most event organizers and sales reps have focused on the data that is generated before and after an event, which gives a good picture of who showed up, but not much else.

Here are 5 ways that event marketers can use the data that is being generated before, during, and after their events to create a richer experience for their attendees, while providing insights into the value of their show.

1. Social Listening

Using social media to track activity pre and post-event is nothing new, but keeping up with what your audiences are saying during your event could lead to valuable clues and insights to help optimize your event for the future. EventTrack revealed that nearly 77% of event marketers use social media as a key engagement strategy before an event. But that number drops to 61% after the event. It seems silly that most organizers would disappear on social after their event is over, and even sillier that we wouldn’t be prioritizing social media during events!

Try setting up a social listening dashboard to track your event’s unique hashtag. (And if you don’t have one of those, you’d better jump on that bandwagon!) Look for valuable clues such as sentiment, number of posts, images, etc. from your audience. Are they posting quotes from speakers who inspired them? Or are they complaining that the speaker went on too long? Are they posting a ton of photos about a specific exhibitor’s booth or product that they’re excited about? Those comments can go a long way to tailoring future events and finding the content that’s really connecting with your audience.

Using that social data will help you identify engaged attendees who really are invested in your event. Or use that social data to generate post-event content that you know your attendees loved by sending out notes from your most popular speakers, creating graphics based on trending quotes from your sessions, point audiences towards presentations that were used during keynotes, post photos of people having fun and enjoying themselves, or send out a newsletter highlighting all the great social activity that your event attracted to make attendees feel special.

Some tools you can use to set up an easy to use social listening dashboard:

• Hootsuite – Set up an alert for your event’s unique hashtag or name and collect all social mentions on your registered social accounts. The mobile app will allow for real-time responses and monitoring no matter where you are on the floor.
• Google Alerts – An “oldie but goodie” in terms of being able to have all mentions from around the web about your conference’s hashtag or name sent directly to your email account.
• Mention – A personal favorite of mine for setting up a dedicated dashboard to listen for any mention of your show. Mention pulls in everything from blogs, to forums, to social posts all in one dedicated location.

2. In-Event Surveys

Want to know what your audience thought about the speakers or exhibitors you’ve booked? Ask them while the content is still fresh in their mind! Sending out surveys during or the night of an event is a great way to gauge interest from your attendees and an excellent way to collect additional data that you can use when planning for your next one. How long did they spend at the session? Did they enjoy the topic? Is there anything else they wish the speaker would have covered? What topics are they most interested in?

Don’t forget to look at the metrics that come with your survey as well, such as open rate, bounce rate, time on page, etc. Those people who took the time to give you feedback might be qualified leads waiting to be added to your sales pipeline! And what a great excuse to follow up with them to thank them for their time, whether the response was good or bad!

Don’t forget to pool your exhibitors for their thoughts and feedback on the event. They are in the trenches talking to your attendees, and they can probably offer some unique insights as to how they thought the event’s marketing worked, what could be done better, attendee attitude, etc.

Some survey tools you can use during your event to maximize attendee response:

• Your Mobile App – If your conference has a dedicated mobile app that allows for surveying, this is an effective way to reach those who are already engaged and using your content to find their way around. Create surveys on the fly or work with your speakers to craft a questionnaire that will give valuable insights.
• Email – If you’re collecting attendee email addresses at your event (and you really should), then you already have a direct way to connect with them to gain insights. Not everyone will respond during the event, because hopefully they’re still engaged with the event itself, but you might be surprised who answers after the day is over.
• SurveyMonkey – A powerful and free survey tool to help you manage the email addresses, which allows organizers to “jazz up” their content a bit. Pro tip: Add your company’s branding to legitimize the messaging and increase response rate.

3. Targeted Messaging

Image Source

If you’re tracking movement during your event using beacon or RFID technology, then you have a good idea of where people are gravitating on the floor. Most event organizers send out messaging via their conference app, or using emails to “remind” attendees of upcoming speakers, special offers, etc.

Use that digital data to help understand which messaging and attractions at your event really resonated with attendees or inspired them to attend. For example, you can correlate how many individuals were scanned going to the events that you messaged them about via your conference app or use the email analytics to understand who was reading your content and who wasn’t. Not only will you have a better understanding of what messaging really caught people’s attention, you can prove to speakers, exhibitors, and your boss, which partners you should be securing for future events who will really drive attendance and traffic.

4. Gamification

Gamification is a trend that’s worth looking into when it comes to live events. What better way to engage attendees and get them excited about exhibitors, speakers, and parties than by creating a fun game with swag to encourage them to discover?

Some examples of successful gamification methods would be:

• Scavenger hunts – just as much fun as when you were a kid, but now you’re competing for grown-up prizes, and there’s networking along the way.
• Photo quests – encourage attendees to find locations or people to snap photos of that they can post to their social channels; it gets them to use your event’s hashtag, while promoting how much fun they’re having (and again, there’s prizes).
• Social check-ins – getting people to check in at certain event locations can be difficult, but not when you incentivize them or make it part of a bigger game!
• Networking challenges – Who’s going to be the first to collect 100 business cards or gain 20 new followers on Twitter?

The data that these types of games collect will be invaluable to knowing whether or not your content was compelling, and will help you understand which of your attendees were really interacting with your event.

Getting exhibitors in on the game is another great way to collect data too. They will appreciate the increased networking opportunities, and you will be able to see how actively people participated and where they went. Those attendees who enthusiastically played along may qualify as sales leads for your organization or possible thought-leaders to partner with in the future to help promote upcoming events or content that you plan on releasing.

5. Mobile App Insights

Your event’s mobile app is a treasure trove of attendee activity that you can export and use to produce data-driven insights. Beyond the total number of downloads, ask your app provider for a full breakdown of who used the app and how to discover whether or not it was effective. Did your attendees use the messaging function? Or were they more focused on the app’s networking capabilities? You could even send out a survey to ask attendees what improvements you could make to your event’s app. Those metrics will drive a better understanding of your audience’s needs as well as improve functionality.

Using this kind of digital data to help inform the layout, agenda, and messaging for your event will take a lot of the guesswork out of planning, not to mention deliver a more qualified list of leads to your sales teams! And because events are an expensive and immersive experience for everyone involved, marketers need these kinds of insights to help them prove value to their attendees, sponsors, speakers, and exhibitors.

Conclusion

Connecting with your prospects and clients in person is key to driving your sales and marketing. As described in this post, I am proposing several ways that you can learn about the actual experience of your attendees. Because each attendee has their own agenda, priorities and social behavior, it is complicated to understand every journey throughout your event.

At the very least, you should identify and understand those attendees who are the most engaged at the event. By focusing on these attendees, you will be able to optimize your messaging before, during, and after future events? With the right combination of tools, you can reveal much about your attendees and translate this on broader scale into successful sales and marketing campaigns.

Watch Our Upcoming Webinar

Brian Friedman will be the presenter in our upcoming webinar, How to Leverage Data to Drive Event Marketing Decisions. Signup if you’d like to learn more.

About the Author: Brian Friedman is the founder and CEO of Loopd. Design driven product leader socializing technology through wearables and analytics.

Marketing: If I Knew Then What I Know Now

We all look back at our past and reflect, “if only I’d known X at the time. I would have been more successful/kept my hair/met the guy of my dreams.”

The same applies to running your own business. I started my marketing firm nine years ago, and I laugh now when I see the crappy website I had and think about the kinds of projects I desperately took on just to have some income. Here’s what I wish I’d known then about marketing.

1. “The Cobbler Has No Shoes” Syndrome Will Hurt You

As a marketer, I’ve, er, found it difficult to market my own business. I’ve always been too busy marketing for my clients. So there have been times when my business has suffered because I didn’t put enough energy into growing my own business. When I read Michael Gerber’s E-Myth, his suggestion to “work on your business” really resonated with me.

2. Having a Niche Will Actually Bring You More Customers

Early on, I was scared to say no. I needed to pay my bills. So I took on projects I had no business working on. I didn’t zero in on my niche of blogging until about six years in. When I did, I broke out into a sweat, sure I’d be out of business within a year. Instead, something interesting happened. The more blog content I wrote for clients, the more new business I attracted. I got really good at my core offering, and as a result, more people hired me. Awesome.

3. You’ve Got to Market, Even When Business is Booming

Oh, 2009. You got me, and a lot of other people. Business had been chugging right along, and suddenly, no one had money to hire my firm. Now, had I been marketing my business in the months leading up to the Recession, it might have been easier. But I assumed everything was smooth sailing, so I didn’t put the effort in. Now I know that marketing today will lead to tomorrow’s customer, and you’ll always need more business in the future.

4. If It Ain’ Working, Ditch It

I tried Google AdWords. They didn’t work for me. Nor did Pinterest. Instead of wasting too much time on the wrong marketing and advertising channels, I learned to let them go. Sure, Pinterest was a great marketing tool for people with products, but it was a little harder to leverage it to sell intangible services.

5. Consistency is Key in Marketing

I have a pretty steady cadence for my marketing now. I publish 3 blog posts a week, and have a steady stream of social media updates. I’ve learned that people find comfort in the reliable. It’s the blogs that erratically publish every day then once a month then once a quarter that drive off traffic and potential customers.

6. There’s Nothing More Important to Invest in Than Your Brand Image

I designed my first logo. I’m too embarrassed to pull it out of the archives. I didn’t see the sense in paying someone to design a logo when I was perfectly capable. Yea, it sucked. My website too was a DIY nightmare. Now I understand that these are visuals that potential customers see, and they damned well need to be impressed if they’re going to cut you a check. So you can foresake a lot of business expenses (start with that Starbucks addiction you keep writing off as a business expense) but marketing isn’t one of them.

I’m a firm believer in learning from my lessons, and there have been plenty in marketing over the past nine years.

The post Marketing: If I Knew Then What I Know Now appeared first on AllBusiness.com.

5 Tips for Buying Document Management Software

By Denny Hammack

Most people don’t buy enterprise grade document management software more than once or twice over the course of an entire career, so when the task arises, it can be daunting. In reality, it’s fairly simple. Use these five tips to narrow your choices:

1. Efficient Business Processes Are Top Priority

The best document management systems offer multiple methods for capturing and storing documents. Look for systems that make it simple for users, such as a “Windows-like” file repository and easy drag-and-drop capabilities. Some document management systems allow document capture using cameras on cell phones and mobile devices as well as from traditional scanners or email attachments.

With the right capabilities, document management can greatly increase the efficiency of your business processes. Accounts payable, for example, becomes much simpler when users scan invoices, packing lists, and inspection reports and link to payment vouchers, replacing the tedious process of matching, stapling, and filing hundreds or thousands of paper documents each day. The resulting increase in productivity enables staff to work on more productive activities, and increases accuracy as well as employee satisfaction.

Many other business processes benefit from the use of document management. Processing engineering change orders, purchase requisitions, student or employee applications, and proposals of all types are just a few of the “paper-intensive” processes that electronic document management can improve.

Identify the business processes in your organization that generate the most paper and ask the document management suppliers you are considering to walk you through how they can improve your processes.

2. Look for Tight but Flexible Security

Security is one of the most important aspects of document management, especially if you are in a regulated industry such as education, health care, or finance. The solution security should enable you to specify read, write, edit, and delete access separately for each user or group of users. You also may want to extend access to certain documents or folders to people outside your organization if you are working on joint projects with suppliers and partners, so make sure this is easily possible.

Look for archiving capabilities that help to ensure you are always working with the latest version of a document, and if you are planning to use the document management system for applications such as engineering drawings, make sure it includes check-in and checkout capabilities to keep revisions in sync.

3. Understand Your Needs Vs. Wants

Software suppliers are in the business of selling software, so they will demonstrate all their latest and greatest features. It’s easy to get caught up in their enthusiasm, and let emotions sway the ultimate choice. To avoid getting caught up in this cycle, do your homework before you start talking to suppliers.

Talk to potential users to find out which processes take the most time or cause the most problems, and brainstorm potential solutions. Use the Internet to find out what systems can do, and read case studies to find out what organizations similar to yours have accomplished.

Once you have a clear idea of the range of possibilities, sit down with the team to decide which capabilities are “must haves” and which are “nice to haves.” It’s unlikely that you will find a document management system that includes everything on your list, so it’s important to focus on the needs before the wants when you begin interacting with potential suppliers.

That doesn’t mean you can’t allow the vendor to show you the latest and greatest features. You may discover new and better ways to accomplish your required tasks.

4. Integration

One of the best ways that document management systems improve business processes is through integration with your existing business systems. Adding electronic proposals to opportunities in CRM, inspection reports to receivers in your quality management system, or customer specs to shop orders in ERP can all boost productivity, efficiency and accuracy—but not if you can’t integrate easily.

Don’t focus as much on whether the vendor has an existing integration to your current business system as much as on the vendor’s overall integration strategy and technology. Your business system landscape may change over time, and you want to guarantee that the integration technology of your document management solution can adapt with you as you evolve and grow.

5. Regulatory Compliance

One of the most valuable ways that document management solutions can help you is by ensuring compliance with government and industry regulations. Automatic workflows and e-signatures can confirm that all approvals and exception justifications are in place.

If there are regulations for how long certain types of documents must be maintained, your document management system can prevent deletions before the required hold time has elapsed. If you are governed by privacy regulations such as HIPAA, your document management system can help prevent unauthorized access as well as record each time a document is accessed so you can monitor usage.

Ask your potential suppliers to show you how they can help with the compliance requirements of your industry, and try to talk to references with similar needs.

By focusing on these five tips, you will be well on your way to selecting a state-of-the-art document management system that will improve operational efficiency, increase accuracy, and save you money.

About the Author

Post by: Denny Hammack

Denny Hammack is the CEO of FileSolve, an industry-leading provider of electronic document solutions. FileSolve’s solutions and services are offered to a wide range of industries and departments.

Company: FileSolve
Website: www.filesolve.com
Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

The post 5 Tips for Buying Document Management Software appeared first on AllBusiness.com.

What Marketers Need to Know About Cohorts

The word “cohort” can be scary to those unfamiliar with the term. It may sound like something out of a medical journal or statistics class. But, I promise you, there’s nothing to be afraid of. And, if you’re a marketer, it’s pretty important to understand cohorts if you want to get into and benefit from marketing analytics.

So, what is a cohort? Wikipedia defines it as:

“A cohort is a group of subjects who have shared a particular event together during a particular time span (e.g., people born in Europe between 1918 and 1939; survivors of an air crash; truck drivers who smoked between age 30 and 40).”

Pretty simple, right?

And, if you’re one those left-brained people who love to analyze data, then cohorts are perfect for you.

Cohorts are frequently used in studies to compare groups of people. They’re useful because, in a cohort study, you track the cohorts over a period of time to see what kind of data each one brings.

To use one of the examples from above, you could study truck drivers who smoked between age 30 and 40 compared with those who didn’t smoke at all and/or those who smoked earlier or later in life. You would then look at various test results for each cohort and compare the data.

Now, we’re not going to be talking about truck drivers who smoked. Since we’re marketers, we’re going to run through how we can apply cohorts to optimize our marketing. We’ll also examine a couple of tools that offer cohort analysis.

How Can Marketers Use Cohorts?

There are literally hundreds of cohorts marketers can create. But, the question here is not how many they can create. It’s which cohorts will produce the most insightful data.

When thinking about which cohorts to track, ask yourself these questions:

• Will the data I get from these cohorts produce insights that can change my marketing strategy?
• Will I be able to clearly know what’s working and what’s not when it comes to marketing?
• What targets do I need to hit this year? Will this cohort help me improve that metric?

Here are three cohorts marketers may find useful:

1. Signed Up / Purchased, Organized by Time

You’re a marketer, so it’s critical for you to deliver leads and signups to your sales team. Create a cohort that tracks people who visited your site and signed up. You’ll see when they first visited your site and how long it took them to sign up after their first visit. This can essentially tell you if your marketing campaigns lead people to take immediate action. Let’s break it down.

The new year begins, along with your new marketing campaign. You’ve spent the past 2 months planning it, designing it, and setting targets. Now it’s prime time, and you’re ready to see how it performs.

Your campaign runs from January – March. You get 100k visitors to your site, and your signup rate during this time remains at .5%. You start a new campaign in April.

Fast forward a few months, and you’re looking at a Cohort Report. You’re viewing the people who visited your site and signed up. For the people who visited your site sometime in the period January – March, you notice a slight increase in signups in the months following. You see that 1.0% of the people who visited your site in February came back in June and signed up. This means that the January – March campaign was more effective than initially thought.

As marketers, we often expect people to sign up right away. In our minds, we think they come to our site and either sign up or don’t. But the truth is, it’s not that binary. It’s not a yes or no at that very moment. Sometimes it’s a “wait and see.” People might visit our site, browse around, but then not sign up until later.

This is why it’s a useful cohort. Signups don’t always occur right away, and a cohort reporting tool can track signups over a long period of time.

2. Your Most Loyal Customers

Every marketer wants to acquire customers. But, as we know, not all customers are created equal. Some spend more than others, and some may require more “help” than others. There are also customers who sign up for your service and cancel a few months later (which doesn’t help your Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC)). Most important, there are customers who sign up, stay engaged with your product, and tell their friends about it. You need to know who these customers are, where they came from, and how you can get more of them.

With a sophisticated Cohort Report, marketers can create a cohort of users who frequently login, and then they can segment (aka group) those users by the marketing channel they came from.

Here’s a way to think about it:

Your marketing challenge is finding loyal customers. You have no problem delivering signups, but 80% of them cancel their accounts after a few months. What about the other 20%? Where do they come from and how do you get more of them? This is where a Cohort Report can help you.

This is the Kissmetrics Cohort Report. It’s one of the best places to get this kind of data.

On the left, we see the marketing channel users came from. Move to the right, and you’ll see how well each channel performed. The darker the shade of blue, the higher the login retention.

With this information, we can see which channels are sending us the most valuable customers and then spend more money and energy on them and less on the ones that aren’t delivering.

3. Repurchase Rates

Every business needs loyal customers. That includes retail stores, SaaS companies, subscription-based companies, you name it. They need customers who come back and make purchases on a recurring basis. There’s no getting around it.

So how do you, as a marketer, find and acquire these loyal customers? Use a cohort. Here’s what you’ll want to do:

Find the people who have repurchased. This can be for any business, but let’s use e-commerce as an example. Then segment the purchases by product categories, marketing channels, or marketing campaigns. Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Do certain product categories keep people coming back? Maybe people who purchased ties come back frequently and purchase other items. If so, it’s time to start promoting your tie collection more often.
• Do any marketing channels have a tendency to bring loyal customers? For example, perhaps your AdWords campaigns are outperforming your Facebook ad campaign in bringing repeat purchases. If this is the case, you’ll want to spend more time and money on the AdWords campaigns.
• You have dozens of marketing campaigns running. You have seasonal campaigns running four times a year and dozens of other campaigns running in between. With a Cohort Report, you’ll find out which ones drive purchases and repurchases.

The Value of Cohorts for Marketers

As you can see, there are many insights you can gather by grouping people together and tracking their behavior over time.

Each business and marketing challenge is unique. I’ve listed a few ways marketers can use cohorts to help optimize their marketing. But your challenges are unique, and only you will be able to create cohorts that garner valuable insight.

Where to Get This Data

There are two tools we’ll focus on that provide cohort reporting. The first is Google Analytics and the other is Kissmetrics. Let’s start by examining Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Cohort Analysis

Google Analytics has a feature called Cohort Analysis. Here it is:

You have four choices in setting up your cohort analysis:

Cohort Type
This is where you choose a cohort. Acquisition Date, for example, groups people based on when they first came to your site.

Cohort Size
Here you choose the time frame for each cohort. You can measure people on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Metric
Here you choose what you’ll be measuring for each cohort. There are a variety of choices.

Date Range
You have a variety of date ranges you can choose from. This is determined by the size of your cohort. For example, if you choose a cohort size “by day” you’ll have the date range options of 7, 14, 21, and 30 days.

Underneath these options, the Cohort Analysis presents the data visualization. Users can see how well the cohort is performing over time.

The bottom part contains the raw numbers and the retention afterward. The darker the shade of blue, the higher the percentage (i.e., better retention).

The Cohort Analysis is still in its early stages. Some of the more advanced things you’ll want to do may be a little more difficult to set up in Google Analytics. It is, of course, free and does not inherently come with support. You can get support through a partner.

Kissmetrics Cohort Report

This report is one of the most customizable out there. You can track any event and property across a custom date range. Using this report, you’ll be able to measure how your marketing campaigns are performing and refine them based on the data. The report’s usefulness can also extend beyond the marketing department. Here are a couple of other departments that could use it:

Product Team

• Track the features users keep coming back to. Which ones aren’t used as often? Why? Getting answers to these questions will help improve future product iterations and can help you find your product/market fit.
• Know which features are used first by new users. Are new users gravitating toward one feature over another? What was their experience with this feature?
• Understand the feature utilization that leads to payment. Is one cohort of users, who use a feature or area of your site more often during their free trial, more likely to pay for your product or cancel? Perhaps some features turn people off and they never return. Knowing this can make a huge difference.

Sales Team

• Know the product plan that has the best retention. Your sales team should not knowingly be pushing product plans that have been shown to have higher churn.
• Does viewing a certain element on a page lead to a signup? Maybe visitors who downloaded a white paper are more likely to sign up. If so, you can push people to download that white paper and even ask the marketing department to create more white papers.
• Find which product features are used by each customer segment. For example, let’s say your sales team is trying to land a big account from a well-known SaaS company. To sell the account, your sales team needs to show them the features your other SaaS customers use. Think about it. You don’t want to show them features that none of your SaaS customers are using. You want to show them the features that their peers are getting value from.

Here’s a video demo of the Cohort Report:

If the video embed is not showing up, you can click here to view the video on the Wistia page.

Recap

We’ve gone through a lot. Here are the takeaways:

• A cohort is a group of subjects who have shared a particular event together during a particular time span (e.g., people born in Europe between 1918 and 1939; survivors of an air crash; truck drivers who smoked between age 30 and 40). To put it another way, a cohort is a group of people who have a similar characteristic. Their behavior is then tracked over a period of time.
• These cohorts can help marketers understand how groups of people compare against each other. If you have two groups with different behaviors, notice which one delivers the best results. Then refine your marketing with what you learn.
• Sometimes signups don’t occur right away. A visitor may visit your site in January, bookmark it, and then return in June to sign up. The June marketing campaign may incorrectly be attributed with the signup even though it was actually the marketing campaign in January that brought the visitor. This is where the Cohort Report comes in handy.
• One cohort that marketers commonly use is people who have signed up. Marketers can see how each marketing channel or campaign performs at delivering signups.
• Many tools provide cohort data, but we focused on two of them – Google Analytics’s Cohort Analysis and Kissmetrics’s Cohort Report. Both have their upsides. If you’re looking to get more advanced analysis, definitely go with the Kissmetrics Cohort Report. The Cohort Analysis tool is still in its early stages.
• The Cohort Report can be used by more than marketers. Nearly all departments in your company will be able to get useful data out of this report.

See How Cohorts Can Impact Your Marketing

Want to learn how the Cohort Report can help you optimize your marketing? Request a personal demo today!

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.

Forget Generic – Target Individual Users by Tailoring Your Website

We all know that no user is the same. Aside from the very basics such as age, gender, socio-economic background and so on–every person differs in their life experiences, interests, and preferences. Since this is the case, why do marketers continue to use the same tired methodology to reach a diverse customer base? There are lots of excuses: Little man power, not enough resources, and of course—time constraints. But, with today’s technology, customization, segmentation and individualized targeting can be done efficiently without utilizing too many resources.

The importance of individualized messaging for your website cannot be overlooked. After all, there is a strong psychological basis behind the practice. This generation has seen tremendous breakthroughs in terms of promoting the interests of people on a personal level and while it has proven tremendously advantageous in the social arena, it has also lead to higher expectations in terms of customer experience, marketing and sales.

People want their needs to be met right here, right now. As a result, your messaging needs to be in tune with your users specific problems, provide viable solutions and give them maximum bang for their buck in terms of information provided and personal appeal. In other words, your users don’t want to feel like they are being spoken at. Instead, they want to feel valued as an important part of a community.

In order to arrive at the information necessary for individualized website marketing to be successful, you should first consider analyzing your users accordingly.

Demographics

User demographics tell you who they are on the most basic level. This includes information such as age, gender, socio-economic level, location, profession, education level, and marital status. In certain marketing contexts, these elements would be extremely important to note.

For example, if you are creating a landing page meant to increase your jewelry sales, it would be a bad idea to target single people about buying your jewelry as a gift for their spouse. Not only can this be a slap in the face for some, but it also makes people subconsciously feel discluded from your brand’s messaging and by extension, your community as a whole.

To avoid such disasters, you can obtain your users’ demographics in a few different ways. First of all, your website should always be set up to be a two-way conversation. This way, you can casually ask users this information either through conversation or asking them to fill out a short survey. Some great survey tools include SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Zoho Survey.

Using surveys is highly beneficial since you get the personal information you need while simultaneously empowering your customers and showing them you care about being relevant in their lives.

If surveys don’t cut it, use analytics tools such as Google Analytics Demographics Report along with Facebook Insights. Additionally, products such as Demographics Pro and Quantcast are able to easily provide great insights to classify your customers.

To demonstrate how demographics can make significant impact on a Marketing campaign, check out this great infographic about using demographics for social media marketing:

As you can see, by gaining knowledge of which social media sites are more popular based on age, income, and other factors, marketers are better equipped to decide which social media campaigns to use where. Obviously, the same type of information can be used for websites in general in order to run the right campaigns and write appealing website content.

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation digs deeper. This type of data focuses more on people’s lifestyles, behavior, and belief systems. While this type of information is more difficult to attain, it is by far the most valuable way of appealing to your customers.

Going back to the psychological level, appealing to a person’s intrinsic, emotional beliefs is generally extremely effective. For example, you can appeal to a targeted segment of say– young mothers based on the ideal of providing quick, healthy meals that children love.

In contrast, the exact same message will likely not be a significant core belief of a college aged male and will therefore fail to make a deep impression on his buying habits. Selling people on beliefs and lifestyles rather than products have been a key strategy in marketing for years.

As seen in the ad below, Tiffany and Co. builds an emotional connection with their audience by connecting the emotion of love with their brand. Through this strategy, they as a brand resonate with individuals that identify with this emotion.

At this point, it is important to note that connecting emotionally is not the only way to utilize psychographic data. Often times humor, hobbies, and other motivations are just as effective – if not more so. Check out this landing page by Awesometalk for example. Its messaging is simple and funny, while making a valid point which almost everyone can relate to.

While the data needed to come up with messaging that resonates with your target audience can be obtained through surveys, keyword searches, and your previous effective content – in order to put the values into practice for your marketing efforts, you need to put these beliefs into words. So design landing pages, content, and social campaigns that communicate such themes and messages, and watch your users grow to love your site.

Prior Purchases

Deriving information about previous buys can help you gain insights on the types of products and services that interest a particular person. For example, if a person has previously bought a new comforter for their bed, they may be interested in buying pillows as well.

Therefore, using website features that sell complementary products or services can make your customers’ lives easier. Even prior to purchase, you can give your customers smart options. Many ecommerce sites such as Amazon show similar products that others have looked at so users can compare products and make a purchase.

Thankfully, there are a variety of tools and plugins that will allow you to instantly install this intuitive sales feature. For example, Retail Rocket specializes in real-time ecommerce personalization and product recommendation based on previous purchases and products that have been clicked on. By installing features such as this, your users feel that your site understands their needs and cares about their ease of use. Eventually, this will lead to increased sales and greater customer loyalty.

Previous Behavior

Each browser’s behavior online can show you a lot about their interests and what information is relevant to their lives. Answers (or lack thereof) to email newsletters or taking into account what they’ve clicked, Liked or read on your website can help indicate an individual’s interests and/or place in the buying cycle.

Heatmaps such as Crazy Egg as well as Google Analytics In-Page Analytics can show you where your customers are clicking, scrolling, and reading, which can help you get a feel for how to best approach them.

Obviously, if you see on a heatmap that a person has already watched a demo of your product, they may be more inclined to purchase than someone who is just reading your blog. However, if you notice that a user is constantly coming to your site to read blogs posts on growth hacking, writing more content on the topic and informing them about that content could give that user an extra push.

In addition, getting information about the searches your users are making and how they arrived at your site can help you to figure out messaging that is tailored to their needs.

What’s Next?

So now that you have gotten all the data needed to understand your customer’s needs, how do you actually follow through with your site’s customization? Here are some tips:

Individualize Your Newsfeed, Updates, and Notifications

There’s a reason people keep coming back to Facebook– and there’s no reason your site can’t capitalize from their understanding of targeted website marketing. They came up with the newsfeed so people get a glimpse at what’s happening in their friends’ lives. They then altered the newsfeed and notifications according to their users’ preferences and stories they wanted to see most. The same with Netflix – each users homepage is different. Each user sees different suggestions and recommendations based on their previous viewing history and ratings.

You can do the same. Think about installing updates and notifications based on the type of content specific users want to see. For example, if you have users who repeatedly read content related to growth hacking, display those stories in a special section and ensure they get notifications when a new story on that topic goes up.

You can also employ a comments section where your users can converse amongst themselves about topics that interest them. In this scenario, user’s conversations about growth hacking should also appear on this individual’s newsfeed so he or she is instantly informed and can participate in the conversation.

Targeted Landing Pages

As we have established, your users interests vary. Therefore, creating landing pages that appeal to specific keywords and niche subjects is a great strategy for reeling in segmented audiences.

Landing pages work great because they bring people to your site based on specific interests. For example, you may have users that love gardening. To bring them in initially, you would place an ad about growing beautiful flowers on a different site, targeting these specific individuals. Once the ad is clicked on, they get to an entire page elaborating on how your product can help make a beautiful garden. This eventually guides them to perform a specific action.

So now that we know why landing pages are great for targeting users, here’s how to write one that is sure to convert:

First decide which key messages, subjects, and topics are most relevant to various user-types. Then develop short, concise headlines for each topic along with information that elaborates the main points of what you can offer your customers. Make sure there is one call-to-action in order to ensure users are more likely to actually follow through with what you want them to do. Finally, design it, and watch it do its magic.

For further guidance, check out Kissmetrics’s comprehensive guide to creating an effective landing page.

Power to The People

As we mentioned earlier, your users are not interested in a one-way conversation. They want to feel you are open to their suggestions, input, and knowledge. Therefore, adding a comments section or another area where your users can communicate and discuss ideals is a great way to make them feel you geared their site to fulfill their needs. Not only does it help them to use your site for a social means, but it also helps them to solve their problems and share their beliefs in a manner that is both educational and informal.

Of course, since nothing is more individualistic than voicing an opinion, so by installing such features, you are definitely scoring points with your users.

Individualized Content

Like many sites, your content might cover a variety of different topics. However, not all of these topics have the same meaning to everyone. This is where individualized content comes in. By guiding your users toward information that’s of specific interest to them, you provide them with useful intellectual tools that are relevant to their lives while also enticing them with more reasons they should continue to visit your site.

To take this to the next level, install tools that suggest new content to read at the bottom of each article. This way, you get greater loyalty and user retention by keeping their interests at heart.

Get Personal

Finally, don’t be afraid to take your site to a personal level. Allow your users to have usernames pictures and even gravatars. This way, they can feel they are talking to real people on the other side of the screen and feel that their comments are being noticed and attributed to them.

Individualizing your site is extremely important for creating personal relationships with your users. Your users want to feel that they are valued as people and not just as potential leads. By paying attention to their individual characteristics, you grab their attention and make them feel like a valued, dynamic member of a community.

About the Author: Nadav Shoval is the CEO & Co-Founder of Spot.IM, an on-site community that brings the power back to the publisher. Prior to Spot.IM, Nadav has developed and founded 4 technology startups. Spot.IM is his fifth venture. Nadav is a technology erudite and a sports addict.

5 Reasons to Hire a Candidate Who Has Worked Abroad

The most forward-thinking employers know that job candidates who have spent time working abroad will have developed valuable skills which can be a great asset to companies. The experience of studying or working abroad is rapidly being recognised as a strategic career move to be encouraged, with the White House even holding a summit with travel bloggers in order to promote initiatives for young people to study or work abroad.

Living and working abroad can have a profound effect on the people who choose to do it, and often opens up further opportunities that a person wouldn’t have access too in the same career field at home. The experiences gained from working abroad often translate well to the workplace in the person’s home country as well.

Here are five reasons why hiring a candidate who has spent an extended period of time working abroad is a great decision:

1. They adapt to new environments.

Being able to adapt to a new environment is an essential part of working abroad. For some people this comes naturally while for others it can feel like they’ve been thrown in the deep end. Spending an extended period of time abroad shows resilience and an ability to grow into a place that is completely different to what they are used to. In a new workplace, you can expect candidates who have worked abroad to dive straight in and rise to the challenge of being in a new environment.

2. They’re familiar with change.

Those who choose to work abroad are no strangers to change. Moving abroad brings about changes in all aspects of a person’s life, from the place they live right down to the food they eat. For those who have lived abroad, change is normal and natural. They’re not afraid of leaving their comfort zone and won’t be deterred by new changes in the workplace–in fact, they’ll likely be on board with them!

3. They think creatively.

Leaving a comfort zone and working abroad inspires creative thinking. In order to cope with the changes to everyday life and routines, those who work abroad need to come up with new approaches. By immersing themselves in new cultures, those who live abroad are more adept at changing their way of thinking and seeing things from a different perspective. Creativity and innovation are the driving force behind successful companies, making creative thinking a highly desirable quality for employers.

4. They are more emotionally tuned in.

All cultures are different, and to work abroad it’s important to learn to respect the customs, values, mannerisms and different ways of doing things. While in the U.S. and the UK we can speak directly, in Asia communication is more tactful and implicit. Get to the point too quickly and you might come off as rude, but take your time and you’ll have made a better connection with a co-worker. Learning to be sensitive to others can make a candidate a more aware and receptive employee and colleague.

5. They can work independently.

More often than not, candidates who have worked abroad will have made the decision to do so independently. Making such a bold move on your own steam, coping with the transition of being in a new place, adapting to a different way of doing things, and being on your own when you first arrive abroad, takes a lot of independence and self-motivation. Employers can be sure that candidates who have worked abroad are able to take the initiative and do what needs to be done without having their hand held.

About the Author

Post by: Ron Stewart

Ron Stewart has worked in the recruitment industry for 30 years, having owned companies in the IT, construction and medical sectors. He is currently running the Jobs4Group, including Jobs4Medical.

Company: Jobs4Medical
Website: www.jobs4medical.co.uk
Connect with me on Facebook and Twitter.

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