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March 13, 2019

Apple Mission Statement and Vision Statement In A Nutshell

Apple mission is “to bringing the best user experience to its customers through its innovative hardware, software, and services.” And in a manifesto dated 2009 Tim Cook set the vision specified as “We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing.”

Why does it matter?

Understanding the mission and vision that drives an organization is the first step to really appreciating how that company moves toward its short and long-term objectives.

Indeed, where a mission statement focuses more on the business objectives and how to reach them. The vision is about how that same company sees itself in the long-term.

Thus, for any organization, it is critical to understand how the mission and vision are formulated to have a deep understanding of how they think about the future.

The simplest way to define a mission and a vision is by setting up a mission and vision statement. We’ll look at the mission and vision statement of Apple.

Breaking down Apple mission statement

The Company is committed to bringing the best user experience to its customers through its innovative hardware, software and services.

Apple points this out in its annual report for 2018. Understanding the elements of Apple mission statement is critical:

Best user experience
Innovative hardware
Innovative software and services

From this element also the way the organizational structure is designed is crafted. Therefore, at Apple user experience comes first; this gives great power to design and designers over engineers.

Not surprisingly Apple products are beautifully crafted. Everything about Apple products has to be designed with maximum attention to details.

At the same time, Apple has leveraged on software, integrated within the hardware that made its products more valuable for users. An iPhone without its App Store would not be worth much, even though that is a beautiful device.

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This also leads to a clear business strategy for Apple:

The Company’s business strategy leverages its unique ability to design and develop its own operating systems, hardware, application software and services to provide its customers products and solutions with innovative design, superior ease-of-use and seamless integration.

And a set of business objectives to be achieved:

As part of its strategy, the Company continues to expand its platform for the discovery and delivery of digital content and applications through its Digital Content and Services, which allows customers to discover and download or stream digital content, iOS, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV applications, and books through either a Mac or Windows personal computer or through iPhone, iPad and iPod touch® devices (“iOS devices”), Apple TV, Apple Watch and HomePod.

Furthermore, through a clear mission statement the company can identify the key stakeholders to involve in the growth process and allow its products to be successful:

The Company also supports a community for the development of third-party software and hardware products and digital content that complement the Company’s offerings.

Also, it can leverage resources to achieve the business goals defined within its mission statement. Indeed, part of the “best user experience” implies a high-quality buying experience, where the whole process is controlled and customized:

The Company believes a high-quality buying experience with knowledgeable salespersons who can convey the value of the Company’s products and services greatly enhances its ability to attract and retain customers.

One strategy that Apple chose to create this high-quality buying experience is via its stores as a part of its distribution strategy:

Therefore, the Company’s strategy also includes building and expanding its own retail and online stores and its third-party distribution network to effectively reach more customers and provide them with a high-quality sales and post-sales support experience.

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The Company believes ongoing investment in research and development (“R&D”), marketing and advertising is critical to the development and sale of innovative products, services and technologies.

Breaking down Apple vision statement

We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change. And I think regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.

Back in 2009, when Steve Jobs was in medical leave, Tim Cook set the stage for the Apple manifesto a long-form vision, that also set the mission the company had to accomplish after the death of its legendary founder!

This vision set in stone follows a few key and core believes:

Making great products
Focusing on innovation
Simplicity in place of complexity
Control the primary technologies behind Apple’s products
Focus on a few key projects
Excellence as standard

The vision statement sets the stage to the company’s core believes. These core believes do not change year over year but instead follow the company life throughout several cycles.
While there are events that shake companies fundamentals and make them rethink the long-term vision!

Other resources:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples

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Published on March 13, 2019 16:55

March 11, 2019

What Is The Cost Structure Of A Business Model And Why It Matters

The cost structure is one of the building blocks of a business model. It represents how companies spend most of their resources to keep generating demand for their products and services. The cost structure together with revenue streams, help assess the operational scalability of an organization.

Why it’s important to know how companies spend money

there are two elements to understand about any company:

How it makes money
How it spends money

While most people focus on how companies make money. A few truly grasp how those same companies spend money. However, understanding how companies spend money can give you insights about the economics of their business model.

Thus, once you grasp those two – seemingly simple – elements you’ll understand a good part of the logic behind the company’s current strategy.

Defining and breaking down the cost structure

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In the business model canvas by Alexander Osterwalder, a cost structure is defined as:

What are the most cost in your business? Which key resources/ activities are most expensive?

This ingredient is critical as – especially in the tech industry – many focus too much on the revenue growth of the business. But they lose sight of the costs involved to run the company and the “price of growth.” Defined as the money burned to accelerate the rate of growth of a startup.

Too often startups burn all their resources because they’re not able to create a balanced business model, where the cost structure can sustain and generate enough revenues to cover for the major expenses and also leave ample profit margins. Companies like Google have been pretty successful in building up a sustainable business model thanks to their efficient cost structure.

Indeed, from a sustainable cost structure can be built a scalable business model.

Operational scalability

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In the Blitzscaling business model canvas, to determine operational scalability, Reid Hoffman asks:

Are your operations sustainable at meeting the demand for your product/service? Are you revenues growing faster than your expenses?

Blitzscaling is a particular process of massive growth under uncertainty that prioritizes speed over efficiency and focuses on market domination to create a first-scaler advantage in a scenario of high uncertainty.

Reid Hoffman uses the term operational scalability as the ability of a company at generating sustainable demand for its product and services while being profitable. Indeed, lacking the ability to build operational scalability represents a key growth limiter, and the second key element (together with lack of product/market fit).

While most startups dream is to grow at staggering rates. Growth isn’t easy to manage either. As if you grow at a fast rate, but you also burn cash at a more rapid rate, chances are your company or startup might be in jeopardy.

That is why a business model that doesn’t make sense from the operational standpoint is doomed to collapse overtime!

Google cost structure and how you should do it

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I know you might think Google is too big of a target to learn any lessons from it. However, the reason I’m picking Google is that the company (besides its first 2-3 years of operations) was incredibly profitable. Many startups stress and get hyped on the concept of growth. However, it exists a universe of startups that instead managed to build a sustainable business model.

Google is an example of a company that came out of the ashes of the dot-com bubble thanks to a hugely profitable business model:

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To appreciate Google business model strength, it is critical to look at its TAC rate.

TAC stands for traffic acquisition cost, and that is a crucial component to balance Google business model sustainability.

More precisely the TAC rate tells us the percentage of how Google spends money to acquire traffic, which gets monetized on its search results pages. For instance, in 2017 Google recorded a TAC rate on Network Members of 71.9% while the Google Properties TAX Rate was 11.6%.

Over the years, Google managed to keep its cost structure extremely efficient, and that is why Google has managed to scale up!

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Part of Google‘s cost structure is useful at keeping together the set of processes that help the company generating revenues on its search results pages, comprising:

Server infrastructure: back in the late 1990s when Google was still in the very initial stage at Stanford, it brought down its internet connection several times, by causing several outages. That allowed its founders to understand they needed to build up a robust infrastructure on top of their search tool. Today Google has a massive IT infrastructure made of various data centers around the world.
Another element to allow Google to stay on top of his game is to keep innovating in the search industry. Maintaining, updating and innovating Google‘s algorithms isn’t inexpensive. Indeed, in 2017 Google spent over $16.6 billion in R&D, which represented 15% of its total revenues.
The third element if the acquisition of continuous streams of traffic that make Google able to create virtuous cycles and scale up.

Key takeaway

There are two key elements you need to understand to have insights about how companies “think” in the current moment. The first is how they make money. The second, how they spend money. When you combine those two elements you can understand:

How a company really makes money (where is the cash cow, and how and if a company lowers its margins to generate more cash flow for growth)
Whether that company is operationally scalable
Where the company is headed in the next future and whether it will make sense for it to invest in certain areas rather than others!

In this article, we focused on operational scalability and cost structure, and we saw how Google managed to build an extremely efficient cost structure.

Additional Resources:

What Is Product-Market Fit? Product-Market Fit In A Nutshell

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Published on March 11, 2019 17:37

March 9, 2019

Facebook vs. Google: Advertising Business Models In Comparison

Facebook and Google are the two tech giants that in the space of a decade have disrupted the old media industry and created an empire. Google in the late nineties up to these days has built a business model based on advertising, which leverages on two networks (AdSense and AdWords).

At the time of this writing, Google’s value is almost eight hundred billion dollars. Facebook, on the other hand, was created by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room back in 2004. At the time of this writing, Facebook has more than a billion users and a market capitalization of over five hundred billion dollars.

Both companies have a secret weapon. For Google that is the SERP, while for Facebook that is the News Feed. Both target one thing: users’ attention. The more attention they get, the more they monetize.

But who’s the winner?

I’m using for this article the data coming from Similar Web to assess the engagement of the SERP vs. the News Feed. Instead, I’m going to dig into Facebook and Google‘s financials to understand what’s more powerful from the financial standpoint.

At the end, we’ll determine who’s the winner based on two things: attention and profits!

Facebook’s secret weapon: The News Feed

Back in 2006 a significant transformation silently revolutionized Facebook: the news feed. Before that, Facebook was primarily a directory of profiles. If you wanted to see what any other person in your network was doing, you had to look for that actively. When Facebook introduced the news feed, a new homepage allowed any user to be continuously updated on what her/his network was up to.

The news feed is a critical part of Facebook‘s success. In fact, without the news feed, there is no way Facebook could have managed to make its users stick. Also, the news feed is where Facebook monetizes its users’ base.

To know more about Facebook‘s business model read this:

How Does Mark Zuckerberg Make Money? Facebook Hidden Revenue Business Model Explained

Google’s most valuable asset: The Search Engine Results Page

Today we give for granted that Google is an advertising company (as of 2016, 88% of its revenues came from advertising). However, on the 2000s that wasn’t a trivial choice. One of the reasons why Google had been so successful was its ability to create a search engine that offered relevant results through a powerful algorithm called PageRank.

That is also why Page and Brin (Google‘s co-founders) didn’t want their search to be associated with a company that mixed paid advertising with organic results. Google‘s UX got simpler and simpler over the years:

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Google UX in 1996. Source: uxpin.com

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Google UX in 2018

Google’s search page is the most important asset the company owns. That is the place where billions of people each day ask anything from “how to tie a tie” to “why am I alone.”

It is so popular that back in 2006 the verb “to google” was added to the Oxford Dictionary.

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Google in the Oxford Dictionary

The ability of the company to keep users going back to its results pages is also the secret for its past, present, and future success.

To know more about Google‘s business model read this:

The Power of Google Business Model in a Nutshell

News Feed vs. SERP: The fight for attention

Before we get into financials, it is crucial to stress why the primary sources of business value for Google and Facebook are the SERP and news feed respectively.

When we think about traditional companies, it’s easy to understand what’s their most important asset. Take a real estate company that owns a resort. You know that resort is a vital asset for the company. Instead, when it comes to tech companies, it gets a bit trickier.

For instance, if you think about Google or Facebook, what’s their most valued asset? In short, what’s the property that generates most of its long-term business value?

Probably the 2,000,000 square feet Googleplex in Mountain View or the 307,000 square feet Facebook data center in Prineville? Undoublty they have enormous value. However, I believe the two most important assets respectively for Google and Facebook are the search results page (SERP) and the news feed.

That is the place where each day the battle for the attention of billions of people is fought. Those are also – I argue – the leading company’s assets. Google without its SERP and Facebook without its news feed would be worthless.

So how the two things compare? I used the data from Similar Web:

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The engagement of users is crucial for both Google and Facebook. It is true that the SERP‘s logic is slightly different from Facebook‘s news feed. Google needs to be able to provide relevant results quickly and allow its users to leave the results page.

Indeed, by clicking on a sponsored advertising – part of Google‘s AdWords network – or by surfing a website – part of the Google‘s AdSense program – that is how the tech giant from Mountain View monetizes.

Instead, Facebook‘s news feed logic is to keep the users for as long as possible trapped into the feed. What a behavioral psychologist would call a “slot-machine mechanism.”

The news feed has an infinite scroll. There’s no limit. You could spend days scrolling that, and you’d be always finding content available for you to consume.

In a sense, I’m not surprised that Facebook wins against Google. It is true though that Google in the last years has developed a set of features that also serve the purpose of keeping users for as long as possible on the SERP.

Think about the featured snippet (a little box that gives users answers to specific questions) or the more recent people’s also ask feature. Those allow you to find most of the content you need in the SERP.

In conclusion, if we compare who’s the winner based on the battle for attention, Facebook‘s news feed shows an average visit duration of 13:44 minutes compared to Google’s SERP of 7:20 minutes.

That is quite a long time considering those are averages. In short, there might be people that spend a little time on the news feed; while others might be spending an entire day!

Does the battle for attention make Facebook also more profitable? Let’s see!

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know

News Feed vs. SERP: The fight for profits

To determine who wins the battle over profits. I’m going to look at one central metric: the operating margin. This metric assesses the effectiveness of a company’s operations.

If we had to look at the net income, other factors (like taxation) would be influencing the results. Instead, I want to see how the two companies compare at the operational level.

Google (data in $ mln)
2016
2017

Revenues
90,272
110,855

Operating Income
23,716
26,146

Operating Margin
26.27%
23.59%

Facebook (data in $ mln)
2016
2017

Revenues
27,638
40,653

Operating Income
12,427
20,203

Operating Margin
44.96%
49.70%

From an operational standpoint, Facebook wins! Even though as of 2017 Google still has almost three times as much revenues as Facebook. If we look at Operating income that becomes only 1.3 times higher.

Also, Facebook as of 2017 has an operating margin of 49.7% compared to Google‘s 23.6% (more than twice). Therefore, by looking at the financial operations, Facebook seems to be the winner as well.

A little caveat: To be 100% accurate I should have adjusted the Google revenues and operating expenses to reflect only those related to advertising. However, Google provides a breakdown of the sales based on the different segments. While it’s not possible to make the same adjustments for the operating expenses as they get lumped all together. However, the exercise above is still critical to understand the profitability of the two companies based on the overall business.

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Facebook sales break-down 2015-2017

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Google sales break-down 2015-201

Comparing Google and Facebook business models

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The foundation and cash cow of both Facebook and Google business models is the advertising business. While Facebook as of 2018 is primarily driven by advertising (more than 99% of its revenues). Google as of 2018 makes most of its revenues from advertising (86%).

On the one hand, Google has been able to diversify its business model. However, that model is still primarily driven by data collection. Google and Facebook both collect a massive amount of data of their users to monetize them via advertising.

While Google monetizes via its search pages or with in-app advertising via the Play Store. In 2018, Facebook primarily monetized via its newsfeed within its products (Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram).

Facebook has higher margins than Google, thanks to its cost structure, and the strong brands of its products. Indeed, Facebook and Instagram are very sticky on people’s mind, which makes them connect to those apps without relying on Google. That might seem trivial, yet it is critical.

Many brands derive their visibility via Google search pages. While also Facebook does, it is only for a small chunk of it. The remaining is direct traffic going through it thanks to its stickiness (so far). Even though the number of users in the US and Canada has stalled, other products like Instagram are still growing.

As for Google, the tech giant is also investing in other areas, hoping a small bet might become the next big hit!

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Summary and Conclusion

Throughout the article, I argued that Google and Facebook most important assets are the SERP and News Feed respectively.

By looking at the data from Similar Web, it is clear that Facebook news feed can keep the user engaged more than Google‘s SERP. The financial data confirmed the operational ability of Facebook to be financially more effective.

Even though as of 2017 Google‘s revenues are almost three times higher than Facebook. If we look at the difference between operating income, the gap gets narrower.

In conclusion, it seems that Facebook news feed could unlock profits for Facebook that – if things stay equal in the next future – will allow Facebook to take over Google. Of course, in tech things change swiftly, and a simple algorithm tweak can also change the future profitability of a company.

Handpicked related articles:

Case studies:

How Does Facebook Make Money? Facebook Hidden Revenue Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
The Trillion Dollar Company: Apple Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising!

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Published on March 09, 2019 15:01

The Complete Guide To Business Development

Business development comprises a set of strategies, tactics, and actions to grow a business via a mixture of sales and marketing. Indeed, while marketing usually relies on automation to reach a wider audience, and sales usually leverages on the one-to-one approach to close complex deals. Business development is about creating distribution strategies to scale up a business.

A good business development process should have as the primary aim to drive business growth with strategies, partnerships and unconventional marketing to 10x the output of the organization. The success of companies like Google also depended on their business development capabilities.

Although you might be looking for a straightforward definition of what business development is, you need to understand that this is a discipline in continuous evolution, which has as a main driver business growth. In this context, a good place to start is to define what business development is not.

Business Development vs. sales

Thinking about the business developer as the sales guy, it’s limiting. Not that a business developer doesn’t sell, but it does so by creating a distribution. In other words, rather than looking at the single sale the business developers try to find sales channels to tap into to speed up the process of scaling up a company. If that means selling a product or a service directly, then the business development person will temporarily become a sales guy.

Imagine the scenario of a company that has no clients. In that context, a business developer will need to find the first clients as quickly as possible. Those clients will serve to launch the company’s growth, while the business developer will look strategically at ways to have those clients to become partners. Therefore, all of a sudden a few clients become your distribution channel. Even though the business developer acted as a sales guy from the outside, he never lost sight of the long-term strategy.

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The successful business developer thinks like a marketer but acts like a salesman

Business development is a mixture of sales and marketing. In fact, in many cases, a business developer will use marketing and PR activities to establish critical relationships for the business. Those relationships will become partnerships to generate new distribution channels.

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Business development is about nurturing the right relationships with partners that can become distribution channels

Where the sales process ends up with a closed deal. The business development relationship starts with a closed deal. The business developer knows that a deal closed is just the starting point of a long-term relationship that can impact the business in the long run. Therefore, the business developer will translate that paying customer in a trusted partner, and an advocate for your business.

Business development guides marketing automation

Marketing automation is a powerful tool for any business. However, marketing automation is also risky. Indeed, automating processes requires a deep understanding of your customers. Thus, before you can automate the marketing processes, you’ll need the business developers to help the marketing team structure those processes. Indeed with unique insight about the company’s customers, the industry and competitors, the business developer will advise the marketing department on how to structure and set up automation processes that fit the long-term organizational growth.

Business development scales up businesses

When Google closed its deal with AOL, it was a turning point for the tech company that would become a unicorn first and a tech giant then. It all started with a business development activity that allowed Google to build a partnership with AOL and kill its competitors!

A successful business development person is a quick learner and a renaissance man. He will be able to learn about as many disciplines needed to have a deep understanding of the industry that will drive the company’s growth. For instance, if you think of a business developer in the digital marketing world, he’ll probably be someone that understands SEM, SEO, funnel optimization, content marketing, sales and all the other channels available to grow a business.

Business development is about a growth mindset

The business development process could vary quite a lot based on industry, business model and stage of maturity of a company. If you are called as a business developer for a startup, most of the activities will be connected to grow the startup and bring it to the next stage of growth.

Therefore, the successful business developer will need to have a mindset fine-tuned for growth.

Business development requires a high level of understanding of a potential partner

To be able to build a relationship quickly, a business developer has to understand the business dynamics of a potential partner. Indeed, just by tapping into the economics of a partner, the business developer can craft the perfect deal/solution. For instance, when Google proposed the deal to AOL, the deal was so good for AOL, and it had no risk for them, that they couldn’t say no to it. Yet AOL was an established network, which was what allowed Google to get into the next stage of growth and scale.

What activities does business development imply?

Anything that helps build up a solid distribution strategy falls into the business development processes.

The sales pipeline is a basic tool for a business developer

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A sales pipeline is as a visual representation of your sales process where all your potential customers are displayed and neatly arranged according to their phase in your sales cycle.

Source: salespop.pipelinersales.com/sales-pro...

A business developer has to be able to build up predictable sales processes to generate continuous streams of leads for the organization. The sales pipeline is a useful tool to set up those processes.

Also, being able to track your sales pipeline is a critical activity. A sales pipeline is just a way to have clear in which stage of the sales process you are with a potential client. As shown by Sales POP from the initial contact to closing a deal it takes a few steps:

Initial contact
Qualification
Meeting
Proposal
Close

At each of those actions, we can assign a probability of closing a deal. For instance, at the initial contact, you don’t have an idea yet whether the person you’re reaching out would later become a customer. Therefore, the more you move forward down the pipeline, the more the chances of closing the deal improve. Sales POP research shows that each of those stages has a chance of success as it follows:

Initial contact – 0 %
Qualification – 10 %
Meeting – 30 %
Proposal – 60 %
Close – 100 %

Therefore, after you have qualified a lead, you have 1 in 10 chances of closing it. Once you have met, defined the project and sent a proposal, then your chances will improve up to 60%. The chances of closing a deal also depend on other factors. For instance, have you previously worked with this person?

In short, if you have already built trust, it will be easier to close the deal. If you are expanding a project you were working on, then it might be easier as well. Therefore, it will depend upon several factors crucial to any deal.

Yet the business developer can have clarity about the stage of a business deal. In that way, the business developer can plan the actions and activities that will get the sales process going.

What actions can the business developer perform to improve the sales pipeline?

There are several ways to improve sales processes. Some examples comprise:

Experimentation with new tools, or channels
Finding out new tactics from your peers
Creating new partnerships
Managing existing partnerships to expand the scope of work
Direct sales (outreach, live demonstrations, free training)
Off-line activities (live seminars, or industry events)
Content marketing or PR activities
Talk to clients to improve product/service
Learn how to build relationships with influencers
Use LinkedIn for social selling
Experiment with new distribution channels
Develop relationships with media partners
Create new packaging for your service
Draft commercial offers
Up-sell, cross-sell, leverage on the core product to offer complementary services
Create sales processes
Build up a predictable sales funnel
Help marketing to build sales funnels for continued lead generation

Why undertake a career in business development?

Being a business development person means having an entrepreneurial spirit. It’s almost like you are a business within your business. Therefore, working as a business development person helps you:

Develop an entrepreneurial mindset
Get more freedom compared to a traditional job
Dynamic work that pushes you to learn new things quickly
Make more money (the variable is an important part of the remuneration)
Higher pressure but also more fun than a traditional job
Be your own boss (if it is in a large organization, of course, you will respond to someone. However, the only boss you have are the commercial objectives you agreed upon)
Build a professional network quickly

What are some downsides?

Of what I can think of here are some I identified:

The bottom line is your mixed blessing. In fact, although you might be doing things right for specific periods, you just don’t seem to be able to close enough deals, partnership or create a proper distribution strategy. From the outside that might look like you’re not doing your job properly. What I like to call the outcome bias. In those periods you have to be good to think about your track record
Your pay is proportional to the objective you’re able to achieve. Therefore quite volatile
Some days it just seems you’ll never get to achieve the financial results agreed. It is normal to feel like that. The good side of it is that you’ll feel what any entrepreneur experiences

Overall the balance is positive. Now the most critical question. How do you make a business get traction?

The channels you can use to get traction

Gabriel Weinberg, CEO, and founder of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track your data, put together in his book, Traction a list of channels that are critical to allow a business to grow. He identified quite a few channels:

Targeting Blogs
Publicity
Unconventional PR
Search Engine Marketing
Social and Display Ads
Offline Ads
Search Engine Optimization
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Viral Marketing
Engineering as Marketing
Business Development
Sales
Affiliate Programs
Existing Platforms
Trade Shows
Offline Events
Speaking Engagements
Community Building

As a business developer, you need to understand some of those channels to grow a business.

What’s a secret weapon for the business developer? LinkedIn

65% of salespeople who use social selling fill their pipeline, compared to 47% of reps who do not. source: blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-statistics

LinkedIn is a fantastic tool to generate conversations that can help you speed up the prospecting phase. What can you do with LinkedIn?

Find new B2B clients
Build new partnerships
Get media coverage
Personal branding for business

Those things are possible if you are consistent. Three ways to build relationships with business are:

Outreach to people that might get value from what you offer
Use LinkedIn publishing to create awareness or become a thought leader in your niche
Share and like posts about people you admire to strengthen your relationship and create value for your network

Check out the complete guide on how to use LinkedIn.

A crash course in sales canvassing

Sales canvassing is a sales process where you get in touch with potential customers that have never heard about your brand. Examples of sales canvassing are door-to-door sales and cold calling.

Those are critical strategies as they might be an inexpensive and sustainable way to generate qualified leads without having to rely on sales consultants or expensive lists. However, to be successful, the process of sales canvassing needs to be structured.

Why sales canvassing matter?

As many new startups operate in the digital space, it is easy to assume that old sales techniques are also outdated. Thus, we all like to speak about marketing funnels, automation, and multiple touch points.

However, any business to be sustainable needs a continuous stream of leads; and in many cases, this implies cold calling or approaching people that never heard of you before. Indeed, unless you have a massive marketing budget that you can use to grow your brand quickly.

In most other cases you need a sales force that can venture in the world and create contacts with customers that don’t have a clue about you.

However, to make the sales efforts effective you’ll need to make sure your sales force has a plan, a strategy and a process to follow.

That is what sales canvassing is about. That is a process through which salespeople can have consistent results nonetheless of the single outcome.

When you make the sales canvassing process yours, that is when your company can become sustainable in the long run as you won’t need to depend on other companies to provide you with a consistent stream of leads, you’ll be able to generate them on your own.

Also, you’ll be able to grow a sales department able to create new opportunities independently from the marketing department.

That doesn’t mean you’ll need only sales canvassing. In many cases, having multiple touch points with a potential customer via proper marketing strategies is a good strategy as it makes it way more comfortable for your salesforce to close a complex deal.

In other cases, though it is also critical to have an independent sales force able to open up new opportunities, primarily when your brand isn’t yet established.

So what steps do you need for your salesforce to take advantage of sales canvassing? Some key ingredients are:

Have sales force once understand the product/service and its strength and unicity
Make sure your sales force understands what problem your product or service solves
Have them set clear targets and share them with the rest of the team
Make the value proposition clear to your sales force
Prepare scripts and speaking points but let them be flexible enough to handle a complex conversation
Get them ready to be rejected
Rejection as a key to the learning process
Focus on a single channel but leverage on several media

Understanding the strength and unicity of the product/service

When a salesperson ventures to bring in customers that never heard of your brand before, it becomes critical that the sales force is very knowledgeable about the product and service and they can explain it in the simplest terms.

Focus on the problem and payoff

When approaching someone that never heard about your brand, why even focus on explaining who you are. Instead, focus on their issue and what solution you have for them.

They need a short term pay off. Find out what is the payoff and struggle your potential customer has and propose a solution. That is when you’ll listen.

Set a target customer

During sales canvassing it is critical to have a laser focus. You need a list of contacts, but it makes sense to start from a profile that fits best the profile of existing customers your company has.

Indeed, when approaching a customer that never heard about your brand, you’ll need to understand what problem you can solve. But she/he won’t trust you can answer it unless you showcase studies that resemble the situation they are in.

When you can tell a business owner you’ve already helped someone in a similar situation it’s easier to trust you even if they never heard of your brand.

When you take the time to understand the problem, propose a solution and show a similar case study that is when sales canvassing becomes way more effective.

Have a script but leave it flexible

Many salespeople like to use scripts. Scripts are prepackaged dialogues usually drawn by old conversations with existing customers. While scripts are a good starting point, you need to be flexible.

Indeed, with sales canvassing, you’ll deal with people that never heard about your brand and your company. Would it make sense to engage in a dialogue you had with a client that already knew you? Not really.

Rejection is part of the process

During sales canvassing the risk of being rejected is exceptionally high. It is critical to allow your sales force to understand that is not something personal, but rather that is part of the process. Rejection is what makes them more effective.

Focus on a single channel but leverage on several media

During sales canvassing, it is important to focus on a single channel. Therefore, if your preferred way is telemarketing, you’ll use the phone. However, not all customers like to be reached by phone.

In that scenario, you’ll need to learn how to use several channels, from social media to emails. The important thing is to be able to generate a conversation for long enough that the person, on the other hand, trusts you can bring an actual value. When you get there, you won.

Examples of sales canvassing

Sales canvassing can be done in several ways, like:

telemarketing
door-to-door
direct mail
networking
events
introductory sales letters

Whatever medium you choose it is critical to have a process, with clear objectives, which is repeatable and where rejection is part of the learning process.

A crash course in sales and marketing alignment best practices

In Marketing vs. Sales a cleared out the distinction between the two activities and when it makes more sense for an organization to leverage on marketing rather than sales and vice-versa.

While it is essential to understand the difference between marketing and sales, it is also critical to understand how they work together.

Marketing and Sales working together

As Peter Drucker pointed out in his book Drucker Management, “there will be always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

While marketing can get to the point of understanding the customer and make sales team superfluous – to a certain extent.

The sales team though is a critical link between the marketing department and the customers. Salespeople are involved in the whole process of and customer journey at a personal level.

Indeed, not only the salesperson might speak to the potential customer in the most delicate moment when she/he is deciding whether it makes sense to purchase your product or service. But it assists the customer throughout the entire process.

For instance, a critical moment of the whole customer journey is when she/he needs assistance or support. While this phase might be in part automated, in most cases you’ll need a support team, which is often sales oriented to assist the customers.

In those phases, you can unlock many insights about the customers that marketing will never manage to have with automation alone. That is when sales and marketing come together to create a customer-centric journey.

In what other ways than sales and marketing work together?

Lead generation

The usual funnel sees it the marketing department in charge of giving to the sales team a list of leads (people that might be interested in your product or service) they can work on and bring them in as customers. While this is the traditional process, it is important to remark that often the opposite happens.

For instance, if you take the sales canvassing process that allows the company to acquire customers that have never heard about your brand. In that scenario, a sales team can give valuable insights to the marketing team on where to focus their attention and understand the areas where the marketing activities of the company might be improved.

Automation

In the era of AI and machine learning, it’s easy to assume that automation should come before anything else. However, automation, if done with no coordination between the marketing and sales teams, it doesn’t add any value.

If at all it can create irreversible damages to your brand. Therefore, before you set up any automation, you need a deep understanding of your customers, your product, your value proposition, and the whole journey customers take to go from the first touch point with your brand up to the referral stage and on.

Thus, before the marketing department creates any automation you need them to coordinate as much as possible with sales team to make sure the automation process leverages on customer insights that only the sales force, which is in touch with the customer base on a daily basis – has at its disposal.

Viral marketing

Many believe that all you need is a viral marketing campaign to make the lead acquisition process smooth and inexpensive. However, even though viral marketing can do that, you might initially need intense coordination between sales and marketing (and engineering) to understand what part of your product might carry some virality.

For instance, if you run a SaaS business in some cases, it might make sense to create a free version of the product (the so-called freemium model) that becomes an essential part of the lead generation process.

However, what features, or how much volumes can you offer for free to acquire enough customers? A/B testing and big data will help. However, to set it up correctly you need insights from the sales teams.

Those mentioned above are just some of the activities for which sales and marketing working together can really create an effective strategy for the growth of your brand and business.

Therefore, even though it makes sense to understand and keep a clear distinction between sales and marketing so that each of them can focus on specific aspects of the business with accountability and set results.

On the other hand, it is critical to understand the level of coordination that sales and marketing can achieve.

More sales best practices to apply to your business

Sales and distribution are two primary ingredients for any business success. Thus, starting from the best practices for your sales team is the first step toward building a profitable business. Of course, once you have mastered those the time is right to start experimenting with new sales strategies that none out there is doing. Yet if you’re missing the best practices, this is an excellent place to start.

Action plan

Salespeople have to act and do it as quickly as possible. Procrastination is the first enemy as the more time you spend thinking, the less you’ll have time to act and start for instance sending those emails that can lend you new clients or calling those contacts you have on your desk.

However, to make your action more effective, a plan is needed. An action plan is merely a set of predetermined steps you will take and a workflow you’ll need to make your effort more organized.

Customer targeting

One key ingredient to make sales processes successful is the ability of the sales team to target the right leads. Indeed, imagine the case of a salesperson contacting a hundred people and closing none.

In many cases that happens when the salesperson doesn’t know who’s the ideal target that can benefit from the company’s service or product.

Sales canvassing

When a company has mastered lead generation by automating part of the activities from its marketing department it is easy to have salespeople forget about the first and hardest stage, get in touch with people that don’t know your brand.

Instead, have your salespeople spend a part of their time doing sales canvassing or contacting with cold calls or emails people that don’t know your brand. When they master this process, they can also uncover insights about why your business didn’t manage to be recognized among valuable segments of the market as well.

Sales scripts

When a company starts up, you’ll probably have one or two salespeople that have a weird profile. In short, they are not typically just people that mastered the sales process; they are more like renaissance men and quick learners.

They ventured in the business world when none or few people knew your brand and built the company from the ground up. Thus, those people know your company and product better than anyone else.

Therefore, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. Instead, have the new team members of the sales team take advantage of scripts that cover up the main concerns and questions potential customers might have and how to address them. Keep in mind that the script is just a tool to guide the sales force, but it is meant to be improved over time.

Email templates

Just like scripts, email templates can be a great help to salespeople to use what has already worked and rolled it out on a larger scale.

It is essential to keep improving those templates to allow sales emails to gain higher and higher conversion rates. Even though templates do work, it is vital to let for at least a small part of it to be personalized.

Thus, while you can have a template, you still need to do your research and make sure you offer some valuable information to get the lead interested in what you’re saying. Why would anyone listen to you if you’re sending out the same message to anyone?

Personalized message

Before contacting anyone make sure to do your research. People are interested in listening to you when you can deliver to them solutions to their problem.

None cares about your product or service or who you are (unless you’re a rockstar). Thus, before sending our that message, are you providing something valuable to the person on the other side?

Value proposition

One of the less understood aspects of selling is the fact that you only need to pick up the phone as many times as you can and sell your product.

However, while this is a prerequisite, it is not really what makes the difference. When you’re reaching out to someone, you need to understand what motivates them, their value proposition.

Marketing usually can deliver a value proposition and make it seen by as many people as possible. But that value proposition will be not tailored. In short, your product or service doesn’t have a single value proposition, but it will have as many as many potential clients exist out there.

The salesman has to be able to find the value proposition in the product or service that most suits the potential customer on the other side. That is how you get attention.

10x goal setting

Among the most misunderstood things about sales is the goal setting process. Many believe that is fine to set reasonable goals. Thus, they won’t shot to the moon but rather be happy with a discrete objective.

For instance, they might say, “why don’t we increase sales by 50% this year?” And for many, this is a massive increase. Yet if you are not ambitious enough not only you won’t reach the objective but you won’t even take the necessary actions to get there.

In short, to reach massive results, you need to have quite ambitious goals, and targets. Those will ask for the kind of actions that will get you motivated in the long run.

Understand the client business model

If you’re selling to another business, you need to understand its psychology. While indeed when you sell to a consumer, you want to understand their necessities.

When it comes to the business, you want to study their business model indeed. How do they make money? Who are their customers? What do their customers want? What cost structure does the business have?

All those aspects will be critical to understanding what the person, on the other hand, is motivated by and get you closer to deliver the solution that works best for them.

Follow-up

This is the most critical word in sales, yet many neglect it. When you’ve spent hours in prospecting, researching, and meeting a client you’ve done only part of the work.

However, when you don’t follow up, you’ve wasted your time. You could have well not done the work at all. The follow-up is probably the thing that requires the least effort (that is more a matter of organization), yet that is what gets you to close the deal.

Until the potential client gives you an answer which might be positive or negative, you need to follow-up!

Fill your pipeline, always!

In some cases, you might think your pipeline is good enough. That is when you start losing ground. To avoid the risk of being left with an empty pipeline, you need to be prospecting at all time.

Some deals might take way longer than expected to be closed, in that scenario you need a backup plan, which is your pipeline and how full it is.

Keep in touch

When you’ve closed a deal or received a No as the answer, you can’t just leave it up there. You need to keep in touch with that person as what might have prevented to close the deal might have been timing.

On the other hand, if you already closed a deal with that person keeping in touch might allow you to understand when that person has additional needs and whether you can help with your company to fulfill them.

Deliver value before closing

Many think of selling as closing a deal. While closing is part of the process, you’re selling (or serving) at all time. The common mistake is to think you have to deliver value only when the customer has been acquired and he has given you the credit card.

Instead, you need t deliver value as soon as you start interacting with a potential client. Why does she/he need to trust you?

That person doesn’t know you, how she can be sure you’re the person she wants to have business with. There is only one way to prove it, to deliver value before the sales are closed.

Outstanding support

After you’ve closed the sales, it isn’t like your work is over. If you provide a service the most delicate part of it is the first stage of usage of that service by the new customer. Indeed this is still a process in which the person needs to understand whether you can be trusted to deliver the value you promised.

Therefore, you need to be on top of it. The way you support the client once she has acquired your product or service determines how much your business can be trusted. Also, an essential part of any sales funnel is the referral side.

When you’re providing outstanding support not only you’re retaining valuable customers, but you also have those people refer your business to others.

At the end of it, it’s about listening

Based on the research by Hubspot those are the top four ways to create a positive sales experience, according to buyers:

Listen to their needs (69%)
Don’t be pushy (61%)
Provide relevant information (61%)
Respond promptly (51%)

Therefore, it is critical to learning to listen, which does not mean thinking about what you have to say next when the other person is listening. But instead to focus solely on what the other person says emphatically. One mantra I have (or at least I try) to follow is “how do I create value for this person?”

Once that becomes hardwired, it will be much easier to get things going!

Other tools and resources for your business:

Handpicked popular case studies from the site:

The Power of Google Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising!
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained
How Does Spotify Make Money? Spotify Business Model In A Nutshell
The Trillion Dollar Company: Apple Business Model In A Nutshell
DuckDuckGo: The [Former] Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game

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Published on March 09, 2019 14:51

Top 4 Online Business Communities To Join

In 2015 I started to blog. Coming from a different industry (I was a financial analyst for a real estate investment firm) I didn’t know where to start.

Only after many trials and errors, I understood a few things. Now, after a few years, I identified five critical issues and hurdles to overcome as a digital marketer.

Content Amplification

When I first started blogging, I thought all I had to do was to write great content and hit the publish button. That is what I did. I focused a hundred percent of my time at writing in-depth content about topics I was interested in and posted it.

As time went by I realized how wrong I was. I had put so much time and effort into producing quality content. However, none (not even my friends) was reading it.

You may argue that writing is something you can do for the sake of it. Yet while this is true for aspiring writers, that isn’t true for content marketers. If you write content, you’re trying to build something.

Whether that is a personal brand or business, you need an audience. In short, even before to start writing a piece of content, you have already to think about potential avenues to amplify that content.

Usually, my rule of thumb is simple; if I’m not able to write something that can get at least a few thousands of views, then I don’t even bother writing that. Therefore, to make sure I reach that target I must have a few channels I can rely on to make my content seen and shared.

Noise Filtering

Today over three million and a half blog posts were written, which amounts to a surprising one and a half (and over) billions of articles in a year. How do you keep up with that? The answer is simple; you can’t. In short, you need a sort of filter.

A trusted community of experts in your industry that share contents they love. For instance, some of the people I follow that provide quality content, which I usually dive into are people like Nir Eyal, Sam Hurley, Neil Patel, and a few others (at least in the digital marketing space).

This community acts as a sort of filter. In short, instead of having over a billion and a half posts to read each year I will have a few hundred. Finding communities of trusted people that help you cut through the noise of your industry is crucial to becoming a better marketer.

Personal Branding

This step is complementary to the previous one. If you want to build a business or a particular brand, you can’t be an expert in all the specific sub-areas of that industry.

That is why sharing articles from other experts is crucial to add additional value to your audience. Thus, relying on the community of people that act as a filter to find great content is the first step.

The second is to select content that makes sense to your audience. That is also how you become a trusted source for them.

Network Nurturing

Digital marketers know that the best currency to use to build relationships is awesome content. In my professional activity, as a business developer, I find it easy to create new partnerships and business opportunities by adding value with quality content.

From webinars to ebooks or in-depth guest posts, none will say no to that.

Growing an Audience

Building an audience is one of the most complex aspects of digital marketing. Not everyone is interested in that because it sounds too committing. However, as Kevin Kelly puts it, all you need is a thousand true fans.

Top Four Communities to Join to Be a Successful Digital Marketer

Ok, time to dive into four great communities you should join today if you want to bring your digital marketing career to the next level.

Zest.is: transform your browser into a powerhouse

Imagine that as soon as you open your Google chrome tab, you could see fantastic content shared by a community of digital marketers. However, those articles or videos are selected and approved by a professional team to ensure quality.

Also, imagine that with a click you could share your content with this great community with over 12,000 weekly active members to gain knowledge and get qualified traffic. Well, stop imagining because that is a reality.

You can turn your Google Chrome into a powerhouse while connecting with an excellent community to amplify your best content. Do that by adding the extension called Zest.is which will turn your tabs into a discovery and amplification tool. Also, they’re launching a content boost page which you can join here.

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Why should you use Zest.is?

For quite a few reasons but I’m going to list three main ones:

Find excellent, selected content quickly (in fact only about 1% of submitted posts get approved)
Make your content available to a selected, growing community of digital marketers (make sure to submit just your best articles for the reasons above)
Build relationships within the community. Zest.is works pretty much with the same logic of a social network. You can follow and be followed by other people

Growthhackers.com: gain the growth mindset

If you are in the digital marketing space, you might have heard of growth hacking.

A relatively new discipline, in the broader marketing arena, that combines several skills, from programming to sales, with one objective in mind: growth.

Well, growthhackers.com is the website founded by the father of this discipline, Sean Ellis.

There you can find the best content around growth hacking but also an active community of like-minded people. Go on and create your profile as I did:

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Take some time to see what other marketers are posting and sharing. Upvote, comment and connect with marketers that share, write and engage.

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Why should you join growthhackers.com?

Great content to grow your knowledge
An effort to build an active community of marketers around an exciting and relatively new discipline, like growth hacking
The opportunity to expand your network

Quuu: go viral and grow your social media with hand-picked content

Social media is one of those things you need to master to be a successful digital marketer. However, if you had to spend your whole time become a social media expert, you couldn’t do anything else.

Therefore, why not automate it? Although it seems a good idea, automation isn’t easy. Most of the times lead to failure. Indeed, social media like Twitter got cluttered with bots rather than real people.

But then why using social media all along if you don’t build relationships?

Quuu comes to rescue. This is a unique tool, more than a community that helps you in two ways. First, you can automate your social media account, by picking the topics that are more interesting to your audience and decide how many times per day to have those posts shared with your community.

This kind of automation works because the content you share is hand-picked and selected by the team behind Quuu, which makes it possible for you to automate your social media. Second, you can submit your content to quuupromote.co (you can try it for free for 14 days) so that it will be automatically shared (if it fits Quuu guidelines).

In short, you get to automate your social media, while also making your content go viral:

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Why should you join Quuu?

automate your social media account while ensuring the content shared is hand-picked by a team of professional individuals
grow your audience quickly and create conversations automatically
make your content prone to go viral

Pocket: master the art of speed listening

Now that we put a filter on the millions of blog posts out there you may still end up with a few hundred to read. While speed reading maybe not the best option speed listening can. See what strategy Nir Eyal uses:

Pocket isn’t only to make sure you avoid FOMO and save the best articles you find for later. It is also a great way to recommend great content. Once you saved an article to the Pocket app you can recommend it, thus building your audience there:

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Why should you use Pocket?

Avoid distractions online, yet make sure you don’t miss out great articles to read later on
Start practicing speed listening. So that you can keep up with the hundreds of articles to read each year
Recommend the content you find most valuable to build a community of speed listeners like you

Summary and Conclusions

Throughout this article, we saw what some of the roadblocks that a marketer encounters in his/her way. Some of them are listed below:

make sure people read what you write
cutting through the noise of the over three million and a half articles published each day
build your branding through excellent content
create a trusted network to develop future business opportunities
nurture your audience to make it become a loyal ally for long-term success

How can you do that? I highlighted four communities/tools:

zest.is
growthhackers.com
Quuu.co
getpocket.com

Your turn now. Which tools and communities have you found helpful to your growth as a digital marketer?

Resources for your business:

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Published on March 09, 2019 12:20

What Is Product-Market Fit? Product-Market Fit In A Nutshell

Marc Andreessen defined Product/market fit as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

In an article entitled “The only thing that matters” Andreessen also highlights a few points:

At any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose.

In other words, Andreessen takes into account three major factors for the success of any startup:

The team
The product
And the market

He argues that if you asked Entrepreneurs and VCs of the three elements what mattered the most, they would have picked the team.

On the other hand, if you asked engineers about the most crucial element, they would argue that the product matters the most (Andreessen mentions Apple and Google as an example of that).

He takes a third path though. Rather than the team or the product, what matters is the market!

In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.

From here he introduces the concept of MVP or minimum viable product.

He defined it as:

The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along…

…The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.

From here it is essential to understand two concepts that help startups and entrepreneurs in general to launch successful products:

The lean startup methodology
And the MVP

We’ll also see a third element which has become critical even before an MVP can be developed: the problem/market fit.

In other words, where the lean methodology is the “How,” the MVP becomes the “What” and the problem/market fit becomes the “Why.”

The Lean Startup Methodology in a nutshell

Steve Blank, launched the Lean Startup Movement, which as he explained in a 2013 HBR article “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything” defined it as:

It’s a methodology called the “lean start-up,” and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development.

In a nutshell, the lean startup methodology aims at creating a repeatable process for product development to minimize the time it takes to build a product that the market wants.

This process consists of three phases:

Build
Measure
Learn

Once you go through the build > measure > learn that will need to be repeated over and over, thus creating a virtuous cycle or feedback loop.

Steve Blank also highlights a few core principles at the core of the lean startup methodology:

Business plans rarely survive first contact with customers
Five-year plans are worthless and a waste of time
Start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies
The lean start-up movement is about agile development

Thus, the primary purpose is to come up with a minimum viable product (MVP) which helps companies reduce the time to market.

Read: What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained

For that matter, it is essential to understand what’s an MVP.

The Minimum Viable Product in a nutshell

Back in 2009, Eric Ries defined MVP as:

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

And he continued:

MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don’t need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.

Ash Maurya also described it as:

The smallest thing you can build that delivers customer value (and as a bonus captures some of that value back).

At the same time, other entrepreneurs like Rand Fishkin also highlighted the drawbacks of the MVP approach when you have an established brand.

Indeed when you have an established brand, it might make more sense according to Fishkin to adopt the EVP or Exceptional Viable Product approach, summarized as:

My proposal is that we embrace the reality that MVPs are ideal for some circumstances but harmful in others, and that organizations of all sizes should consider their market, their competition, and their reach before deciding what is “viable” to launch. I believe it’s often the right choice to bias to the EVP, the “exceptional viable product,” for your initial, public release.

In my view, an MVP done right should already have the features described by Fishkin EVP. However, Rand Fishkin raises an important point. A company with an established brand should be cautious the way it releases its MVP.

One classic example of what a disastrous MVP can do is Microsoft‘s launch of Bing, which promised to take over the search engine industry, and replace Google as the monopolist of search and the meme of our generation (Microsoft wanted to establish the meme “bing it”) but failed miserably:

While Bing today represents a decent presence for Microsoft in the search industry (Bing makes a few billion dollars to Microsoft) it never really recovered from that MVP launch.

As of 2019, if you ask to the SEO industry (the practitioners that position their content via search) many still curl their lips at the sound of “Bing.”

Indeed, while SEOs are both a blessing and a curse for Google, that community has helped Google get better over the years.

For instance, thanks to the so-called Black SEO practices (attempts to manipulate – successfully – the Google’s algorithms) the search engine has evolved more quickly, by releasing algorithm updates that allowed it to get better and better over the years.

Read: What Is the Minimum Viable Product? Why Use the Exceptional Viable Product Instead

Before building up an MVP, entrepreneurs have learned the hard way, that there is another step, the problem/solution fit.

Problem/Solution Fit comes first

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Source: blog.leanstack.com

MVP makes you fall into the trap of building up a product even before understanding the problem the target market faces. That might delay the ability of a company to build a product that satisfies the market.

Ash Maurya describes this phenomenon in “Don’t Start With an MVP:”

You raise your odds of success significantly by spending the requisite time first defining the MVP, then validating it using an offer, before building it. Think of it as Demo-Sell-Build versus the more traditional Build-Demo-Sell approach.

Therefore, where the entrepreneurial world has stressed so much over the solution by trying to build an MVP, that has delayed the ability to deliver a product that the market wants.

Instead, by focusing on the problem first, you can understand the problem, and as Ash Maurya said it, you’ll make the market “an offer your customers cannot refuse.”

The demo > sell > build process has become common nowadays with many platforms (Kickstarter is one of them) that make it possible to validate an idea, selling it, even before the product is ready.

Product-market fit myths

In a blog post entitled The Revenge of the Fat Guy Ben Horowitz points out the four myths about product-market fit.

You might want to know them as they might compromise the all product/market fit endeavor.

Myth #1: Product market fit is always a discrete, big bang event

Some companies achieve primary product market fit in one big bang. Most don’t, instead getting there through partial fits, a few false alarms, and a big dollop of perseverance.

Myth #2: It’s patently obvious when you have product market fit

Ben Horowitz among others uses this example:

Apple’s first iPod shipped in November 2001. It took nearly two years (91 weeks, to be precise) to sell its first million units. In contrast, Apple’s iPhone 3GS shipped June 2009 and shipped 1M units in 3 days. At what point is it obvious to the original iPod team that they’ve achieved product-market fit?

In short, determining when you have reached a product-market fit might seem obvious at hindsight but not so when that is happening!

Myth #3: Once you achieve product-market fit, you can’t lose it

As product-market fit is about the market. When the market changes dramatically you might also lose product-market fit. If that happens, you need to rebuild it again to stay in business.

Myth #4: Once you have product-market fit, you don’t have to sweat the competition

A market that has a big opportunity also has massive competition. If so, the fight will be fierce and if the fight is fierce, how do you know when the time is right to battle up? Also here there is no formula, but the ability to quickly adapt becomes a key advantage.

Product-market fit tools

There are several tools to find your product-market fit. Some of them are:

Value proposition canvas
Lean startup canvas
Product-market fit canvas

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Read: What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained

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Read: What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained

Summary and conclusions

The product-market fit can be defined as the ability of a product to satisfy the market. The market itself can be segmented to start from a niche market; throughout this process, it is critical to use a method called market segmentation.

At the same time before going to build a product through the lean startup methodology, it is essential to define the problem itself. That can be done via the problem-market fit model which goes through a process of demo-sell-build.

Thus, you will maximize the chances of success of your MVP. Once the MVP is ready, you want to keep improving it to grab more and more market share or to broaden the market wanting the product. At that point, you’ll have reached product-market fit.

However, the product-market fit isn’t something that lasts forever. If the market conditions change, you might lose your product-market fit. Therefore, you’ll have to start the process to regain your product-market fit.

The whole point of the process highlighted in this guide is about coming up with ideas that you can validate and sell even before building a product.

Today that is possible via crowdfunding platforms, or by setting up offerings and only after enough people join in, you start building a product.

Thus, in this era, where digital allows entrepreneurs to quickly and at low costs gather feedback of a large group of people. It is possible to sell something even before you’ve built it!

I summarized this process in the infographic below:

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Resources from the blog:

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Published on March 09, 2019 06:36

The Best Google Chrome Extensions for Business

If you work in the business world, the web is part of your daily life. With 3.7bln users, 127bln of emails sent and 2.9bln of Google‘s Search at the time of this post. For sure the web is the place you have to be. A few common denominators are shared by business professionals, online marketers, and digital entrepreneurs. Those are potential clients, partners, and relationships!

It doesn’t matter in what business you’re in. If that is on or offline, you need leads, prospects and ultimately customers to make your business going and to help you become a successful entrepreneur. Based on that this post will provide 12 tools, which are available as Google Extension to help you fire up your online business, or to use online strategies to boost your business offline. I don’t get any affiliate earnings from the following list. The tools I suggest are the ones I started to use after this research. With no further ado…

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know

Never Make a Grammar Mistake Again with Grammarly

We write dozens of emails per day, most of them get written when we rush, are tired or not paying full attention. Others write content to build their online following and build a sales funnel that converts. Yet the difference between being an amateur to being a professional is to have your grammar in check. However, none of us is an English teacher. How do you solve this impasse? The Grammarly Extension is the answer!

Grammarly will show you the mistakes you’re making when writing and then allows you to check them all when finished. In this way, you can write with no effort and quickly without worrying about Grammar, just like I’m doing right now!

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Who cares? I’m writing so fast that I’m making spelling mistakes yet with Grammarly I can quickly check and correct them once finished writing!

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Not only Grammarly helps me with my grammar mistakes, but it also suggests style adjustments to make it more readable. Although I like that feature too, I usually don’t make all the custom adjustments Grammarly suggests because I like to keep my style personal. Therefore, even though not 100% elegant I still prefer to keep it as it is!

Reverse Engineer Your Competition with Similar Web

Time to hack your competitors. How? With the Similar Web Extension. If you’re not familiar with it Similar Web is a great tool to reverse engineer your competitors by looking at their main metrics. From traffic sources, to referrals and keywords, Similar Web is the ultimate tool for the growth marketer. There’s a warning though. Which one? Bare with me!

According to MOZ Estimated how accurate are those tools, I’m reporting the accuracy of Similar Web below

SimilarWeb – monthly visits

Avg. of Metric/Actual Traffic: 406.37%
% of Data within 70-130% of Actual Traffic: 22.00%
Spearman’s Correlation w/ Actual Traffic: 0.827
Standard Error: 0.0504
Data coverage: 87.41%

As you can see “% of Data within 70-130% of Actual Traffic: 22.00%.”

In other words, Similar Web was accurate in almost one-fourth of the sites analyzed. Yet that accuracy swings between 70–130% of actual traffic. Therefore, let’s say Similar Web says traffic of a site is 100K monthly. Consider that more as a range (from 70–130K monthly visitors) rather than an actual number.

That means you want to look at the numbers coming from Similar Web as an estimate and a range rather than an absolute number. That is very useful for comparative analyses among your competitors.

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Make Your Web Navigation Smooth with Adblock

The Web got built upon ads. Google, which is the most used Search Engine in the world, has its business model based on ads earning. There are websites out there with millions of ads on their homepages,

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Even though ads made and make the web possible, they are often bothering and distracting. That is why to get the most out of your internet navigation you got to block them. How? By having the AdBlock Extension. That is how I see my Google Search before and after,

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How to Use Wolfram Alpha for Finance Professionals to Speed up Your Career Growth

Email Marketing on Steroids with Mixmax

Let me just tell you that when I saw this tool, I got ecstatic. Why? As online marketer emails are a vital part of building relationships with clients, colleagues and potential partners. Mixmax Extension is what put all together!

From email tracking, templates, and automation that is a fantastic tool for email marketers or for anyone that wants to be on top of his game.

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Prospecting Has Never Been So Easy with Hunter

Prospecting is not an easy job. It requires time and dedication. Therefore if that is any tool that makes it easy on you that is welcomed. Hunter Extension is an incredible tool to find anyone email contacts on the web. Let’s say I want to reach out to other online marketers, like Neil Patel? Ok, no problem, let’s have Hunter finds his contacts for us,

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From now on your online prospecting will be way more efficient!

Good news you can use the tool on other social media too. For instance, that is how your Hunter Extension will look like on LinkedIn. Independently from you having or not that person on your network you’ll be able to hunt his/her email with a certain threshold of confidence!

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Will Voice Search Bring an End to SEO?

Never Screw up Again Your Emails with Gmail Offline

Think of all those times in which you had an unreliable internet connection, and while writing an important email you’re interned dropped, and you lost it all! While screaming and shouting you then calmed down and started thinking how cool it would be to have a tool that allows you to write emails from offline. Well, stop imagining, because that tool is available now and that is Gmail Offline Extension!

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Take Notes Anywhere on the Web with Evernote

Each time you see anything cool on the Web, it makes sense to note it for later use. You can share it, use it as a note for a piece you’ll write. Mention it to a client during a call. For this and much more Evernote, Web Clipper Extension is a great tool!

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Make Your Website SEO-Friendly with WooRank

SEO stands for search engine optimization. As you might know, those are a set of tactics and strategies to make your content easier to understand, find and interpret by search engines. In this, way, those engines can bridge the gap between you and your audience, by letting you get found by the right people. Producing high-quality content is per se an SEO strategy. Yet there are some technicalities to take into account when building a website, such as the number of backlinks or how many keywords is the content ranking for and a few others. In fact, search engines like Google use over 200 factors to index and eventually rank your content. As you can imagine focusing on all those factors would be a waste of time. There are a few significant factors that play a greater role in your rankings. WooRank allows you to spot the major factors affecting your SEO strategy. That is why I suggest you check out the WooRank Extension!

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That is the score WooRank assigned to my website based on a few factors. Not bad after all, yet I set the goal to see this number improve in the future by implementing a backlinks strategy. How do I know my website is doing poorly when it comes to backlink score? WooRank told me,

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That is where I’ll be focusing my SEO effort in the coming months!

It’s Time to Break-Free from Those Dozens of Tabs with OneTab

Do you ever find yourself in such a messy situation?

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If you’re like me, that should happen to you on a daily basis! At times you’re so enslaved to those open tabs that you won’t switch off the computer for days. With that notification that pops on the top right corner of the screen each day you let the updates accumulate for months if not years!

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After using OneTab Extension, you’ll stop feeling enslaved by those tabs!

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Find the Perfect Gif at Any Time with Giphy

Content marketers are increasingly using interactive materials. From audio, video, pictures and GIF; making your content captivating isn’t anymore about words but more and more about images. In this scenario, finding the right GIF is like finding goldmine!

Well, now finding your goldmine at any time has never been so easy with Giphy Extension. That is how I found and added the GIF above in a few seconds!

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Make Your Gmail Account More Social with Rapportive

Email marketing is a great way to grow your business and nurture your professional relationships. Yet if you want those relationships to be successful ou have to get out from the email tab and get into the social profiles of your prospects, partners, and customers. How? Rapportive Extension is what bridges the gap between the Gmail account and your potential partners, prospects or clients by showing you rich cards of your contacts social media right into your Gmail account!

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That is how you will make the most of your relationships in no time!

Make Your Website SEO-Proof with Moz Bar

We saw what SEO is for (in WooRank Extension) and why it makes sense to focus on it. For anyone that is in the SEO industry Moz is one of those tools that you must have if you want to make your SEO strategy more effective. That is why it makes sense to use the Moz Bar Extension.

The Moz Bar will give you the Page Authority and Domain Authority of a page/website. In other words, those are scores that predict how a page/website will rank in Google’s SERP (Search Engine Research Page). As you can imagine the higher the better. Now you can use Moz Bar to have a quick glance at any website or page of a website.

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Other Chrome Extensions

I took the time to test those tools because I wanted to be a better online marketer. Yet those are only tools. What comes first is the right mindset. A mindset that makes you experiment, test and to try new things, not for the sake of them but because they can help you build, nurture and foster relationships. Your turn!

Also below I want to highlight a few other chrome extensions I’ve been using in the last months, which I’ve found useful:

Zest – Distilled Marketing Content: Zest is a community of marketers but also a chrome extension to keep up with the latest and best content available and at the same time syndicate your own content!
Keywords Everywhere: a chrome extension that powers up your Google tabs by giving you valuable SEO data, from search volume of keywords to related keywords. In this way, you can research more efficiently the keywords to amplify your content marketing strategy.

Structured Data Testing Tool: structured data is what search engines use to understand web pages. This tool connects with the official structure data testing tool from Google that allows you to check what metadata Google can read on your web pages.

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The resources you need to get started with your business model:

Popular case studies from the blog:

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Published on March 09, 2019 00:22

March 8, 2019

Hacking Value Proposition Design With The Value Mix [Interview]

The Value Mix: Create Meaningful Products and Services for Your Audience is a book by Guerric de Ternay. I invited Guerric to join us for an interview. The topic is business design and value proposition design!

Those topics are the foundation of any business and business model. Let’s jump to it!

Disclosure: there are not affiliate links in this article! We review and post the books we find valuable to the FourWeekMBA community

Interview at Guerric de Ternay on value proposition design

Glad to have you for this interview Guerric!

Would you mind telling us a bit more about how you got to become a “business designer”?

Thanks for inviting me, Gennaro.

It’s worth explaining what a “business designer” does. It’s the work of creating new value propositions or business models using a design approach.

This includes both the high-level strategy (purpose, vision, business modeling, financial planning, brand positioning, etc.) and the execution strategy (prototyping, customer experience, product roadmap, customer acquisition & retention, etc.).

Therefore, business designers are quite generalists. They need to master a broad range of business tools and frameworks in finance, design, and marketing, and must also have a sense of industry knowledge.

In general, business designers are entrepreneurs, product managers, or innovation consultants—and also genuinely curious people.

My advice would be to seek opportunities to build an extensive understanding of business and product design.

In my case, I focused on many various skills:

Programming and graphic design when I was a teenager and started a digital marketing agency.
Legal studies as I went to law school.
Business and management when I studied at London Business School.
Sales, marketing, and operations by running two sustainable fashion brands—GoudronBlanc and Blackwood.
And putting everything together in my work as an innovation consultant at ?What If!.

Most of the people I’ve met who can fit the definition of “business designer” are passionate about what they do, reflective, but also proactive—they do not hesitate to get their hands dirty.

In business we all talk about value and value proposition, what’s a good definition of value according to you?

There are two definitions of value in business:

The value of a company for the shareholders and
The value of a product or service from the perspective of a customer—the value proposition.

In the sense of creating value for your customers, value is a matter of perception.

Here’s a good definition of value:

The perception of the benefits that a customer gets from buying, using, or consuming a specific product or service in comparison with available alternatives.

People buy and use a product or service when they believe it will create value for them, i.e., serve them better than all the other available alternative.

In your book, The Value Mix, you break down value as the encounter of an audience with a proposition. How would you break down this matrix for our audience?

Yes. Value is a combination of two things:

What your target audience need and want
What you are offering to the market to help your audience fulfill their needs and desires—this is your proposition.

I like using these words—”audience” and “proposition”—because they go beyond the ideas of “customers” and “products.”

An audience includes customers, users, and advocates (people who may never buy or use your proposition but will influence the decisions of others).

A proposition is what you propose/offer to your audience. It’s not just a product. It’s also all the experience of buying and using what you’re selling.

How important is the context in building up a product or service?

Context is critical to creating value for your customers. It’s one of the most useful design concepts when you’re building a new value proposition.

The reason?

Context influences how much value your audience puts into things. It dictates what they buy and how much they’re willing to pay for it.

If it’s raining heavily and I’m in a business district on my way to a meeting, I’d be immediately considering buying an umbrella on the spot or hailing a cab.

If I have a flower shop, I’d be interested in knowing when is the marriage anniversary of my customers. Husbands are more likely to buy flowers on that date. As a florist, I could help them be thoughtful husbands.

What questions should an entrepreneur ask to build a successful business?

Entrepreneurs and product managers work with limited resources. To design and implement the strategy of a successful business, they have to make tough choices.

One of my professors at London Business School, Costas Markides, summarises the structure of a business model using three simple questions:

Who?
What?
How?

As he explained, a strategy is about making tough choices on three dimensions:

Who = the customers you will focus on and those you will consciously not target;
What = the products you will offer and the ones you will not offer;
How = the activities you will perform and the ones you will not perform.

Besides your book, The Value Mix, what business book would you suggest to the FourWeekMBA audience?

Tough question, Gennaro.

I believe the goal of any business book is to help you progress.

The best business book for a specific person will depend on their situations and the challenges they are facing. For example, I wrote The Value Mix for entrepreneurs and product managers who face the challenge of having to create or improve a value proposition.

That being said, there’s a book I often recommend to executives: Deep Work.

Distraction and shallow work are two of the biggest challenges for any businessperson. Deep Work is an eye-opener and offers some ideas on how to be more focused on doing the work that matters.

I shared some more thoughts on the book in my newsletter, here.

Who’s your favorite business author (if any)?

The work of Seth Godin, especially his blog, has inspired me a lot. I often think that he’s done a great job at bridging business thinking and poetry.

I also really like Fred Wilson’s daily blog called avc.com and the writing of Rory Sutherland for The Spectator.

What person do you follow the most when it comes to business model innovation?

The most important when it comes to business model innovation is observing. So rather than following a business thinker, I prefer to immerse myself with new stimuli constantly.

It’s about observing the customers. For example, when I travel, I always take the public transports, go to the supermarket, and commit to spending an extensive amount of time talking with the locals.

Understanding people’s lives—what people are trying to do, what are the things they buy and use, and why these things—is a great source of inspiration.

And it’s about observing other businesses and new technologies. You also need to understand what are the resources you can leverage to create value for your customers.

For this, I chat with industry experts, listen to people who are advocates of specific products, and often try new products myself.

Resources shared in the interview

A value proposition is the foundation of any business model. And to get it right it means to have a business in the first place! That’s why I suggest you dive into The Value Mix as you’ll find many resources to build the foundation of your business!

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Blogs to follow:

Fred Wilson
Seth Godin
Rory Sutherland

Additional reading:

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You can also follow Guerric, on Twitter.

Resources from the blog:

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Published on March 08, 2019 08:07

March 5, 2019

Platform Business Models In A Nutshell

A platform business model generates value by enabling interactions between people, groups, and users by leveraging on network effects.

There are various types of platform business models, and usually two sides: a supply and demand side. Kicking off the interactions between those two sides and keeping those interactions smooth is a crucial element for a platform business model success.

From products to interactions

In a platform business model, an organization moves from offering a product to creating an ecosystem for those interactions to take place. This shift is critical to understand how platforms work, as often those don’t require any capital or physical inventory.

The classic example is of Airbnb having among the broadest variety of homes around the globe, yet owning none of them. Often those interactions are on-demand thus if I’m looking for a driver I might access my Uber or Lyft mobile app to find the driver that can give me a lift.

[image error]Lyft is a transportation-as-a-service on-demand marketplace that allows riders to quickly find a driver and get from one place to another. However, Lyft has also expanded with a multimodal platform that gives more options like bike sharing or electric scooters. And it is also experimenting with autonomous driving. Lyft primary makes money by collecting fees from drivers that complete rides on the platform. It also makes money via subscription fees and single-use ride fees paid by riders to access the network of shared bikes and scooters.
From connections to transactions

A platform also makes it easy for people to transact. For instance, if I get to Amazon, I will find a variety of products, anything from books to music, apparel and more.

Amazon Flywheel or Virtuous Cycle enables third-party stores to feature their inventory within Amazon fulfillment centers that become part of programs like Amazon Prime, which makes them eligible for one-day delivery.

That makes it extremely easy to transact on those platforms, and the experience needs to be so smooth so that customers can have a great experience and sellers, which usually are small businesses, can benefit from Amazon‘s economies of scale.

[image error]The Amazon Flywheel or Amazon Virtuous Cycle is a strategy that leverages on customer experience to drive traffic to the platform and third-party sellers. That improves the selections of goods, and Amazon further improves its cost structure so it can decrease prices which spins the flywheel.
From customers to network effects

Network effects are a crucial element of any platform business model. Indeed, platform business models are built on top of two kinds of network effects:

Direct network effects: a classic example is a social media platform like Facebook, where for each additional user joining the platform it gets better for future users. Network effects can also be as powerful as they trigger social pressure. Imagine a group of friends all on Facebook, except one. The one person not on Facebook might feel marginalized, and the pressure to join the platform grows as more people within the social group join it.
Indirect network effects: in a two-sided marketplace, when one side of the platform improves, the other side benefits from that. For instance, LinkedIn is a two-sided platform where the more experienced professionals join, the more the platform becomes valuable to the other side, the human resources professional or companies looking for qualified profiles.

A two-sided marketplace benefiting from network effects also need to leveraging on other key elements:

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The chicken and egg strategy problem

Before networks effect kick in, it takes momentum which can be built “artificially” by bringing in the “chicken” that will allow the platform to take off.

In the Amazon Flywheel Model, before Amazon would become the tech giant we know today, it needed to broaden the variety of good available on its store if it wanted to dominate the marketplace.

Rather than wait for Amazon to build up that variety, Amazon Virtuous Cycle made it possible for third-party sellers, which at the time were also Amazon competitors, to offer their products on the platform.

That solved the chicken and egg problem. As more sellers meant more variety, which was something customers valued a lot. That variety improved the customer experience which in turn made it Amazon speed up its growth and take advantage of network effects!

Beyond technology and into business model innovation

One of the greatest misconceptions of platforms is that technology is all that matters for its success. However, a platform is, first of all, a business model and as such to avoid failure, in the long run, has to be able to build a distinctive business model that makes it hard to copy. Therefore, business model innovation is another key ingredient.

Platform business models tyles

There isn’t a single way to classify platform business models. Those, indeed, can be classified in several ways. For instance, based on the kind of interactions that the platform creates, but also on the type of relationships those same platforms nurture, or with a functional approach.

Thus, if we use these three classification methodologies, we’ll come up with different platform business models.

For the sake, if this analysis we’ll take into account the three approaches:

Interactions approach
Relationship approach
Functional approach

Platforms business models as interactions

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Source: applicoinc.com

According to Applico platform business models can be divided into exchange platforms and maker platforms. The primary difference is in the kind of interactions those platforms allow.

An exchange platform allows a one-to-one platform, where two sides interact as smoothly as possible. Some examples are Airbnb, Amazon, and Dropbox. In this kind of interaction, the two parts are made to transact based on supply and demand.

A maker platform allows an interaction one-to-many. In short, a creator connects with its audience. For instance, an App developer on the Apple Store can get many downloads, just like an author on Amazon Kindle can allow its community to purchase an info-product.

Platform business models as relationships

John Hagel, in The Power of Platforms – Deloitte University Press, 2015 divides the platform business models into four primary categories based on the kind of relationships they generate.

We move from a transactional platform where the parts are made to transact as smoothly as possible, to platforms that instead nurture mobilization:

Aggregation platforms
Social platforms
Mobilization platforms
And learning platforms

As pointed out in the paper “Aggregation platforms bring together a broad array of relevant resources and help users of the platform to connect with the most appropriate resources.” Instead, social platforms differ from aggregation platforms as they aim to “building and reinforcing long-term relationships across participants on the platform.”

Mobilization platforms take a step further, and they don’t just allow people to form relationships based on interests but to take actions together. And learning platforms which aim is to facilitate learning, but also insights exchange.

Platform business models as functional marketplaces

In The Rise of the Platform Enterprise Peter C. Evans and Annabelle Gawer platform business models are divided into:

Transaction platforms: actings as an intermediary) facilitating exchange or transactions between different users, buyers, or suppliers
Innovation platforms: consisting of a technology, product or service acting as a foundation for other firms to develop complementary technologies, products or services (this is usually a loosely organized ecosystem)
Integrated platforms: usually a technology, product or service that works both as a transaction platform and an innovation platform
And investment platforms: consisting primarily of companies that have developed a platform portfolio strategy and act as a holding company, active platform investor or both

Resources:

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Published on March 05, 2019 15:37

The Line Between Marketing Strategy Vs Content Strategy

Marketing and content strategies, two concepts that both depend on each other, build off one another — but have a fine line in between them.

We’ll admit it, keeping up with marketing trends is a job in itself. For many, keeping up with both marketing and content trends seems like too much work — which is precisely why the two roles should be kept separate, but close.

We’ll be talking about the fine line between content and marketing strategies. We’ll also look at ways that you can combine the two so that you work perfectly together, and look at great examples of strategies for both.

You’re being spoilt today, so, let’s dive right in.

What is a content strategy?

Firstly, let’s look at the definitions of both content strategies and marketing strategies. This way, we might be able to grasp a better overall understanding.

Content strategies are somewhat tricky to pinpoint. We put this down to them varying so differently from one brand to another.

We’d say that a content strategy is a vision or design that guides you through all your future content development and management. This strategy should always work alongside your unique business objective.

A lack of a content strategy will lead to generic content — which simply does not suffice in today’s digital world.

You see, generic content doesn’t help your SEO rating, it doesn’t get shared, it doesn’t get interactions, and it ultimately doesn’t help with your overall objectives.

What is a marketing strategy?

Right, now onto your marketing strategy.

Again, every brand more than likely has their own definition of what a marketing strategy is. We like to think of it as an analytical approach to sales, that utilizes all possible resources to expand your business.

You’ll be able to realize by now that marketing is, without a shadow of a doubt, a standalone project. It incorporates a little bit of everything from brand awareness to, of course, content.

A marketing strategist is responsible for developing that blanket structure. The building, measuring, developing, conducting and mapping are all down to them. Overwhelming, we know.

Marketing strategies are essential, especially if you want to increase your presence locally, nationally, and globally.

The overlap between content strategy and marketing strategy

You’ve probably already noticed that this is the point where the overlap becomes apparent.

The “overlap” is just the part where the two strategies depend on each other, with a fine line separating their primary functions.

First of all, both marketing and content strategists rely on analytics. From this, they both focus on engagement, conversion, and outreach.

“The issue is that a lot of content and marketing roles focus on the same thing. Have you ever heard of ‘too many cooks spoil the broth?’ To make the two work best together, you need to embrace the fine line between marketing and content strategy.” — Ethan Dunwill, a marketing manager at Hot Essay Service.

The differences between content strategy and marketing strategy

As we mentioned, marketing strategies are broader — they use an array of tools to execute campaigns and bounce off business opportunities.

On the other hand, content strategists work on fixing the problems that marketing find. They also will focus on the new opportunities and dig into a narrative, which overall helps the brand.

To put this in the form of an example, imagine the following.

It’s this division that can help the two work perfectly together.

How to manage your market research

As the two primary functions are different, the approaches to research are also different.

For marketing a deal of deductive reasoning and carefully studying marketing trends to make grand, relevant plans are needed.

As for content strategies, a more gradual build-up is necessary. Think of it like a story-telling.

Think of it like; marketing compiles a conclusion and works towards it. Content works towards an end.

That’s how researching differs ever so slightly. Both are equally important, and both should be implemented to minimize risk.

Working together on pitches

These slight differences make the work of pitches all the more exciting.

Every marketing strategist will be aware of it — the pitching process. Maybe even some content strategists too.

That being said, the content strategist should examine the framework provided, and decide how they can transform the (ugly) pitch into a (beautiful) engaging story.

Consider a problem your audience has, how to fix and use hand over the storytelling to content. Simple.

The perfect blend of logic and creativity

Both marketing and content strategies require a mixture of logic and creativity.

If you communicate with each other, you’ll both be able to help each other out.

For instance, a marketing strategy might have all the logic behind social media, email outreach, and sample target audience.

However, the content strategy will have to use this information to create a powerful brand message. One that will hit the goals, and engage the target audience.

It truly is a fine line. The good news is — customers and audiences make both rational and emotional decisions in their day-to-day life. Using both logic and emotions is the logical way forward, from a marketing standpoint.

The perfect marketing strategy and how to combine with the content strategy

Here’s our take on the perfect marketing strategy, and we’ve highlighted the places that require a little communication with the content experts.

1. Find your target audience

2. Find your niche in the market (this makes for great storytelling with the help from content marketing)

3. Analyze the competitors

4. Set up social media accounts

5. Establish the best marketing methods for you. What social channels does your target audience live on? Your budget. Your location.

6. Regularly check up on your outreach and sales statistics. (Content will also be able to incorporate statistics here)

The perfect content strategy and how to combine with the marketing strategy

Vice versa — you know the drill.

1. Analyze where your target audience will more than likely receive your content. (Marketing’s statistics will more than likely be able to help here).

2. Combine forces and define your goals.

3. Find out what’s working for your company at the moment, content-wise.

4. Regularly check up on your content, the analytics and find ways to improve.

5. Create a brand story, and follow that narrative and theme throughout.

These two examples highlight both the overlap and the slight differences between the two.

Essential tools to help you with your content and marketing strategy

An efficient marketing and content strategy strongly relies on a list of necessary tools. Each professional in the field has their own. Here’s what we recommend:

Grammarly — everybody cares about grammar, even Google’s algorithm. Grammarly will help you keep your texts in check.
Rewarded Essays — delegating content creation to professionals is essential if you want to attract more customers. Rewarded Essays helps businesses create high-quality articles and texts on a broad spectrum of topics.
Hootsuite — this is one of the more reputable and well-known social media management tools, and is indispensable in any business’s marketing and content strategy.
SupremeDissertations — this company writes impressive niche texts for professionals all over the world. Get in touch with SupremeDissertations, if you’re looking for seasoned writers for your business’s blog.
Grab My Essay — another top-rated writing service that’s been on the market for many years.
MailChimp — probably the best tool for email template creation and newsletter distribution. More importantly — it’s free!

Conclusion and a key takeaway

Overall, to create an effective campaign, wherever it may be, both perspectives need to be addressed.

Both of these concepts build off each other, work together, and form a narrative which will ultimately make a big difference in the grand scheme of your business.

We’d say that it’s super important to differentiate the two, but use them both interchangeably with each other. This way, you’ll get the best of both worlds.

Guest Contribution by Bridgette Hernandez, a Master in Anthropology who is interested in writing and planning to publish her own book in the nearest future. She finished her study last year but is already a true expert when it comes to presenting a text in a creative and understandable manner, this is why she’s a senior editor at IsAccurate. The texts she writes are always informative, based on qualitative research but nevertheless pleasant to read.

Resources:

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Published on March 05, 2019 13:31

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