The Truth About Relativity

One day while browsing the World Wide Web (obviously for work-not just wasting time), I stumbled on the following ad, on the Web site of a magazine, the Economist.

I read these offers one at a time. The first offer-the Internet subscription for $59 seemed reasonable. The second option-the $125 print subscription-seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable.

But then I read the third option: a print and Internet subscription for $125. I read it twice before my eye ran back to the previous options. Who would want to buy the print option alone, I wondered, when both the Internet and the print subscriptions were offered for the same price? Now, the print- only option may have been a typographical error, but I suspect that the clever people at theEconomist‘s London offices (and they are clever-and quite mischievous in a British sort of way) were actually manipulating me. I am pretty certain that they wanted me to skip the Internet- only option (which they assumed would be my choice, since I was reading the advertisement on the Web) and jump to the more expensive option: Internet and print.

But how could they manipulate me? I suspect it’s because theEconomist‘s marketing wizards (and I could just picture them in their school ties and blazers) knew something important about human behavior: humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly. (For instance, we don’t know how much a six- cylinder car is worth, but we can assume it’s more expensive than the four- cylinder model.)

In the case of the Economist, I may not have known whether the Internet- only subscription at $59 was a better deal than the print- only option at $125. But I certainly knew that the print and-Internet option for $125 was better than the print- only option at $125. In fact, you could reasonably deduce that in the combination package, the Internet subscription is free! “It’s a bloody steal-go for it, governor!” I could almost hear them shout from the riverbanks of the Thames. And I have to admit; if I had been inclined to subscribe I probably would have taken the package deal myself. (Later, when I tested the offer on a large number of participants, the vast majority preferred the Internet- and- print deal.)

So what was going on here? Let me start with a fundamental observation: most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context. We don’t know what kind of racing bike we want-until we see a champ in the Tour de France ratcheting the gears on a particular model. We don’t know what kind of speaker system we like-until we hear a set of speakers that sounds better than the previous one. We don’t even know what we want to do with our lives-until we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing. Everything is relative, and that’s the point. Like an airplane pi lot landing in the dark, we want runway lights on either side of us, guiding us to the place where we can touch down our wheels.

In the case of the Economist, the decision between the Internet only and print- only options would take a bit of thinking. Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant. So the Economist’s marketers offered us a no-brainer: relative to the print-only option, the print-and-Internet option looks clearly superior.

 

 

                                           

 

 

A Guide to Creating Marketing Offers

Create Content For Your Persona

It's easy enough to say you're going to create a helpful, educational offer ... but ... how? To handle the demands of content creation, marketers have been told again and again to “think like a publisher.” It’s great advice, but what exactly does that mean? Just how do you think like a publisher? Publishers have a detailed picture of who their reader is that drives every content creation decision they made; inbound marketers should be no different.

Generate a detailed picture of your target audience (what we call a buyer persona in the marketing biz) so you can create the type of content they'll love to read -- from the right topic, to the right tone, to the right format in which it's presented (more on that later).

So if you haven't already, ask yourself ... who are your ideal customers and prospects? What are their biggest concerns, needs, and interests? Where can you reach them -- on search engines, social media, or blogs -- and what kinds of content do they prefer? These questions will help you develop buyer personas. And if you need more help creating your buyer persona, download this PowerPoint template that helps you lay the whole thing out, step by step!

Focus on the Right Stage

Content plays a critical role in every stage of the inbound marketing process, from generating awareness about your company to helping convert leads into customers. But the types of content you should use to achieve each of these goals depends on where your lead is in the sales cycle. How would you appreciate someone sending you buyer guides when you've only just downloaded a checklist? Here's a sketch of the buying cycle that should help you align the right content with the right stage of the buying cycle so your leads keep on loving the offers you send their way:

• Awareness: The prospect gets acquainted with your brand or realizes they have a need for your product/service.

• Research/Education: The prospect identifies the problem and researches potential solutions, including your product/service.

• Comparison/Validation: The prospect examines the options and begins narrowing down the list of vendors.

• Purchase: The prospect decides from whom to buy.

Use Data to Create Lovable Content -- in Topic and Format

Content comes in all shapes and sizes -- whitepapers, videos, webinars, ebooks, templates, kits -- you name it. While you can host an internal brainstorm session and come up with creative ideas for different content formats that you can produce, it’s important that this new content matches the needs and preferences of your target persona.

But how do you know? Well, you can certainly ask them -- an ideal time is when you're creating your buyer personas and performing interviews of your target audience, anyway. But we also like to use analytics to make that decision! At HubSpot, for instance, we're using our landing page analytics to explore how successful different types of content are in converting visitors to leads. If the conversion rate is lower than average, the marketing offer isn’t appealing enough to our audience. If you have a sense of what that format is for your business, use it to build your marketing campaign around it.

But your job doesn't end in determining the right format in which to present your offer. You also need to figure out what on earth you're going to write about. And the answer isn't, "Whatever strikes my fancy." Not if you want your leads to love your offer.

In order to find what content topics capture the attention of your target audience, you should look at past data that you have access to. For instance, what are the most popular blog articles you've published? What are some of the most viewed pages on your website? Your historical performance should dictate your future direction for all new marketing content -- particularly your lead generation content. If you don’t have access to marketing analytics that give you this type of intelligence, look in the public domain (places like Google News, Google Trends, and Twitter Trending Topics) for popular and newsworthy industry stories. You can then piggyback on these popular topics by adding a personal spin that reflects your expertise and resonates with your audience.

Recruit a Team of Content Creators

You don’t have to be the only one creating your company’s offer content. You can (and should!) use different voices from inside your organization. Technical folks, customer service people, C-level executives, product managers, and others in your organization have a unique take on important aspects of your business, as well as different areas of expertise you can tap into. Get your coworkers to contribute by:

• Asking them to co-write a whitepaper or an ebook
• Interviewing them and posting short videos that share their expertise
• Inviting them to give presentations or answer questions in webinars

You can also look outside your own company for help creating content. New online content marketplaces are springing up to connect marketers with legions of freelance writers and editors who will take on blog posts, ebooks, and other writing jobs for you. You can specify the topic, your desired style and tone, and your intended audience. And depending on the marketplace you work with, you typically don't have to pay unless you accept the finished article.

Repurporse Content

Almost every piece of content you create can be adapted, reused, modified, and republished in another format. Make a habit of finding multiple ways to package and distribute the same information in different formats. Here are a few ideas:

• Combine text from an old whitepaper with new videos to create a multimedia ebook

• Turn videos or webinars into blog posts and ebooks -- or vice versa.

• Use commonly asked questions and comments from webinars to create a new ebook. These topics will directly address your prospects’ pain points.

• Share all company presentations in multiple formats. Post the slides on SlideShare, upload the video on YouTube, and create a series of blog posts that dive into specific points of the presentation.

Original Post

Agencia 365

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn ha anunciado el lanzamiento de LinkedIn Ads (LinkedIn Anuncios) en 17 nuevos idiomas. Desde el ruso pasando por el japonés y el castellano, la actualización hace que resulte más fácil para los usuarios y las empresas compartir información y crear mensajes que lleguen directamente a su público objetivo, así como ofrecer oportunidades más atractivas y relevantes a nivel local y en castellano a todos los usuarios de LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Ads permite a las empresas dirigirse únicamente a los profesionales con mayor interés en sus productos o servicios por su actividad profesional e intereses, ofreciendo a los anunciantes la posibilidad de hacer más eficiente su inversión en publicidad y por lo tanto incrementar el retorno de la misma. Por ejemplo, los servicios de publicidad “easy-to-use” (fáciles de usar) de LinkedIn ofrecen la oportunidad de enviar anuncios según el nombre exacto del puesto de trabajo, el nombre de la empresa o de grupo de LinkedIn, además de la geografía, las funciones a desempeñar, la industria, el tamaño de la compañía, la antigüedad, la edad y el género del potencial candidato.

"Para los publicistas y profesionales del marketing cada vez es más difícil llegar a sus públicos debido al gran volumen de información que se maneja día a día, por eso para superar esta barrera se requiere de un nuevo enfoque. El lanzamiento de LinkedIn Ads en castellano significa que los anunciantes y usuarios en España ahora podrán interactuar directamente de forma más local", dijo Ariel Eckstein, Director General de LinkedIn EMEA.

LinkedIn Ads es sólo una parte de un conjunto de nuevas soluciones de alto impacto para ayudar a que los anunciantes trasladen eficientemente sus mensajes a una audiencia estratégica de más de 175 millones de profesionales de alto nivel en todo el mundo, y a más de 3 millones en España. El amplio portafolio de “Soluciones de Marketing” de LinkedIn abarca una gran variedad de opciones publicitarias socialmente orientadas; que van desde los anuncios de texto más simples hasta campañas de gran envergadura y oportunidades de marca a través de las “Company Pages” (páginas de las compañías) y los grupos de LinkedIn.

Articulo Original

Agencia 365

                                           

 

 

Is there a demand for a well designed, hotel website service?

Most hotel websites are very poorly designed. They are butt ugly and overcrowded. Most of them are not responsive (they don't adjust to mobiles or ipads). Most of them have not yet adopted any social marketing strategies, which are vital in this industry. I've seen tons of them with broken functionality (out of date special offers, broken booking functionality etc.)

Is there a demand for an SaaS product that would offer hotels a well-designed, responsive website that they could customize and update?

he problem you're going to encounter in marketing such a thing is that owners of franchised properties expect the franchise to hand them everything - and if they don't, it's presumably because they don't have it to give. If the owner has a 72-room property, he expects the central reservations system to send him fifty new reservations a night. In real life, it doesn't work that way. So, he concludes, it's not possible: after all, Choice and Wyndham are professionals. Or, if it's a corporate-owned property, they might hire an in-house sales director, who'll try to pull it off by soliciting personal connections and face-to-face contacts in the area - 'sales' without any good marketing. There's no convincing people that better can be expected of a website.

The problem you're going to encounter with franchise organizations is, they're collecting fees and royalties on what they have at minimal investment to themselves, so why should they invest in anything more?  (Likewise, why should a grungy biker bar with tattoo-covered topless dancers spend the money to renovate into an upscale gentlemen's club?  They're already making all the money they can imagine with exactly what they have, and the overhead is as low as it can get . . . You get the idea.)

Here's my wish list: Stand by for lots of edits - and additions - over coming months: I'm just getting started. And I intend to never finish - this business is constantly evolving. (Anyone who tells you otherwise probably runs an older property with a badly dated '70's appearance that smells musty and is probably in need of serious renovations.)

• Rate configurability:

I want more than 'Best Available Rate', AAA-AARP, and whatever whiz-bang promotion the franchise organization has going that, as often as not, has your hotel renting a room for next to nothing so the franchise as a 'whole' can benefit. One feature of a very suite-intensive (if not all-suites in all locations) new brand that we're working on is going to be a rack rate that drops automatically if you request a stay of three days or more, and again if you request a stay of a week or more. 

And I want it to work in accordance with simple rules, not exotic 'industry terminology' that only a Cornell post-grad can decipher. 

Across-the-board special rate programs need to be applied across the board, not room-type-by-room-type. (That's one of the things about configuring Check-Inn -Michael Forrest Jones's answer to What are the best property management systems for small hotels? - that drives me nuts . . . you've got to go into each room type and set a AAA rate for each one: why can't a 10% AAA discount made to be applied to all of them?)

• Package configurability:

Book a room at the Pierre in New York City, and you get that next screen where they ask if you'd like a bouquet of flowers, or a bottle of champagne, waiting in the room when the guest arrives. Why can't any hotel website do that?

We're going to include several Community Partners(sm) rates. Donate ten bucks to Habitat for Humanity, for example, for each night of your stay, and we'll give you twenty bucks off your rate. That little Check-Inn system I mentioned, that I've seen used mostly in cheaper, older economy hotels, will accommodate a deal like that. ChoiceAdvantage - a required purchase by one of the world's largest hotel franchising organizations - cannot or will not.

This package feature needs to be smart. If you make a reservation for a week in advance, you'll be offered an opportunity to order flowers. But if your reservation is for the day before, you won't - we won't have time to set it up with the florist.

Oh . . . and the first question on that page - if it doesn't appear on the reservation screen itself - would be 'Do you need a ride from the airport?' We could then deploy the shuttle van efficiently if we have one, or fall back on a deal we have in place with a local, reputable, taxi service if we don't.

• Pictures, pictures, and more pictures:

Some towns - Detroit, Newark, Camden - have a reputation (deserved or not, at various levels) -- as rusted-out, voodoo hellhole ghetto towns. But if I own a hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania - which I'd very much like to do (there is actually opportunity for hotel developers in such places) - I want Reading to look like the most attractive vacation spot in the world. This will involve some very good, high-resolution (not to mention selective subject matter) photography, and lots of attractive shots - both of the hotel and the surrounding area - on the website.

When I put my new property in Bethlehem, Pa., I want lots of Musikfest video (http://www.fest.org/ - sorry, it was two weeks ago, you just missed it ). A property in Havelock, N. C. will likewise feature lots of video of Marine aircraft taking off. (Such a sight is taken for granted around Havelock, and the noise is a bit of a nuisance, but to a visitor to that city . . . it's a memory. http://www.cherrypoint.marines.mil/  )

This doubles as a cheap advertising gimmick done with class: I want the pics to be done at a ratio, and resolution, suitable for downloading as desktop wallpaper, and a link to a page from which you can download them. (Needless to say, they'll be adorned with the appropriate hotel logo . . .)

• Denial tracking:

I'd like to see at least some of what we call 'denial' tracking. Anytime the customer didn't book the hotel - or anytime the guest had to be told, no, we couldn't give her what she wanted . . . why?  Why didn't we get the sale? Did the customer request a city in which we don't have a hotel? Where? Did he want a date on which we didn't have rooms available?  Did we not have a certain room type he needed? Was the price too high? 

Most existing brands do this very crudely - total number of denials in a day, not much more. 

One of the things that drives me nuts about hotel sales and marketing types is that too much of their focus is on looking for someone or something to blame because they can't make a sale ('rude desk clerks' are one of the biggest commodities in the blame bag); but if there's a really good reason, as opposed to an excuse, I want to know. 

Serious decisions can be made on the basis of such intelligence - or can be made blindly for lack of it. If I run a small, regional chain of hotels, and 40-50 people call my call center or visit my website each month to make a reservation for Richmond, but we have to turn them all away because we don't have a hotel there; guess where I'm going to be the next time I skip town  to chill out  for a few days - part of which I'm going to spend talking to commercial real estate brokers? (Simple law of economics: if you give people what they want, they will give you money. But first, you have to know that they want it . . .)

• Source tracking:
• Revenue tracking:

These two go together because they're so closely related. On any really good property management screen (all of which interface with a website), there are two mandatory fields, 'SOURCE' and 'TRACK'. 'Source' is the source of business, the answer to the question 'where did this guest come from?'. 'Track' is the revenue track, the answer to the question 'how did he come to our hotel?' And if she booked through the website, we'd like to know as much as we can about how she arrived at that from her Mozilla Firefox homepage. 

This would go a long way toward telling us what's working and what isn't in our marketing. 

I'd like to know as much as I can about where my customers are coming from. Why, oh why, can the name/address/city fields on a hotel reservation webpage ask for a company name? (I've stopped asking, why, oh why, don't existing chain hotel websites include this information on the booking screen when you make a reservation online.) And could we have a textarea field that asks, what brings you to our city? 

Neither would be a required field, but for an advance reservation, I'd be willing to knock three to five bucks off the nightly rate in return for the information. 

Some people don't want to be bothered without being asked. (It's why I'm a believer in the old-fashioned registration cards: someone asked this question on a form they're asked to fill out will fill in the blank without thinking: forms are official. Not so easy if we instruct the clerk to ask them when they check them in.) But then, some people are quite happy to share it around.

IP addresses that could be cross-referenced to locations, for each visitor to our website, would also be nice.

At least one notoriously bad property management system linked to a chain website has sources limited to 'corporate', 'group', 'leisure' and 'government' - with no configurability at all. 

Okay, the guys a business traveler. The briefcase, and the fact he was traveling alone when he checked in, was the giveaway. I know nothing more unless I ask him in person. . . 'Government' is not a source of business: government employees stay anywhere. They are not directed by the government agency by which they're employed to stay at a particular hotel. The same goes for AAA, AARP and senior citizens', which is why I don't like those discounts. It's just an entitlement: they do nothing in return for the hotel. Lots of loyalty demanded by AARP and its members, but none given by AARP and its members in return. If of all the hotels in town, AAA sends all its members to mine, then I'll talk AAA discount.  

When the big chains and franchises speak of a 'source of business', that's what they're referring to.

I want the real source of business. Are they hitting my website from a Facebook link? Triple up on my Facebook advertising - and watch for patterns in the pages from which they click the link so I'll know what keywords to put in my ad. Are they hitting an Expedia link on some fourteen-year-old girl's website on Old Salem that she did as a school project? I want to make friends with that kid before my competition does, provide her with some advertising links directly to my hotel's website for which I'll gladly pay her a travel agent commission, and make sure that she and her mom and dad have complimentary rooms if they take a trip out to see Old Salem in person. 

• Interface with any PMX:

If I seem throughout this response to have spoken of hotel websites, and hotel front desk property management systems, as though they are one and the same, inseparable; it's because frequently, nowadays . . . they are.

When you start working on the elements for your web platform, make friends with the guys at Innsoft in Beaverton, Oregon; and at Image Technologies in Dallas, Texas (see Michael Forrest Jones's answer to What are the best property management systems for small hotels? ). Your features need to seamlessly interface with their property management systems, so you'll want to work out something with them where you'll be exchanging lots of PHP code back and forth.

I'd add Micros-Opera to the list, but you'd have to have a client base of 500 or so hotels and show them some potential to drive their high-priced property management system sales before I'd expect them to have time to talk to you. They are where they are because of their success in putting in the fix with franchise organizations, who make their exorbitantly-priced system a required purchase. (Hotels: Do most hotels use a specific POS system at the front desk or a larger computer system?  ) I don't have time to waste on them. Their system isn't thatgood.

Or build your own point-of-sale front desk PMX as part of your system, as ChoiceAdvantage did, and as Image Technologies is working on with their upcoming cloud version of Visual Matrix.  A word to the wise: since you won't be dealing with large franchise organizations, starting out; and your system won't be part of someone's required purchase, perhaps yours should work well and be reliable. I can speak for at least one hotel manager who is fiercely loyal to things that do - and equally unforgiving of things that don't, especially when their purchase and use has been forced on me in the past. 

• Interface with any loyalty program:

If you want to market your system to 'unchained' properties, get in touch with Stash Rewards (http://www.stashrewards.com/  ), and repeat the process by which you got in good with the makers of the better property management systems shown above. 

There are several lesser ones identifiable through Google search - some of which don't have hotel partners - who will gladly work with you.

Or, build your own and maintain the database for it as part of your system. Nearly all of the value of any hotel brand or franchise is directly proportional to the number of people running around with that chain's loyalty cards - HHonors, Choice Privileges, Wyndham Rewards, Best Western Rewards, etc. Those are the people who are - well, loyal. When they need to call or go online to make a reservation, that hotel brand is the one they choose, either because they have a free night coming or want to pile on some more 'points' until they do. Nearly everyone else calls Expedia. Next to no one plans a trip and thinks, 'maybe I'd better call the Quality Inn 800 number', or surfs to the Days Inn website, unless they have the corresponding card.

• Guest history tracking:

On second thought, why reserve the benefits of a loyalty program for loyalty cardholders? (Well, OK, no one will want to sign up unless they get something they can't have without one, but still . . .)  Besides, I want to keep people coming back, and thinking of us first, even if they don't have that loyalty card in their pocket. Requiring that they sign up for a loyalty card program asks that they be our customer, but makes them work for it.

I get a lot of input from several feedback sources re what people want in a hotel, but one of my favorite sources, believe it or not, is Quora users. (Why not? They seem to be just the sort of people I want as guests . . .)  One thing that keeps turning up as something highly appreciated is that, if you come back, the hotel (or one or more of the people there) remembers you.

This should occur through a quick cross-reference once a name and city are entered. It should not require additional entry of a phone number (at least by anyone other than the person filling in the blanks on a reservation page) or a loyalty card number. When I get the reservation at our desk, I should see several possible matches, including one for the returning guest if she's stayed at any of our hotels,anywhere, before.  If during her last stay, she turned out to be the kind of person who likes to use the pool for a late-night swim, I can alert my night guy to be alert for that and try to accommodate her if he can.  If he requested a quiet room on a high floor on his last three stays, I'll know to accommodate that without even having to ask this time around.

On the other side of the coin, if - for one example -  it's someone named Phelps from Topeka, Kansas, that reservation is going to receive some advance scrutiny, especially if it's one for several rooms, or if there's a military funeral in our area (http://godhatesfags.com/  If it's those Phelps', we'll refuse the booking: I don't need either the bad PR or the security headaches that would come with allowing them to stage pickets in the area from our hotel).  If if it's a guy who, during a previous stay at a property 200 miles away, trashed the room in a manner worthy of Aerosmith, his reservation is going to be cancelled within 24 hours after we receive it, if it takes the reservation at all. If it's someone who more than once made a guaranteed reservation, but didn't show up, and their credit card was declined when we tried to charge it, it won't take a reservation from them - or, at least, that credit card - at all.

I also want company names cross-referenced, and possible matches displayed similarly. If I know who the other guests are who are with that same company, what city do they all tend to be from - and where else they travel - I can make good use of one of those skip-town-and-chill-out-for-a-few-days road trips.

Oh, and by the way -- if at any point during or after her stay, one of my guests logs on to TripAdvisor . . .  I want to know right away by text message! And if she's chewing gum while she's logged into TripAdvisor or Yelp!, I want to know what flavor! . . .

• Interface with social media:

Your system should include a Facebook app where someone can make reservations directly from the hotel's Facebook page. Your hotel's landing pages (and there should be several, not just a one-size-fits-all 'index' page) needs a Twitter feed.

A feature that could cross-match a guest who makes a reservation online and his or her Facebook page would be nice. If it's a frequent customer, we'll want to send a card - and a free upgrade - on his or her birthday.

And the content on each of those landing pages on the website - one for business travelers, one for families, one for couples, one for groups - you get the idea - needs to be able to change on a moment's notice, with no more technical know-how by a manager or sales director than it takes to type up something cute in a textbox and click 'enter'.

How to Create a Basic CTA Button

How to Create a Basic CTA Button

Step 1: Pick a Shape

It sounds simple, because it is! Decide on a shape for your button, and simply create one on your slide.

Step 2: Pick Branded Colors

By double-clicking on the shape, options will appear to change the fill and outline colors of the shape. In PowerPoint for Mac, you can also just open the 'Colors, Weights, and Fills' dropdown in the toolbar. This way, you can ensure the colors align with your brand!

Step 3: Add Text

Simply click 'Insert' --> 'Text Box,' and then click on the shape. This will allow you to create text directly in the text box. Craft a brief message that calls on the viewer to complete the action you want them to do. Remember, to adhere to CTA best practices, use actionable words that clearly indicate what the visitor will be doing when click on your button. For example, if our visitor clicked on the button below, they'd expect to be taken to a landing page where they could register for HubSpot's upcoming INBOUND conference. Then adjust the font size to fit the shape as you please.

Step 4: Add More Shapes

While you can stop at just text, you could also include other shapes in your design to emphasize that the button is a call-to-action, and to indicate action. In this case, I'll add an arrow to the end of the text (which I aligned to the left of the shape in step three), so readers know exactly where to click to go, in this case, to register for INBOUND.

Step 5: Group and Save

Before you save this image, you'll want to group the various pieces of the CTA so they stick together as one. Click on each component, and then right click --> Group. Once all the parts are grouped together, right click on the grouped image as a whole. This time, click the option to "Save as Picture." (NOTE: If you don't group together each part, your image will not save with all the components of the button).

Voila! Your CTA button is now created! Now all you need to do is go to your website, upload the image, and hyperlink it to the landing page you want viewers sent to. And if you're using HubSpot, our easy-to-use Call-to-Action Manager allows you to upload CTA creative and insert them into your content. By using the HubSpot tool, you'll also be able to see CTA performance metrics such as click-through rates and number of submissions!

How to Create a CTA With a Brand Logo

If you're interested in branding your CTA or using a custom image, the steps are similar to creating a custom button. But this time, we'll be creating an image that is clearly about your product or service by showcasing your brand logo! Here's an example using the HubSpot logo.

Step 1: Pick a Shape

You should already know how to do this now, but if you forget, refer back to Step 1 in the first section of this guide. To add another visual element to your button, consider adding more than one shape to call out different points in the CTA. Below, I made a basic orange shape, and then placed a gray square on top of the bottom two-thirds of the image. You can play around with how you align shapes and colors based on the messaging you're trying to convey.

Step 2: Insert Your Logo

Hopefully you have the original file for your brand's logo. Find that file, and go to Insert --> Image in PowerPoint to place the logo. You can also just copy the file and paste it into the PowerPoint slide. If your image is not transparent, don't panic. PowerPoint comes with a nifty transparency tool! In PowerPoint for Mac, you can find this tool at the top of your toolbar. In PowerPoint for PC, you can find it under 'Effects.' Simply click the tool, and then click on the white background of your image. This should automatically make your image transparent!

Step 3: Overlay Text

Next, add the text you want to the rest of you CTA. For this CTA, I'm going to motivate visitors to watch a demo, so I'll clearly type that in the orange portion of the CTA. Then under the HubSpot logo, I'm going to add a quick line about what HubSpot is, so viewers know exactly what this product demo will be about.

Step 4: Use Shape Effects

Depending on where you'll be placing this CTA (i.e. on a web page, on a blog post, in a sidebar, within an ebook, in an email, etc.), you may want to change the way the shape appears. In PowerPoint for Mac, you can simply go to 'Quick Styles and Effects' in the toolbar to change the glow, shadow, or positioning of the CTA. In PowerPoint for PC, double-click on the image, and your top navigation should change to show different effects for your CTA.

Step 5: Group and Save!

Just like last time, be sure you group together each component of the image, and then save it as a picture. As you can see to the right, the final image is done and ready for use!

Again, even though only one part of the entire CTA says "WATCH A DEMO," you can still upload and hyperlink the entire image. That way, no matter where visitors click, they'll still end up in the right destination.

 

How to Create a Specific, Offer-Related CTA

Step 1: Pick a Shape

For this CTA, choose a shape that would easily fit the bottom of a blog post or the desired place on your website. An offer-specific or content-specific CTA usually performs best when it's used on content about a similar topic! For example, in this article, we're blogging about calls-to-action. If you scroll to the very end of this post, do you notice what subject the call-to-action on this post is about? Why -- it's an offer about mastering the design and copy of calls-to-action! For blog posts, for example, some form of a rectangular shape usually performs best.

Step 2: Add the Main Image

Since this post is about creating CTAs, why don't I create a CTA for an offer about CTAs?! Find an image that portrays the offer, and then place it on the either the left or right side of your shape. Of course, you have artistic freedom at this point, so put it wherever you choose. (You could also try an A/B test with the image in different places!)

Step 3: Add a Title for Your CTA Offer

You'll want a short title in bold letters telling viewers EXACTLY what the offer in your CTA is about. It should grab the viewers attention so they continue on to the next part of the CTA, discussed in step four.

Step 4: Add Clarifying Information That Describes the Value of the Offer

Add additional information to give the offer in your CTA some context. In other words, why exactly will the offer benefit the viewer? Why should they click on your CTA? What is your offer's value? Explain this clearly and concisely.

Step 5: Add a Basic CTA Button (Just Like You Created in Section 1 of This Guide!)

Essentially, you'll be creating a button inside of your button! The point is, even though you'll end up hyperlinking the entire image, viewers may not know they need to click on the CTA to get the offer. They'll either go searching for it or leave because they didn't know what to do. Create another box, perhaps with different colors this time so it stands out from the rest of the CTA, and add clear, actionable text inside of it so visitors know to click.

Step 6: Group and Save

You know what to do :-) (See Step 5 in section one of this guide if you're lost.)

While I hope you found these examples and this tutorial useful, these are merely a few examples of the types of CTAs you can create. Feel free to play around in PowerPoint with the different shapes, colors, and effects and overall options available to you to create different CTAs. And don't be afraid to test multiple variations to optimize the click-through rates of your calls-to-action.

Or if you're a HubSpot customer, as we mentioned earlier, you can just rely on HubSpot's handy Call-to-Action Manager to design these CTAs in minutes, upload your own designs, and easily A/B test multiple variations of your CTA buttons. Imagine that!

 

 

Email Marketing: How to Identify Leads' Needs So You Can Segment Emails

There are quite a few different ways to segment and nurture your leads. And in fact, the way you choose to nurture your leads really just depends on how you decide to segment and target them.

Depending on your product or service and your marketing objectives, you can segment your leads based on demographic and geographic information or behavior-based information such as the type of content your leads have previously engaged with and which point they're at in your funnel. These are obvious and practical ways to segment, target, and nurture your leads. And from our experience here at HubSpot, we know they work.

A Needs-Based Approach to Lead Nurturing

List segmentation, however, doesn’t stop at this two axis matrix. There’s another, less obvious way to segment and nurture leads -- their needs! Think about it. What if you knew what your visitors and leads were looking for, or even better, the problem they wanted to solve? Then you could create super tailored and customized lead nurturing for different types of leads’ needs and problems to move them more quickly through the funnel to become a paying customer. Sounds awesome, right? The problem is, it's not as easy to figure out a prospect's pain points as it is to figure out, say, their zip code. One could be an essay; the other is five digits. Which information do you think would be easier to capture by a form and segment with?

Okay, so therein lies the challenge. But by knowing what your prospects want, you can easily and quickly position your product or service in a way that makes you -- not your competitors -- the clear and obvious solution. And there is a way marketers can do this more advanced type of nurturing. In fact, it's critical if they really want to take their lead nurturing to the next level! And in this post, we're going to teach you exactly how to do it. Just follow these four easy steps to a better lead nurturing approach.

1) Determine Your Leads’ Problems & Needs

In order to start segmenting and nurturing your leads based on their biggest pain points or challenges, you’ll need to figure out what those challenges are by collecting some data. You can do this by surveying a representative sample of your leads, or simply by adding a new field to your landing page forms. As a side note, this is a great tactic to gather information about your database -- just be careful it doesn’t hurt your conversion rates on the landing page. Below is an example of a field we use on some of our own forms.

 Note that we sell marketing software, so knowing what our leads' marketing challenges helps us understand what types of content to create and provide to address those needs. This field should be open-ended and tailored to your business or industry. I know, I know -- it's hard to segment based on open-ended form fields, but I'll show you how. Trust me.

Remember that some of your leads may not even think they have an issue or problem that your product can solve. Make sure you use a broad label that covers a general industry instead of a niche one (e.g. for us, we use "marketing" instead of "marketing software"). Also, think about how you phrase “problem” or “need.” Most of your leads won’t want to admit -- or even realize -- they have an issue, so we use the term “challenge” instead. Once you have this field added to the forms on your landing pages, start collecting your data by promoting your landing pages and generating new leads and conversions!

2) Analyze Major Themes in Your Data, and Select a Handful of Key Issues

Once you've set up your landing pages and forms to collect data about your leads’ challenges, give them some time to marinate so you have a substantial data set to analyze. In order to analyze the data, you’ll need to export your form data from your marketing software or CRM. If you have your data stored in a CRM, pull in other useful information to your list such as demographic or activity data on those leads that filled out the “challenge” field. This data will be useful when you start to analyze the responses in order to leverage the data in your lead nurturing.

Once you’ve exported your data, let the analytical fun begin! Unfortunately, this is a somewhat manual process since you’re collecting data on an open form field. The best way to start is to read through some of the responses to get a sense of the common themes in the challenges your leads are expressing. A quick way to get a snapshot of this is to generate a word cloud. Try uploading all the responses to Wordle, and it will spit out a visual representation of the words and phrases that are most commonly mentioned in your leads' responses. When you're reviewing the responses, pick out 10-15 major themes you notice. Next, you’ll want to read through the list of responses and categorize them as best you can by those themes. Once you have all your responses categorized by theme, count the number of responses that fit into each category. As you do this, there should be a few that rise to the top of your list. When selecting your most mentioned themes, look at the data and decide on a threshold. Are there some themes that are mentioned a lot more than the rest? What sticks out? This will help you come up with your final list of lead “needs” or “challenges” that you'll use to create a drop-down list on your forms.

3) Create & Add the Drop-Down Field to Your Landing Page Forms

Once your analysis is done and you've identified your top themes, it’s time to create your drop-down form field and pop it into your forms. Like any drop-down that you use in a form, you’ll want to make sure the number of options does not hinder your conversion rates. This is something you should test and iterate once you implement the new drop-down field on your forms.

Simply remove the open field you used to gather your initial set of data, and replace it with a drop-down form field based on the top themes. Your leads will now be able to select individual “challenges” or “needs” that best apply to their situation. Simple as that!

4) Segment & Nurture Leads by Need

Once this is in place, you can start to segment your leads by need. In addition, you may want to also segment by other variables such as persona or demographic in addition to “needs” information. If you're a B2B company, for example, a lead at a small business may have the same need as a lead from an enterprise business, but you'd probably want to craft two different messages to these two distinct groups.

With all this detailed information, you can create specific lists to nurture based on a combination of need, persona, and position in the funnel. Simply pull this information from your CRM or marketing software to generate lists that fit various criteria, and import that list into your email tool. (Note: If you're a HubSpot customer, this is very easily done using the Contacts and Email tools.) This will enable you to send content that is very targeted to your leads' different interests and needs, improving your open and click-through rates as well as the overall effectiveness of your lead nurturing campaigns.

When you can offer your leads the right content at the right time that also addresses their most pressing challenges or needs, there’s no way you’ll miss out on future sales. Be sure to analyze the conversion rates from lead to customer before and after you implement this additional segmentation strategy. That way, you’ll have concrete stats that prove your marketing success in funneling more leads into a sales-ready state.

Original Article

Agencia 365

Storytelling: Historias de Hoteles

Desde tiempos inmemoriales al ser humano siempre le ha gustado contar historias. Hemos nacido con ellas transmitidas de generación en generación formando parte de una tradición popular asentada en nuestras costumbres, en el modo de irnos a la cama, entre piratas, lobos, magos, reinas o caballeros destronados.

La imaginación no tiene límites. Aprendimos parte de nuestra naturaleza, modelos y conductas, a diferenciar el bien del mal a través de esas historias, siendo tan solo unos niños asomados al entonces, gigantesco mundo.

Pero al igual que teníamos nuestros cuentos o relatos favoritos también sabíamos elegir a nuestro cuentacuentos preferido, quién nos leía, podía ser papá, mamá, la abuela o el hermano mayor, eso no importaba, nos gustaba su tono, el modo en que lo contaba, aquello que nos hacía permanecer con los ojos abiertos hasta que el sueño nos vencía.

No todo el mundo cuenta igual una misma historia ni es fácil contarla manteniendo al espectador expectante, enganchado a cada tramo de palabra, imagen o fotograma.

En el caso de los hoteles, como estrategia de marketing y apoyándonos en el fuerte impacto viral del video, contar una historia se ha convertido en un modo de llegar a nuestros clientes ofreciéndoles nuestro producto con el objeto de que empatizen con él. Pero, en realidad, no siempre se consigue ese resultado.

Como en todo, he visto historias aburridas que no empatizan con el cliente, otras que no pueden llamarse historias porque no cuentan sino solo muestran una secuencia de habitaciones, servicios, mobiliario o decoración, otras que hacen de la música y el diseño una interesante atracción y otras que son un claro ejercicio de creatividad e ingenio al servicio del cliente.

Porque la historia debe de llegar, comunicar, mantener un hilo conductor que evite la pérdida de atención y el abandono de nuestro cliente.

Hoy solo quiero reflejar la importancia de contar una buena historia, separando el grano de la paja, y eso requiere fijar bien los objetivos, trabajar la idea, darle consistencia antes de abordar la tecnología como nuestro principal recurso.

Internet forma parte de un ecosistema donde vivimos y las redes sociales contribuyen a la difusión del mensaje a gran escala y a una velocidad fulgurante.

Pero un storytelling para hoteles que no empatize, que no llegue, que no despierte alguna emoción, que no convoque será simplemente una pérdida de tiempo y dinero y terminará por perderse en la espesura de lo digital.

Porque las historias somos nosotros quiénes las contamos, alimentamos y compartimos, como siempre, de unos a otros, sino que ahora tenemos el mundo al alcance de un click.

En un próximo post escribiré más sobre ellas orientadas a las Pymes hoteleras, sus costes y su plan de marketing en redes sociales.

Articulo Original

Marketing de Contenidos para Hoteles