The Last Guide You’ll Have To Read For Dealing With Millennials

Millennials, millennials, millennials. If you read any type of business news, you see the word countless times daily. Article after article after article about how to hire them, how to work with them, what they want, what they hate, and on and on. Judging by the non-stop talk on the topic, one would think millennials are some strange new breed that’s impossible to understand and must be approached with caution. The business world seems to be acting as if they’re unprepared to deal with this new generation of workers and everyone is offering their ideas how to make sense of this impossible task.

As much as the business world seems to believe that working with millennials is a crazy task, it’s actually stupidly simple. In reality, there’s just one thing we need to do.

How To Make Sure Your Influencers Are Actually Influential

Influencer marketing is becoming one of the new hot tactics for marketers. Though brands have been using influencers for decades (celebrity endorsements for example), with the growth of social media, almost anyone with a passion can become an influencer on their own topic of expertise. While these influencers add credibility to your marketing pieces, they also have a large number of social followers that should be on target with the products you offer. This can even further increase the potential reach of your marketing efforts.

Those looking to find influencers for their marketing programs often believe that those with a high follower count are automatically an influencer. Sadly, this method of identifying potential partners based largely on following aren’t going to garner the greatest results. Here’s how you can pick prime candidates for your programs.

Reach Is NOT A Sign Of Social Success

When measuring success, bigger always seems to be better. You want to have big numbers to show off the awesome work you’ve done. The bigger the better. To get numbers that look the best, marketers often look for the largest number they can find. The problem is, those big numbers often mean very little to the actual success. On social, reach is that over-inflated, almost meaningless number.

Reach is the ultimate potential of a Twitter message. It’s the total number of people that could have seen a message. Reach or potential reach is the number of people that follow you, along with the number of people that follow everyone that retweets your message.

If you have 1,000 Twitter followers and tweet once, your reach is 1,000. If you tweet twice, your reach is 2.000 and so-on. If you tweet once and someone with 500 followers retweets you, the message reach is 1,500. You can see how the reach of a message can quickly add up as the messaging quantity and retweets increase. This gives you big numbers in a hurry, but what does it really tell you?

Why Your Mobile-Friendly Site Still Lost Search Traffic

It’s April 21st which means Google Mobilegeddon is upon us. Starting today websites that are not mobile-friendly will begin to see a substantial drop in mobile search ranking on Google (some websites have already seen changes in the past weeks). While this move has many crying that Google is trying to screw them, the change is a great one as it is finally pushing many to make the user experience for mobile viewers an acceptable one. Mobile web usage now beats out desktop browsing but even so, many have been very slow to give mobile users a decent experience. This move by Google was just the kick in the ass that many needed to make that change.

You saw the announcement back in February. You worked hard to update your site to be mobile-friendly, or maybe you were ahead of the crowd and already had a mobile-friendly site. With the switch being flipped April 21st, you figured you were all set to make it through without issue. So why is your search traffic still dropping? The answer may not be about your site at all.

Social Sharers Aren’t Created Equal

Very often, marketers make the mistake of assuming that what works for one company on social media, will work for every other company. They see the success others are having and assume they should see the same if they use the same tactics.

One KPI many use when measuring social success, is social shares (this isn’t a smart metric to gauge success by, but we’ll cover that at a later time). When it comes to social sharing success, marketers must remember that all are not created equal.

Quality Is The Key. Don’t Forget It.

Why do we follow others online? No matter what the account, a comedian, a business, a philosopher, etc, the answer is always the same. Because they share great quality content. It doesn’t matter if they share just images, only blog posts, or nothing but quotes, in the end, the quality of those things is why we follow them.

Sadly, while quality is key to the content of those we follow, marketers often forget this in the content they promote. Before promoting anything, we all need to take a step back and check the quality.

Your Followers Don’t Care About Your Big Event

Events are a huge deal for marketers. They offer an opportunity to engage with current and potential customers and really form a strong connection with them. When events come along, we tend to drop everything and put all efforts into promoting the happenings and hype. We really see this on social media, where our channels fill with messages encouraging people to attend events, plan the sessions they’ll be attending, and book their trips. While it’s great to promote your event, we need to remember one thing: You followers don’t care.

Want To Become A B2B Buyer’s Dream? Solve These Frustrations

B2B buyers have problems. A recent survey by SAP found that the average B2B buyer is approached by sales people 64 times every single week. With so many folks vying for their attention, it’s no surprise that they get a bit annoyed and frustrated with their work. So, how can you stand out from the others and become the sales person they want to do business with? The answer is simple. Solve their frustrations.

Imagine that you work a job where many of your frustrations are caused by other people (you may already work in such a position). What if one person didn’t cause the frustrations most of the others did? What if they even solved many of these pain points for you? Think about how much more likely you’d be to want to work with and even buy from them. It’s time to become that person they’re hoping for.