As a Leader, Helping Your Employees Grow is One of Your Most Important Jobs

As a leader within your organization, it's understandable to feel like the list of things you have to look over gets longer and longer all the time. While you're being pulled in so many different directions, it can be easy to forget about one of your most important jobs of all: doing everything in your power to make sure that your employees are getting better and stronger with each passing day. Make no mistake: this is absolutely something you'll want to spend time thinking about every day for a number of compelling reasons.

Helping Your Employees, One Step at a Time

One of the most important ways that you can help your employees grow is by encouraging them to take an active role in their own professional development. One of the major reasons that you became the leader you are today is because you were not content to "spin your wheels" as far as your career was concerned. Help your employees understand that the status quo is never something they should be satisfied with and provide them with guidance in the form of mentorship opportunities along the way.

Another one of the most important ways that you can help your employees grow involves showing that you trust them by constantly pushing them outside of their comfort zones. One of the ways that we get better in our professional lives involves stepping outside the box we normally live in and doing something that makes us fear what might happen. By constantly challenging your employees, you not only help them move forward - you help show how valuable they are to both you and your organization by establishing a bond of trust that is very difficult to break.

An Investment in Your Employees is an Investment in Your Future

Another reason why helping your employees grow is one of your most important jobs has to do with the positive effect it can have on your company as a whole. Think about things from a hiring perspective - you aren't just looking for someone to fulfill certain job duties. Anybody can do that. You're looking for someone who can regularly surprise you and exceed your expectations on a daily basis. If you're having a hard time finding or attracting these candidates in the interviewing process, the next best thing is to essentially build them yourself by investing in their development over time.

This not only presents you with a workforce capable of doing higher quality work on a daily basis, but it also helps cement your business's reputation in your industry and with your own clients as an entity that can be trusted and relied on. Yes, it's true that this will also make your employees more marketable. But with benefits like these, this is one risk that you should be more than willing to take.

At the end of the day, outward success in the world of business begins from within. By looking at your employees as what they are - a solid foundation from which to build the business you've always dreamed of - you can then begin strengthening that foundation brick by brick through employee growth and development initiatives. Not only will your employees themselves thank you, but your clients and ultimately your bottom line will thank you, as well.

Super-Charge Your Sales Force With Highly Effective Print Sales Collateral

Converting prospects into clients is often a difficult and expensive process. Sales reps can spend weeks, months, even years trying to get a prospective client converted into a buyer. A large part of that process involves face time between the sales rep and the prospect in an attempt to forge a relationship built on trust. Seldom does that face-to-face meeting end in a solid sale.

Sales reps hate leaving a prospect without a signed contract, and the days of hardline sales techniques are long gone. So, how do your reps keep the conversation going and the interest building when they're away? The answer is simple: put high-quality, effective print sales collateral in their hot, little hands.

Armed with the right mix of marketing materials, your sales reps can leave their prospects with some subliminal messaging that subtly invades the prospects' subconscious after the sales rep leaves. Think of it as a little beacon whispering "buy me...buy me."

Highly effective print sales collateral doesn't just mean you leave a brochure and a business card and hope for the best. To super-charge your sales force, you need well thought-out, quality-designed materials that will continue to grab the prospect's attention and not end up as a coaster or at the bottom of a hamster cage. Top sales experts have weighed in with the following best practices.

Case Studies

The single, most effective piece of sales collateral that you can leave with your prospects is the case study. Including one or two case studies targeted to the prospect's needs can do more for your sales than a holiday gift basket. Your case studies should concisely discuss:

What the client's greatest challenge was prior to purchasing your product or service
How the client implemented your product or service
How the client's challenge went away or was reduced by implementing your product or service

These three things will communicate more to the prospect about how your product or service works and the value that it can provide to them, than merely listing the things your company does. Be sure to include solid numbers about money and time-savings, as these are the top two complaints companies have.

Testimonials

Finding three or four clients to rave about you is also a fantastic way to show your prospects that (1) you have clients, (2) your product/service is LOVED and (3) why your clients love it. Just like the case studies, if you can guide your clients in crafting a testimonial that discusses how your company changed their life for the better, the more effective the testimonial will be. Including their name, business name, and even a picture can go a long way in building credibility. Nothing says, "Trust us" like someone else saying, "Trust them!"

The Sales Page

Sales and Marketing Strategist Walter Wise notes that successful marketing messages use the "Marketing Equation of Interrupt, Engage, Educate, and Offer." Let's break down that equation (don't worry, it's even less to remember than the FOIL method from back in middle school):

Interrupt: your main headline, designed to interrupt your prospect's attention
Engage: your sub-headline, crafted to keep the prospect's interest and get them to keep reading
Educate: this is where you add some valuable information on solving your clients' problems
Offer: this should be a low-risk, free report, checklist, white paper, or e-book that will position your company as a thought leader in the field.

Take the time to provide your "offer" in your sales package. The longer you can keep that prospect engaging in your company's materials, the more likely they will be to buy.

Putting It All Together

It goes without saying that all of your materials should be printed on high-quality paper stock and designed by a professional graphic artist so that the materials are aesthetically pleasing. Too much text and low-quality graphics can be an instant turn-off regardless of the quality of your product.

Have your sales reps present the documents to the prospect in a snazzy, branded folder that will catch your prospect's attention when the rep leaves, and one that will beg them to open it up and read what's inside.

Lowered Postal Rates Mean Now is the Best Time to Give Direct Mail a Try

To say that most small businesses have something of a love/hate relationship with the United States Postal Service is an understatement. USPS is one of those necessary things to get a wide range of direct and print mail marketing materials out into the world. With a decade of increasing prices chipping away at return on investment little by little, it's no wonder many organizations started to skimp on direct mail spending in favor of other "cheaper" solutions in the interim. Now, however, the tides may be truly changing as postal rates are on the decline with no clear end in sight. If you've been waiting to jump back into the direct mail world, now might be the PERFECT time to give it a try for a number of reasons.

Postal Rates: What is Going On?

On April 10, 2016, the cost to ship a first-class letter in the United States fell to just $0.47 - a rare phenomenon in recent memory. Additionally, the price of sending a postcard dropped a penny, international letters fell $0.05, and even coveted "Forever Stamps" saw a decrease in cost at the same time. These are the most direct mail and small business-friendly prices to come along since the beginning of the 2008 recession.

Direct Mail Doesn't Just Work - It Works Gangbusters

Despite all this, some people still refuse to give direct mail the chance it deserves because they naturally assume that digital marketing is more efficient in the tech-driven world in which we now live. After all, with people glued to their cell phones day in and day out, how much of an impact can direct mail really have?

The answer is "a great big one."

According to a study conducted by Compu-Mail.com, direct mail is still used heavily in an iPhone and Droid-centric world: approximately 43% of all local retail advertising still falls into this category. Not only that, but young adults are actually the largest group to respond to direct mail the most, particularly among the millennial crowd. According to a recent International Communications Research survey, approximately 73% of consumers actually prefer direct mail over alternative advertising methods. This is largely due to the fact that an equal number of respondents said that direct mail marketing was a much more personable experience than internet-based materials. Keep in mind that millennials think junk mail happens in their inbox, not their mailbox.

So, if the reasons why you had overlooked direct mail in the past were because "it was too expensive" and "you didn't think it worked," congratulations: those two reasons just evaporated in an instant.

No two businesses are created in quite the same way, and what works for one might not work for another - especially in terms of an overall marketing strategy. However, with the recent decline of USPS postal rates, now would be the absolute perfect time to give direct mail a try if it's something that you've flirted with in the past, but ultimately overlooked for whatever reason. Now, is a terrific chance to really dip your proverbial toe in the water and to see just how direct mail can benefit your organization, especially if you're doing so for the first time. These declining rates most likely aren't going to stick around forever, so go for it, and create your direct mail campaign today.

Marketing Automation: What You Need to Know

"Marketing automation" is more than just a buzzword - it is a very real practice that is empowering marketers around the world to accomplish more than ever in a shorter amount of time. At its core, marketing automation is a term used to describe a set of software, technologies, and other platforms that automate marketing on certain channels. These can include e-mail, social media, websites, and more. The idea is that by automating certain repetitive tasks that, while hugely important are also time-consuming, you unlock a host of additional benefits that can't be ignored.

Reaching Customers on a Deeper Level

Targeted marketing has always been the bread and butter of many businesses in terms of increasing customer engagement. People don't want to feel like they're just one of a million different people being marketed to simultaneously - they want to feel like your business is taking time out of its busy day to speak to them directly. This helps increase the effectiveness of your marketing materials and is also a great way to take an average customer and turn them into a loyal brand advocate at the same time.

The issue here is that this historically takes a lot of time - or at least, it used to. Marketing automation is one of the best tools that you currently have to reach your unique customers in a meaningful way. Previously, you would have to manually segment customers based on things like your buyer personas. You would have to spend time creating these niche groups of customers based on their personalities, their needs, their likes and dislikes and more. While effective, this takes a great deal of time.

With marketing automation, however, you can simply create restrictions that will allow your software resources to segment these customers automatically based on whatever criteria you want. You get the exact same beneficial end result, but you only had to spend a fraction of the time in order to get there.

What Marketing Automation Is NOT

When people hear the term "automation," they often call to mind images of technological solutions or other IT developments that are designed to completely replace the jobs of human employees. While that may be true in an environment like a factory floor, this couldn't be farther from reality in terms of marketing.

Marketing automation is not designed to be a replacement for your marketing team or the hard work they're doing - it's designed to be supplemental to the existing experience. Automation isn't an excuse to hire one less employee, but to free up that employee's valuable time to put to better use elsewhere within your organization. Maybe Thomas shouldn't be spending so much of his day writing and sending out new tweets or Facebook updates every time you publish a new piece of content - maybe that should happen instantly so that Thomas can work on something a bit more important to your larger business objectives.

These are just a few of the major advantages that marketing automation is bringing to the table in terms of what the industry looks like today. By automating certain basic marketing functions, it's enabling your employees to do better work in a more fundamental way. It gives them the ability to work "smarter, not harder," so to speak.

MPM as a Marketing Tool: What is it?

Simply put, marketing performance measurement and management, or MPM, is a means of monitoring and adjusting marketing campaigns on the fly. Any good marketing campaign is a fluid campaign, accommodating changes and adjustments as they become needed. Large corporations spend thousands of dollars on gaining a command of MPM, but that doesn't mean that small businesses cannot benefit from trying to master the same tools.

MPM is a way of systematically managing and coordinating your marketing assets for the improvement of the overall strategic marketing of your products or services.

Really, MPM is more like a fine-tuning mechanism that allows you to tailor your best marketing assets to do their best work for you and informs you of those marketing channels that are not performing as you had hoped or planned.

MPM is About Timing and Comparison

Timing has to do with when you release specific marketing channels. If you released them all around the same time, you would never be able to evaluate which ones were the most productive for you. Staggering their release provides the necessary criteria for effective evaluation of each one's individual value to your marketing scheme. That way the channels can be compared for their effectiveness. A spike in sales can result from any marketing channel, but if they are all released at the same time, you cannot easily determine which ones are successful and which ones are not.

Once you can establish which channels are the most successful, you can emphasize those channels, modifying them accordingly to increase their effectiveness.

In the digital realm, the metrics tell the story. The analytics, that is, the collection of data, permit you the luxury of creating new strategies based on the success of earlier efforts. With this information, you can not only improve existing campaigns, but you can also more aptly tailor future ad campaigns. Fully strategic thinking involves planning ahead, and the analytics from MPM give you the information to do that more effectively.

There are five pillars to MPM. Each has its own value and must be addressed. The first is alignment. Align your marketing efforts to your desired results. Target those results and adjust your campaign according to the success of initial strategies.

Second is accountability. This is simply a statement of how well any specific marketing channel delivers the desired results based on the metrics you have before you.

Third is the analytics themselves. This is the data that drives your campaign and complements and improves it with its needed modifications.

Fourth are the alliances. You form these naturally in the process of marketing, but using them is an important part of successfully employing an MPM strategy. Use your network partners, such as content providers and the agencies that locate them, as well as other assets to emphasize your successful marketing channels.

Finally, there is the assessment. This is the natural outcome of the process, the data that is compared and contrasted for their relative benefits. The strengths and weaknesses can be evaluated in real time as each campaign develops, permitting adjustments and allowing growth in the campaign, itself.

Change Your Leadership Style to Match Your Company's Vision

Nobody likes being told what to do. It rarely matters who is doing the telling, you just feel that tension rise in your neck and a little rush of adrenaline as your inner 2-year old shouts, "You're not the boss of me!" Then, that thought that you're an actual adult enters your mind and you usually do what you're told, because inevitably, the person telling you what to do is technically the boss of you in some fashion.

When it comes to getting things done in business, someone has to be told what to do, otherwise, nobody would know what to do, right? While this statement has some truth to it, there are effective ways that you can direct people without channeling your inner dictator and incurring the seething wrath of your employees.

Successful leadership styles are not the same as they were twenty years ago. Employees no longer respond favorably to top-down directives. They want a more collaborative environment where their ideas are valued. They want to feel as though they have some sort of stake in the game. If you see your company as the next Google or Zappos and want to attract and retain the talent to match, you may already have that inkling that autocratic and directive leadership styles just will not do.

Today's employees are more responsive to a democratic and more participative leadership style, where creative thinking and individual ownership of projects is emphasized. With this type of leadership style, it is not the leader or boss who is central to the decision-making process, rather, it's the group. Think podium dictatorship versus collaborative round-table.

For an example of this, imagine your company designs and builds laptops:

Podium Dictator calls a staff meeting and tells everyone that this year they want the new model to be something no one has ever seen before. Something game-changing. That is why this year you are going to build triangular-shaped, green laptops. Collective eye-rolling ensues and everyone files back to their desks like prisoners in a chain gang. These employees will either polish up their resumes or begin the soul-sucking task of putting a bad idea into production.

On the other side of the coin, the round-table leader asks for a meeting and describes the grand vision - the design of a game-changing laptop. Regardless of how badly this leader wants a triangular-shaped, green laptop, this leader understands that they have a creative and powerful team of designers who know what game-changing really means. This leader asks for ideas. The designers around the round table feel empowered and their creative juices start to flow. Concepts are thrown up on a white board. Truly revolutionary ideas begin to form. There may even be some green involved...

You can see the difference pretty clearly, right? The collaborative leader has just empowered the group to create while the dictator has told the group what to do. Who will have the happier employees and the better product?

This new generation of leaders is able to hire talent that fits well within this new working model. They are able to clearly articulate their vision, manage expectations, and keep the project on track within that vision. They also have the self-control to allow the process to happen with the team that they've built. Micromanagers need not apply. When employees feel they have more control over their working environment and schedule (within the confines of the greater vision, of course), they truly want to make the company's vision a reality.

Pull Back the Curtain: Providing a Backstage Glimpse of Your Company

One of the primary objectives of any marketing campaign you run has nothing to do with selling your product or service. While these will always be important, equally necessary is your ability to sell yourself as a company. People want to know more about the people who work in your business and the values and ideals that you have. They want to be able to look at you as an authority. Pulling back the curtain and providing a "backstage" glimpse into your product or service is one of the single, best ways to accomplish both of these things at the same time.

The Benefits of the Backstage Approach

One of the major benefits of this type of "backstage" approach is that it helps position you as a true authority on a particular topic. It's one thing for you to SAY that a product performs X, Y, and Z functions - it's another thing entirely to prove it by providing an unprecedented look into the design and development process. You can shed insight on your decision-making process, for example, helping them to not only SEE what your product does but WHY.

Taking a "backstage" approach to marketing also helps to strengthen the intimate, organic connection you're able to create with your target audience - thus helping to build brand loyalty. Think about it from the perspective of the entertainment industry, as celebrities, in particular, are masters at this. DVDs are filled with hours of special features outlining how a scene was shot, how a script was written, how a special effect was pulled off and more. This instantly makes something that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make seem smaller and more intimate, while letting audiences take their experience to a whole new level at the same time. Providing a similar look into your own operation will have the same effect for you, too.


Pulling Back the Curtain

Unless you're launching a product that is shrouded in complete secrecy, you can start pulling back the curtain pretty much right away. Even if it's something as simple as updating a weekly blog post with sketches, schematics, and other materials from the research and development phase, this will go a long way towards increasing transparency across the board. Have employees talk about the specific work they're doing on a daily basis and how even though they're all working separately, they're all contributing to a larger whole.

This startlingly simple approach helps to close the gap in between business and customer, making a customer actually feel like they're a natural part of the process. When you combine this with all of your other marketing techniques, you're looking at a striking amount of loyalty built just from publicizing activities that were already going on behind closed doors anyway.

These are just a few of the many reasons why providing a "backstage" glimpse can help bring your product or service to life. Not only does it help provide a valuable context to the particular product or service that you're trying to sell, but it also helps build a strong, positive impression of your company. People will stop seeing you as a faceless entity and will start looking at you more like the living, breathing, hardworking people that you really are. This will only deepen the connection that you have with your target audience and make interaction more meaningful in the future.