We’re so glad you asked! Content marketing is a customer resource that uses different assets to address business challenges and help buyers make a purchasing decision. It helps businesses reach, engage and convert customers by addressing their business challenges and needs. The overall goal behind content marketing is to create a strategy that reaches and converts your ideal customers. 

What is a content marketing strategy?

At its core, a content marketing strategy is your “why, who and how.” Why you are creating content, who you are helping and how you will help them in a way that no-one else can. Organisations typically use content marketing to build an audience and achieve at least one of these profitable results: higher lead quality, faster conversions and increased revenue.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “content is king”, and considered thoughtfully, this can also be an integral concept to help you grab your audience’s attention. We’ve identified 10 core building blocks you can use to assist the development of your organisation’s content marketing strategy or take it to the next level. Check them out below!

1. Brand guidelines

The foundation of your strategy comes from your brand identity, which should include clear guidance on personality, voice and tone. Successfully communicating your brand identity through your content is critical if you want content marketing to work. Developing and putting your unique brand book to use will help create a consistent voice and tone across the different assets and channels your organisation uses. 

If you need some inspiration, here are brand book examples from Mailchimp, Nike Football, Intel and Cisco.

2. Marketing objectives

Your organisation’s marketing strategy helps ground your team on its big-picture goals and objectives. To reach your content marketing goals, it’s helpful to align them with audience needs and streamline your content creation process. This will make it easier to reach your goals, and to be successful, they should be: 

• Specific: State exactly what you want to accomplish.
• Measurable: Determine the metrics for success.
• Achievable: Go for challenging but attainable results.
• Relevant: Make sure your goals support your marketing strategy.
• Time-bound: Outline the period in which you’ll work on achieving your goal.

3. Customer persona(s)

Understanding your audience helps align your content strategy to the addressable needs of your market. A customer persona is a fictional character that you develop based upon different attributes for a role or segment. These can include demographics like:

• Role and responsibilities
• Challenges and pain points
• Influence on the purchase decision
• Goals and objectives
• Solution requirements
  

Most importantly, work to uncover a unique insights into your target customers that the rest of the industry overlooks or under-appreciates. Often, customer personas serve as the creative catalyst for a successful content strategy or campaign direction.

4. Data and market research

Data and research help your organisation understand current market conditions as well as where it’s heading. The content your organisation shares with its audience generates data and insights that can help your team fine-tune its content strategy.

Market research provides insights into what other brands have done to improve their strategy. Learning about the market includes learning about your competitors, too. If you know what content your competitors are sharing with their customers and prospects, you can use this to your advantage. Tools like social listening can help your organisation understand how prospects and buyers talk about your product and industry online. These valuable insights can help your organisation improve its content and gain an edge.

5. Customer journey map

Once you’ve defined who your customer is, a journey map outlines your persona’s needs and how you can meet them at every stage of the buyer journey. An effective map is a visual representation of the customer journey based on what the buyer is thinking and feeling at every stage of the decision-making process. By understanding what your buyers are thinking and feeling, you can create content that best supports them as they consider your product or service. 

Customer journeys are not linear, but there are several ways in which your organisation can be agile and adapt to changes. Savvy marketing leaders use a variety of methods to represent the buyer journey, from post-it notes on a boardroom wall to Excel spreadsheets and infographics. The most important thing is that the map makes sense to those who use it.

It helps if your journey map is tailored to your specific customer profile (and how you reach and interact with them), but a few guiding principles and good design approaches apply. Here is what is typically included in a customer journey map:

• Buying process
• User actions
• Emotions
• Pain points
• Solutions

6. Content-market fit

At times, the content a company creates doesn’t always satisfy the customers it’s trying to attract, either because the content doesn’t reach them, doesn’t fit their needs or both. For example:

• Findability issues: content is published without first considering how potential and existing customers might find it → time and effort are wasted on content that nobody sees.
• Relevance issues: content is published without making sure it’s what potential and existing customers are interested in/need → time and effort are wasted on content aimed at the wrong audience.

As important as it is to understand your customer, it’s also important to understand the current state of content in your industry to look for opportunities. Pay careful attention to media behaviour and content consumption formats, including device usage and visual trends. The key is to find your unique place to stand out and add value to the conversation. Simply put, the goal of a content-market fit is distributing content to attract and retain customers.

7. Process

Every effective content programme requires an iterative process that helps your team focus on what’s important: translating creativity into effective content. To build an efficient content marketing machine, consider the following:

• Group content into a few core buckets (e.g. videos, blogs, ebooks, microsites)
• Design a ‘best practices’ workflow for each core content type. Think about where each content type begins, who owns the business requirements and brief development process, when/where resources need to be turned on or off, how feedback and approvals are coordinated, how to measure each step and who’s responsible for the final output.
• Meet with stakeholders and team members to see whether your ‘best case’ process is possible and makes sense for them. Identify what might be missing or what you haven’t thought of.
• Test the process. Does it work? Where are the gaps? Where are the breaking points? Processes will mature and develop over time. Keep abreast of production time and resource requirements. Regularly check in with teams about any frustrations.
• Incorporate good habits. Making your new workflows a habit will allow you to truly scale your content strategy. Enforce your new workflows internally and find champions to help you at each checkpoint.
  

You may also want to diagram your process, along with key challenges and opportunities for improvement, with a “swim lane” diagram:

8. Internal communications plan

An internal communications strategy can be a recipe for success, but without a detailed plan to execute that strategy, there may be a breakdown in your process. Your content team can bring in diverse voices – communications, customer marketing, product marketing and senior marketing management – to ensure they’re aligned with your strategy. This is particularly useful if your content team is operating as a ‘service’ function for other parts of the organisation. 

9. Content calendar

Consistency is essential when building a digital presence, and a great way to have everyone in the loop is to manage a joint content calendar. This tool will help you plan and stick to a consistent schedule of publishing content. It can include information about the content format, time of posting, channels and so on.

By scheduling content on a shared calendar, you can enable proper visibility and coordination across different initiatives, teams and regions.

10. Ongoing analysis

It’s often said that a writer’s work is never done, and the same is true when you’re responsible for defining a brand’s ongoing narrative. In general, ‘test and learn’ is a sound operating philosophy, and it’s particularly true with content. Place small bets, iterate, gather data, listen for feedback and then scale your successes. Building great content effectiveness requires patience and perseverance, so it’s important to progress incrementally, milestone by milestone, and break down your ideal outcomes into actionable programmes and phases.

Create impactful content and campaigns with Seismic

Wondering how to create a content marketing strategy that is the perfect fit for your company? At Seismic, we are committed to helping organisations and teams template workflows and manage tasks to accelerate the delivery of high-impact campaigns. Our ‘work smarter’ mentality will help you decrease the time it takes to create content and launch campaigns with robust workflows and proofing to ensure compliance and speed. Find out more here.

The post The 10 essential elements of a content marketing strategy appeared first on Seismic.

At a high level, this tension can be categorised as “feelings vs. facts.” Brand marketers set out to create high-level experiences that tell stories to engage prospects’ emotions, swaying them over to support the brand. Product marketers, on the other hand, create technical content that offers concrete details on what a product does and spell out how it can solve the prospect’s pain point. 

When rivalry flares up (particularly over resources), these two philosophies can clash. Brand marketers sometimes dismiss product content as dull speeds and feeds; product marketers sometimes dismiss brand marketing as meaningless fluff. Who’s right?

The truth is, it’s a false dilemma. Neither brand nor product marketing is inherently “better.” They’re simply two different tools that are better at two different things, and you’ll likely need both to successfully navigate your customers’ journeys.

The tricky part, then, isn’t which to choose. It’s how to make sure your brand and product marketing works together. It’s all too easy for the two departments to each produce their own content without regard to what the other is doing. Obviously, this can cause problems down the road, particularly if the stories don’t quite line up.

That brings us to two of our favourite subjects: alignment and visibility.

The key to ensuring that you have the right content, of the right type, for the right people, is making sure that everyone is on the same page about strategy from the very beginning. What does your customer’s journey look like? What task is the customer trying to accomplish at each journey stage? What content can you provide that helps them accomplish it? 

If that sounds like a foundational question, well, it is. It’s surprisingly common, however, for those foundational questions to go unanswered in the relentless drive to execute content and campaigns. Carving out the time to sit down, bring together both teams, map out customer journey needs and align on how to solve them can pay dividends when it’s time to actually create content.

Even with good foundations, it’s easy for that initial agreement to slip out of alignment when the two teams don’t have visibility into each others’ work. It’s important to ensure regular communication between your brand and product marketing teams, along with awareness of what each is working on and how it fits into the customer journey strategy. This helps make certain that while brand and product might take different roads, they both lead to the same destination: boosted sales.

Every company is different, and the right mix of brand and product marketing will depend on your market and industry. What’s universal is the need to get both sides of the house working together, giving your prospects the optimal experience.

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With that out of the way let’s get to a definition. That’s right – a dang definition! I told you this was getting right to the point. What is marketing enablement? Here!

Marketing enablement is the process through which marketing-owned activities such as content creation, content storage, sales communication and content analytics are made more efficient, improving overall sales and marketing alignment.

Boom! You got that? No? Too bad! Keep up! We’re going fast here. You’re busy, I’m busy, the world’s on fire and we’ve got to keep moving. The only thing we’ve got time for is marketing enablement so let’s go!

Why should you care about marketing enablement? I don’t know, I can’t tell you what you should care about. Take a look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and figure it out for yourself. If you care about being good at your job and improving sales and marketing alignment then you should care about marketing enablement. Does that sound like you? Good, great, grand, wonderful. No yelling on the bus!

Why does marketing enablement help you reach your goals of transforming your organisation into a sales and marketing powerhouse? Great question, now you’re catching on. I was worried for a second but I think you’re starting to get the hang of this no-nonsense blog!

Marketing enablement unlocks the full potential of your marketing team. “But how does it do this?” you say to yourself as if you haven’t come to hear thought leaders drop truth bombs on you. It does it in a bunch of ways! Do I have to spell this out for you? Actually yes I do, that’s the whole point of this blog.

Marketing enablement radically alters the way content is stored, created, refined and delivered. A true marketing enablement initiative will give marketers the freedom to create better personalised content that speaks directly to their buyers and their needs. That content then can be stored in a more efficient manner by reducing the amount of ineffective and unused content while also serving the content up to more targeted audiences through content profiles.

Content analytics is arguably the biggest benefit of a marketing enablement strategy. If you’re a marketer think about what you’d give to have insights into how content performs, how it’s engaged with, who uses it the most, and finally, the actual effect on revenue your content has. You’d probably give up a lot for that! Well, you don’t have to give up anything when you start working on a marketing enablement strategy! So keep your grandfather’s watch and don’t barter it away for content analytics, you don’t need to do that anymore.

Marketing enablement sounds pretty good, right? I see you enthusiastically nodding your head. That must mean you want to learn more about it right? Again, the nodding, I love it. If you want to learn more then click the fancy picture below to read our guide Marketing Enablement 101. It’s full of great information. “Why don’t you just tell me more right here in this blog?” you’re asking. Because this blog is over!

The post A No Nonsense Blog About Marketing Enablement appeared first on Seismic.

Hear me out on this.

Marketing creates specific messaging (i.e. that’s what she said) that sales may miscommunicate because even though that’s what she (as in marketing) said, did she (as in sales) actually say that? Somewhere along the way, messages can often be misconstrued and improperly communicated. This is why brand integrity is so important.

Brand integrity is how consumers perceive your company and its products, image and reputation. While every consumer experience may not meet or exceed your brand promise, when a brand loses integrity, its meaning and value to consumers diminish.

Here are three more reasons why brand integrity is crucial in life sciences:

Brand recognition

Simply put, brand recognition can’t exist without brand integrity. In order to foster brand recognition, life sciences organisations need to ensure consistency across all aspects of their organisation, but especially in marketing and sales.

For these departments, brand integrity is typically made up of three brand properties: brand essence, brand voice and brand promises. Brand essence is an articulation of your brand’s unique identity; brand voice is your brand’s consistent identity or the outward projection of its essence; brand promises are the things your brand guarantees to its consumers.

Only when the look, feel, experience, product, pricing and/or service offerings are cohesive and consistent will consumers be able to recognise and trust your organisation. This is especially crucial during mergers and acquisitions as well.

Do keep in mind, however, that brand recognition is a major factor that prompts individuals to purchase products or services, regardless of industry.

Brand reputation

Don’t worry, this isn’t about Taylor Swift’s new album or Joan Jett belting “I don’t give a damn ‘bout my reputation”. It’s about how important your organisation’s reputation really is.

In today’s digital age, consumers – healthcare providers, patients, hospital administrators, what have you – are more tech-savvy than ever before, which also allows for more transparency and a keen sense of brand integrity. To be perfectly candid, consumers nowadays basically have a lie detector that operates on both a conscious and semi-conscious level. They can just feel when something isn’t lining up correctly.

Therefore, when marketing and sales messages aren’t aligned, prospective customers can tell. Whether intentional or otherwise, the damage to a company’s reputation is done in an instant, and often takes a long time to undo in the eyes of the consumer. It’s only when life sciences organisations have created a clear strategy with defined values, goals and brand messaging, that their brand reputation is strengthened.

Customer experience vs. Customer expectation

While brand integrity is a cornerstone for marketing – and the fabric of both brand reputation and demand generation – it’s as much a part of the sales organisation too.

Sales reps are the ones out in the field building a brand with powerful, face-to-face interactions. To be truly value-centric, sales reps need to know their materials and brand messaging inside and out to communicate details with complete accuracy to healthcare providers (HCPs) and buying groups within a very limited timeframe.

While you may want to allow your sales team the autonomy they need to surface and customise the right content to elevate the degree of engagement with your customers, this leaves many doors open for brand misrepresentation.

If the brand is misrepresented, there’s suddenly friction between customer expectation and customer experience, never mind the compliance repercussions that may be associated. It’s the pinnacle of quality when organisations deliver the same kind of service and experience to each and every customer.

Solutions to maintain brand integrity

In a business environment where consumers are king, content and digital marketing are more heightened than ever, and the healthcare landscape is constantly changing – how exactly are life sciences organisations supposed to go about operating with brand integrity? Here are three suggestions:

1. Create or update your branding guide

In a highly-regulated environment, most life sciences organisations do in fact have a branding guide in large part due to the compliance issues that may come about. However, if your organisation doesn’t have one or it needs to be updated, make this a top priority. A branding guide will allow everyone to be on the same page and ensure your brand is being properly represented whether it’s for different departments, business units or offices around the world.

2. Implement a centralised asset library

By creating a single source of truth, employees won’t need to search through multiple repositories to find the correct and most up-to-date information. One centralised library will give marketing greater control to ensure consistency of messaging and to reduce potential rogue messaging from sales, ultimately resulting in declined risk.

3. Deploy permission management

By assigning user permissions within a centralised asset library, users are only allowed to access the materials that they need. This will help user groups to find what they need quickly but also enables more sensitive materials to be accessed on a need-to-know basis. If your organisation has multiple business units, your sales team in one business unit won’t have access to another business unit’s sales materials. Likewise, your compliance team may have access to all business unit materials. It all depends on your organisational structure, but having permissions in place will greatly reduce risk overall.

Lastly, but most importantly, understand that achieving true brand integrity is an ongoing process. Be patient and be receptive to change. Make change actionable by tapping into data and consumer interactions on a consistent basis, then use this information to refine your product offerings and brand message. At the end of the day, focus on making “that’s what she said” a reality and you’ll make Michael Scott (or better yet, your organisation) proud.

The post That’s what she said: The importance of brand integrity in life sciences appeared first on Seismic.

Yet that’s what too many sales people do. They simply share whatever information they have at their fingertips without thought about what it gives to a prospect. No wonder buyers think that 80% of sellers add no value.

That challenge is actually a major opportunity for sellers to differentiate themselves from their competition. But what kinds of insights should sales reps provide? Many people immediately gravitate to solely file-based content. And yes, that kind of material is vital. But what other sales enablement resources can help a seller to add value?

Let’s take a look:

1. Subject matter experts

Your salespeople can’t be experts in every aspect of your product. But within your team, you likely have product managers, technical resources and other individuals who are. They may know your market and customers better than anyone else. Or success stories.

In any case, these people can likely provide a wealth of value to your prospects. By surfacing to a seller the internal experts who can be brought to bear on an account, they can quickly engage a prospect and have a compelling conversation that advances a prospect toward close. An effective seller resource centre provides an easy way to navigate and find these internal people resources.

2. Sales training and guidance

Sales as a profession is a skill that must be constantly nurtured. When your sellers are able to deploy a solid sales methodology and process they not only can accelerate deals but also can understand how to better challenge and engage their buyers.

Similarly, great salespeople know how to adjust on the fly based on changes in the sales journey. Sellers who are equipped with just-in-time guidance can better communicate value to buyers based on their exact needs at a given moment. A seller resource centre provides a one-stop-shop for sellers to find this kind of training and coaching to step up their game and add more value.

Similar to training and guidance, a seller resource centre can be a focal point of information about processes both pre- and post-sale. So, a customer can rest assured of best practices to get a solution implemented and successful going forward.

3. Product training

It’s critical that salespeople communicate the right message about their products. But as new offers and products are rolled out, it’s often difficult for reps to keep up. The result is that a seller may not be able to message correctly or guide a prospect to the best-matched solution.

A seller resource centre equips reps with the most current, approved information about products. In particular, it can provide a go-to location to get information about new product releases. The result: sellers can provide buyers with significantly more specific information about products than what can be gleaned from a website.

4. Customer examples

One of the most compelling types of resources for a buyer is customer success stories. They prove not only that there’s value in purchasing a certain solution, but also that its implementation or use is achievable. But customer examples are more than just PDFs of case studies. They could be videos, quotes, ROI data and more. A great seller resource centre is the hub for this kind of customer information, making it a snap for a seller to find a compelling case that moves a prospect forward confidently.

5. Preparatory materials

Sellers spend a significant amount of time preparing to engage a prospect. That might be researching the best pitch or understanding how they can solve a particular pain. This preparation is vital to the success of a sales call.

A seller resource centre can provide a context-aware environment in which a rep can uncover the materials they need to have a winning sales call. No digging through old files. Instead, a seller can use information about the buyer’s needs, current stage, etc. to find the resources she needs to have a great sales call.

6. Marketing content

Lastly, we must mention traditional sales and marketing content. That includes datasheets, eBooks, product spec sheets and more. The seller resource centre is the single source of truth for these types of collateral too. Marketing teams see 75% of their content go unused. But an effective seller resource centre can turn that around.

When you have a great seller resource centre in place, you’re able to better equip sellers (and buyers!) with the information they need, from collateral to training and beyond. A winning seller resource centre isn’t locked on some drive somewhere. Instead, it’s accessible to sellers where they work – in the CRM, browser, mobile and more. The result is sellers are equipped with the right sales enablement resources wherever they work.

The post Sales resources are more than just sales content appeared first on Seismic.

Sales asset management helps B2B organisations manage their sales assets (i.e., internal reference materials, customer-facing collateral, presentation decks, etc.) in a single, easily-accessible portal. B2B organisations use SAM solutions to create, store, manage, deliver and analyse the usage of content from a single view. SAM is sometimes confused with sales enablement because the two are very closely related.

To put it simply, a sales enablement strategy includes sales asset management. SAM is one of many functions of a sales enablement strategy that helps to get the right information, content and support to sales organisations as efficiently and seamlessly as possible. Certain SAM solutions can function as part of the right sales enablement strategy.

Why does Sales Asset Management matter?

While the importance of a sales enablement strategy is undeniable, it wouldn’t have legs if it weren’t for sales asset management. If your sales organisation is experiencing any of the pain points below, it may be worth looking into a SAM investment:

• Content is stored in disjointed repositories: It’s likely that sales, marketing, product and development teams all have their respective content stored in multiple, siloed repositories. If this is the case for your company, a SAM solution may be helpful to integrate and consolidate that content without needing a complete CMS overhaul.
• Sales reps can’t find the content they’re looking for: A side effect of disconnected content repositories is that sales reps can spend 30 to 50 hours per month searching for and recreating content. If your reps are spending an entire workweek each month looking for content or creating their own, sales productivity is suffering. Content must be made more accessible, or should be served to reps in contextually relevant sales situations in CRM or email (since reps spend the majority of their time in these two).
• Content is out of date and not contextually relevant: Thirty-eight per cent of executives surveyed by IDC reported that they experienced difficulty relating documents or versions of documents to important content because of “digital silos”. SAM solutions can help streamline version control and serve up updated content contextually.
• Content visibility is lacking or nonexistent: Content Marketing Institute reports that 60% of business decision-makers say that company content helps them make better purchase decisions, but many companies don’t have visibility into specific pieces of content that are driving those decisions.
• Sales is unable to access and share content seamlessly: If reps aren’t able to find content from wherever they’re working – on a smartphone or tablet, from email or CRM, for example – they aren’t able to have a meaningful interaction with buyers in an efficient manner. Reps should be able to access and share content right from where they’re working and should be able to see exactly how and when prospects interact with that content.

Core Sales Asset Management characteristics

SiriusDecisions compiled a list of the key elements that SAM solutions should incorporate:

• Content creation: Content creators (marketing, sales enablement, sales training) should be able to prepare and create content for field distribution in the SAM solution. Since these content creation teams typically have other platforms for creating content, the SAM solution should act as an integrator, not a replacement, for these incumbent platforms.
• Content storage and management: Content creators shouldn’t necessarily consolidate content into a single, siloed portal, but instead should be able to integrate all of an organisation’s existing content and data sources so all content can be accessed and tracked from a single, centralised view. This eliminates duplicate and outdated content and allows for more holistic analytics.
• Delivery: The allure of most SAM solutions is the ability to seamlessly deliver the right content to sales reps exactly when they need it. This could be as basic as tagging content for reps to search for contextually, or as advanced as using CRM data to serve content based on specific prospect characteristics (such as industry, role or stage in the sales cycle) right in a rep’s email.
• Sharing with buyers: Not only should reps be able to access and present content to buyers from any mobile device, but they should also be able to send, track and follow up on content from a single view. Revised or updated versions of content should always push live when accessed by reps, so they are always sharing the most current content and presentations.
• Reporting and analytics: The most advanced SAM solutions provide analytics that track both how reps are accessing and using content internally and how external buyers are interacting with the content reps have shared. Content usage should be tracked and analysed by individual reps, sales teams, individual content pieces or content groups (such as the stage of the sales cycle).

It can often be overwhelming to keep up with the B2B sales vocabulary, not to mention best practices and strategies for success. Understanding that sales asset management and sales enablement are closely related is an important step in building your team’s sales support strategy. A sales enablement strategy that incorporates SAM is crucial for organisations working to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales processes, especially if it’s focused specifically on getting the right content to reps at the right time.

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Without goals, teams and individuals alike are left with little direction and motivation to succeed, so many companies turn to SMART goals to improve productivity and performance. As a review, SMART stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timely

We’ve seen the SMART model work very well for setting goals, but what about providing feedback? If you’re a manager or team leader and have your employees making and sticking to SMART goals, it is valuable to provide SMART feedback once the goal is achieved (or not). So, how do you provide specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely feedback? It’s easier than you think.

Specific: One of my favourite film scenes is from Forgetting Sarah Marshall when Paul Rudd’s character plays a space-shot surfing instructor and keeps giving vague advice to Jason Segel’s character:

If you give ambiguous, sometimes contradicting feedback, you’ll never see the results you’re looking for. Explaining specific expectations before, during and after a task will limit the chances of misunderstanding and poor execution.

Measurable: By providing your team with quantifiable objectives to meet, there is no uncertainty about what the goal must be. There are no grey areas in numbers. This includes how much or how many as well as when goals will be met. When goals are measurable, feedback is more fair, less subjective and clearer.

Achievable: It is pointless to set unachievable goals. (This goes for yourself as a leader and anyone you’re setting goals for.) Setting lofty, unrealistic goals makes it difficult to motivate your team to reach them. Giving feedback as employees make progress toward a goal makes it more likely for that goal to be achieved. This step-by-step approach is a good way to provide effective feedback throughout the entire process.

Realistic: The expectations you set for your team must be realistic: high enough that they will still be motivated to work hard, but low enough that they will be able to reach their goals. It’s important to understand how your employees work, not only to help them set realistic goals but in order to provide realistic feedback. Your feedback should relate to the goal and the steps taken to reach the goal.

Timely: Feedback that is given directly upon the completion of a goal (or once the specific timeframe for goal achievement has passed) is more effective than feedback provided at a later time. Think back to school when you would write a long essay, but then not get it back for weeks. Chances are, anything you learned while writing that essay was replaced with new knowledge, and it would take some cognitive digging to understand the context of your teacher’s feedback. The same goes for your employees; give feedback when the goal or process is still front-of-mind and relevant.

The bottom line is, as a leader, you hold your team accountable for reaching their goals. But it is your responsibility to provide them with the resources and feedback they need along the way to succeed. The SMART model has worked wonders in the past for setting and achieving goals; try to see how it works for providing effective feedback.

The post Get SMART To Provide Better Feedback appeared first on Seismic.

1. Develop a 4% Message.

Research shows that the average audience takes away only 4% of the information you present. So if you had only one minute to convey how you differentiate yourself, what would you say? Lead with the elevator pitch and hammer your value proposition throughout.

2. Get Highly Interactive.

The team members of the PM, as well as the board members themselves, should become part of the conversation. More PMs win during Q&A than during prepared comments. Why? Because most people have similar prepared comments, running down the standard characteristics of firm, strategy and product.

3. Have an Interesting Message.

Why not give an example of a recent stock that you evaluated to show the investment process rather than just explain the process itself?

4. Attitude is Everything.

The PM needs to understand the importance of practice and improvement. Greeley suggests that a PM practise giving the prepared remarks on camera once a year and reviewing it with an objective eye. The PM needs the attitude that they will get better with practice – everyone does (and very few are just “born with it.”)

5. Use Visual Aids.

First of all, we are all our own visual aids, so make sure that you dress the part (hunting jackets do not make the cut, as one horrified manager recounted). If there is an opportunity to draw a diagram, either on a whiteboard or on the back of a piece of paper, take that opportunity to show rather than tell.

6. Be Dynamic with Delivery.

Greeley notes that 80% of cues are non-verbal, so posture, hand gestures and attentiveness are more important than we may realise. If a PM dismantles a pen and reassembles it while standing in front of the room, that probably won’t bode well for impressing the board.

7. Make Your Team Look Good.

The PM should offer up leading questions to the other coworkers in attendance (who should all have a scripted time to speak – if you aren’t planning to speak, they shouldn’t be there). Then, the PM should make a remark like, “We brought our best large cap analyst to explain a recent buy recommendation…” And don’t be afraid to say something positive about the firm itself – but keep it sincere, not self-ingratiating (“I feel at home with such smart people” won’t go over well).

8. Project the Right Attitude.

Every PM is extremely smart and well-educated. Harping on these qualities or trying to prove them to be of any interest to the investment board will come across as arrogant. People are looking for credibility, confidence and likability.

9. Be Adaptive.

Every presentation environment is different, with varied audiences and different stages. The PM needs to practise presenting while sitting or standing, in front of one or six people.

10. Debrief Afterwards.

After the presentation, the team needs to sit down for 15 minutes and give an honest assessment of what seemed to work well and what could be improved upon. This shouldn’t be an attack – it should be an objective assessment. The military calls this activity an AAR – After Action Review – and one follows every mission. If you don’t reflect on what worked well and what you would change, it’s difficult to improve.

Greeley strongly believes that a PM needs to have “presentation fitness” in the same way that we think about our own physical fitness: you don’t get a flat stomach by going to the gym once, and you don’t become a rock star presenter without a lot of practice.

The post 10 Portfolio Manager Presentation Tips to Wow Investment Boards appeared first on Seismic.

Due to compliance constraints, many companies in the financial services industry have been more cautious in adopting a social media presence. What are the winners doing that yours isn’t? Let’s take a look at the best examples of social media marketing in the financial services industry:

Facebook winners: Transamerica, Mastercard

Transamerica’s Facebook page, with almost 90,000 Likes, is doing several things well that all tie into their brand image and life insurance product offering. What more positive ways can you think of branding life insurance than a cute picture of a baby and a Healthy Lifestyle Page, complete with pictures of the triathlons that they sponsor? Another great way to engage with prospective customers is through a targeted giveaway of tickets to the college bowl game of your choice – a perfect way to engage middle-aged men, who are likely the target market for some of their products.

MasterCard makes charitable giving a part of the brand identity and uses their Facebook page to promote events that they sponsor. Their Stand Up To Cancer campaign is front and centre, and they utilise images worth sharing, like cupcakes and city skylines, rather than plastering their own logo on posts.

Twitter Winners: John Hancock Financial Services, MasterCard

John Hancock doesn’t even use Twitter for its standard company activity, but it does have a handle exclusively for its sponsorship of the Boston Marathon, which it has sponsored for the past 28 years. With almost 30,000 followers, John Hancock has created a wide-reaching voice to tell the stories of those who run for charity and release event details for the thousands of runners who use #bostonmarathon. Next year’s emotional race, with an expanded field of 36,000, will provide an even greater opportunity to spread the word of uplifting stories and images through Twitter.

Find out how John Hancock Investments is building a modern digital experience

MasterCard has a consistent message across multiple platforms, and their signature sponsorship of Stand Up 2 Cancer adorns their Twitter page as well. Offering people the opportunity to retweet a message and MasterCard will donate $10 to cancer research? That’s a great way to ensure your marketing spend receives exposure. It’s subtle, but even the background image of the Twitter Page is custom-made for the campaign.

LinkedIn Winners: Prudential Retirement, Raymond James Financial and Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

Prudential, with over 37,000 followers on LinkedIn, has created a position as a thought leader by putting out interviews of their “Thought Leader of the Week,” which feature Q&As or white papers by senior employees of the company.

Raymond James keeps a steady stream of company-related news flowing on the page, which shows up to its over 17,000 followers.

Morgan Stanley posts updates about company news and sponsorships to its almost 70,000 followers. Perhaps their largest focus is on career opportunities, where they aim to recruit investment advisers with a strong video and additional opportunities are shown on their career page.

YouTube Winners: Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company and MasterCard

MasterCard does it again, this time with over 170 short videos on its YouTube channel. Many of the videos are interviews with professional golfers as part of its sponsorship of PGA Tour events – another great way to get in front of its target audience of affluent older males. MasterCard is practicing content marketing at its core: it is putting out educational and entertaining videos that are interesting to the target audience even though the videos are not about MasterCard’s services itself. A video of Ian Poulter sharing a tip on how to approach a tough hole… priceless.

The Best of the Best award went to Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and MasterCard, which were both well deserved.

Even in the highly regulated financial services industry, social media marketing can help build a presence as a thought leader, increase visibility of sponsorship campaigns (particularly of charities) and improve recruiting reach.

How does your company stack up against the winners of the Social Media Silver Bowl?

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