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Four Sales Tools To Use During This Economic Downturn

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Four Sales Tools To Use During This Economic Downturn

When the economy is making all of us nervous, we start looking for ways to make the most of every click and every lead.

Here are the tools that help you close more sales by utilizing your current tricks and contacts, i.e. without investing more in marketing:

1. Walnut.io: Make the Most of Your Product Demos

Product demos are the most powerful sales tools. But they are also the most challenging tools because they often require design skills and live presentations. The result is often unpredictable making it difficult to identify what went wrong with different prospects and how to improve your process.

Walnut is an innovative tool that helps sales reps create personalized and interactive product demos that close deals.

Its key features include:

  • Create personalized and engaging product demonstrations for each prospect.
  • Put together ready-to-go product demo templates by use case that are quick to reuse and publicize.
  • Guide prospects easily with interactive annotations.
  • Use built-in analytics to identify what works well and where you are losing sales.
  • Work faster by integrating all your demo data with your CRM.
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In a nutshell, Walnut allows you to increase product demo conversions. It makes your tool more productive by allowing them to reuse demos and focus on what works. It also makes it easier to convince larger decision making units because you can send all your prospects a link to an interactive demo that will help them understand your product value proposition.

2. DealHub: Make the Most of Every Lead or Prospect

DealHub is a deal acceleration platform that helps sales teams sell more with the help of smart technology. It offers tools that make it easier to generate proposals and quotes, and helps teams stay organized and connected, all while syncing data with your Salesforce or HubSpot CRM. 

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While other Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions require extensive coding and ongoing maintenance, GealHub can be easily configured using code-free settings, to ensure everyone on your sales team gets what they need out of it. The platform also includes tools to help teams analyze and understand the sales process and customer behavior. 

All of this is designed to help teams be more efficient and productive, and to give buyers a better experience.

DealHub’s key features are:

  • Guided Selling Playbooks are tools that help salespeople create accurate quotes, sales materials, and legal contracts. 
  • Contract Lifecycle Management helps manage contracts, their progress, as well as handle electronic signatures and storage. 
  • DealRooms are virtual spaces where buyers and sellers can work on deals, and see each other’s actions in real-time. 
  • The Sales Workspace is a place where sales teams can see their own completed and outstanding tasks, as well as analytics (what works well and what yields no results) all in one place. 
  • The Open Data Platform makes it easy to connect with other sales tools and share data.

Dealhub makes it easy to work with large decision making units and adjust your process to each stakeholder.

Four Sales Tools To Use During This Economic Downturn

DealHub is a sales tool that helps teams work more smoothly and efficiently. It helps leaders connect with their teams and manage sales pipelines, all the way through to e-signatures and subscription billing payments. DealHub also helps teams keep track of interactions with leads and stay organized throughout the whole sales process.

3. Nextiva

Cross-platform marketing automation software allows you to track the behavior of your visitors. You know, of course, that not everyone who visits your website is ready to do business.

But there’s no way to know just how interested (or disinterested) they are unless you have at disposal a tool that points out the content they have consumed on the website, the resources they have downloaded, the number of newsletters they have subscribed to, how often they have visited the website, and how many times have they checked out your products/services in earnest (by going all the way to the check-out page).

Your leads may be at various stages of buying, but with access to the data points listed above, you will be able to send targeted messages to them depending on where they are and the next steps that you want them to take. Carefully crafted emails, content experiences and social media messages can be compelling and give them just the nudge needed to make a purchase!

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Nextiva is a smart platform for businesses of all sizes to capture and convert leads. Nextiva is at the top of their game with software that promises to help businesses manage leads and market to them in a targeted and structured way across channels.

So much of marketing is about nurturing leads and keeping them interested season after season as they keep visiting your website. Some might never make a purchase. Others might be waiting for the right moment.

With Nextiva, you can attract the right customers and keep them engaged. Its SEO tool analyzes the performance of your existing keywords and recommends more competitive ones to improve your web ranking. Its “engagement platform” helps you collect rich customer behavior data, which can be integrated with social media platforms to create targeted ads.

Nextiva also helps you engage visitors with personalized content (based on their browsing behavior and data derived from the visitors’ location) to keep them interested. 

If you’re emphasizing account-based marketing (ABM) practices, you can even manually create an audience segment of VIP leads from your email list and surface different content experiences to people visiting your site from these companies.

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With the help of a tool like Nextiva, you gain insights into the behavior of your visitors/customers, zero in on the right ones and send them personalized content, improve your Google search rankings (so that more of the relevant people can find you), and make social media an integral part of the marketing mix.

After all, it doesn’t matter how someone found you, as long as they have found you and are interested in your website. Your marketing efforts should be able to direct traffic to your website from whatever platforms (including social media channels) you have a presence on.

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Nextiva has separately priced plans for their various services. You have to get in touch with them for pricing.

4. Leadfeeder: Turn Visitors into Leads

Leadfeeder is a specialized B2B automation tool that helps businesses weed out the time wasters and focus on promising leads – even when people who visit your site don’t opt in via any of your lead capture forms. This is one of the most effective organic B2B lead generations tools out there allowing you to make the most of your current positions.

Its integration with Google Analytics helps the tool glean data that is worth its weight in gold. Leadfeeder’s code isn’t slowing web pages down so it is perfect for speed optimization.

With Leadfeeder, you can find out exactly which businesses have visited your website, as well as the specific landing pages they visit and for how long. (If they are in your target demographic and have seen the product demo or checked out the pricing, you know a sales call might be in order).

Procuring details on these companies is easy and helps marketers qualify leads. Leadfeeder also offers lists of email addresses, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles associated with people who work at these companies, so that your marketing team can organize contacts according to priority. Then, salespeople can warm up leads across channels and make calls to pitch when the time is right.

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What makes Leadfeeder even more useful is its integration with a number of popular marketing tools, such as Salesforce, MailChimp, Zoho, Pipedrive and webCRM. With the help of Zapier, which Leadfeeder rolled out an integration with in late June, you can now push Leadfeeder data to hundreds of other platforms, like Google Sheets, AdRoll, Todoist, Slack, and several more CRMs.

Making your sales team more effective is the first step to increasing your ROI and surviving an economic crisis. I hope the tools above will help you close more sales and build a foundation for future success!

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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