Working Late? Here Are 21 Tips to Make Your Nights More Productive

This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

Research has shown sleep might be the most important factor influencing our productivity. In fact, not getting enough sleep is similar to being drunk, according to studies.

Every so often, though, you’ll have a counterproductive day at work and need to pick up the slack before bed. But this situation raises an important question: If you’re going to stay up late working, how do you stay productive?

Below are 21 tips to help keep you productive into the early hours of the morning.

21 Tips to Stay Productive When You're Working at Night

1) Practice yoga or meditation.

Practicing yoga helps alleviate both stress and mental fatigue, resulting in improved productivity and a relaxed mindset. Studies have shown that stress can make us less productive. In light of the data, spending a mere 15 minutes meditating can make an immediate difference in nighttime productivity.

2) Take a break before starting.

Research has revealed that taking regular breaks prior to starting a new project can result in improved productivity. After the work day is over, a small 20-minute relaxation period can play a major role in your productivity during the next few hours.

3) Set a hard deadline.

According to Contently, working on large goals with a tight deadline results in our best work. For example, starting a project at 7 p.m. and establishing a hard deadline of 1 a.m. will improve productivity versus saying, “I’ll get this done tomorrow.”

4) Write down your goals.

Writing down our goals, according to research, immediately makes us more likely to achieve those goals. Prior to your long night, jot down the two to three most important tasks ahead of you for improved productivity.

5) Have a well-timed meal.

While caffeine can give us a mental boost, it’s food that has a direct impact on our cognitive abilities during the last stretch of a day, according to studies. Not eating can set us back cognitively, resulting in less-than-excellent work due to lack of energy.

(Here is a list of foods to eat for max productivity.)

6) Create a productive playlist.

Several studies have found that music can play a direct role in our productivity as it makes repetitive tasks less annoying, and drowns out the distracting noises of our offices and homes. There are several options for a playlist, but classical music is most likely to improve cognitive functions.

(Check out our six productivity playlists here.)

7) Don’t work in your bedroom.

Working in your bed can make your brain associate your bedroom as a place for work, not sleep, according to Lifehack. This association can result in lost sleep in the future and an inability to turn off when we go to bed.

8) Avoid watching television while you work.

Watching television while we work requires our brain to multitask, which can lead to decreased performance and an underwhelming project. Our brains work best when we’re focused on one thing at a time and giving the task at hand our complete attention.

9) Exercise before beginning.

Not a yoga person? Studies have shown that all forms of exercise can increase our cognitive abilities and overall energy. With more energy and a clear mind, we’re likely to produce better results and be more productive.

10) Drink water.

While caffeine might be tempting, a recent study found that drinking water can increase our productivity by as much as 14%. The study found that drinking water helps expand the grey matter in our brains which is key to being more productive.

11) Leave your low effort, low impact goals for the evening.

Instead of trying to accomplish an extremely challenging task at night, focus instead on knocking out small goals as you build up momentum for the day ahead. Prior to your day, run your tasks though an impact versus effort analysis to determine which tasks require little energy but add up in value.

12) Be honest about what you can achieve.

Setting overly ambitious goals can put us on a path for failure, which results in lost productivity and drained willpower. Setting realistic goals allows us to accomplish the tasks, resulting in improved morale and enhanced productivity. In short, don’t bite off more than you can chew at night.

13) Cut off the wifi.

While the internet can be enticing after a long day, blocking it will allow you to tune out distractions like social media and hone in on what matters. If you’re struggling with this, extensions like StayFocused and BlockSite can help.

14) Stand up.

Several studies have found that standing while working results in better concentration, more energy, and fewer headaches. By finding a place to stand and work at home, you can knock off your evening to-do list with ease.

15) Dress in work clothes.

Pajamas might be tempting, but studies have revealed that dressing for work actually heightens our attention and makes us more focused on the task at hand. Instead of sweatpants, try some business attire for max nighttime productivity.

16) Block out distractions.

Although it can be difficult, it’s important to stay in a work mindset to produce the best results. By avoiding the regular things we do at home for the night -- i.e laundry, cleaning the bathroom, watching TV with family -- we’re able to stay in the right mindset to be successful.

17) Have an established work space.

If you’re working late at night, it’s important to have an established work space so you don’t confuse home space with work space. Having a dedicated workspace allows our brains to associate the space with work, according to Wix, which makes us more productive.

18) Use the right kind of light.

Studies have found that our circadian rhythm can be triggered by blue light, increasing our awareness and giving us more energy. The circadian rhythm is what determines our body’s natural energy level. By looking at a blue light, we can give ourselves an energy boost.

19) Take a cold shower.

Although scary at first, a cold shower, according to research, can improve energy levels, help our body rebuild key muscles, and make us feel renewed and fresh. If you can’t bring yourself to take a cold shower right off the bat, try the 911 challenge.

20) Crank up the thermostat.

A study from Cornell University discovered that warmer temperatures decrease the amount of mistakes employees make while improving their output. Cold temperature is mostly associated with sleep, so by turning the heat up, you’re more likely to be alert at night.

21) Reach for some lemon tea.

If all else fails and life hands you lemons, make lemonade (or lemon tea). Studies have shown that the aroma of lemon improves our mood, and stimulates our bodies.

Every once in awhile we can have a slow or distracted day, requiring us to work late. While this isn’t ideal, there are a multitude of strategies we can use to ensure we retain our productivity even after the work day is over.

Have you tried any of these out? Tell us about what keeps you productive when you’re working late in the comments.

7 Powerful Ways to Make Your Emails More Persuasive

This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

Communication is the lifeblood of sales and marketing. Successfully closing deals, providing value, explaining complexities -- they all rely on your ability to express yourself clearly and persuasively.

The outreach email is a special breed of writing. You only have a very small window of opportunity to capture your reader’s attention and convince them to move one step closer toward a purchase or intended action. Use these writing techniques to ensure your emails pack the most punch.

7 Powerful Persuasion Techniques to Use In Your Next Email

1) Know your audience.

Okay, so this isn’t exactly a writing tip. But it’s the foundation upon which your email’s effectiveness is built. If you don’t understand your audience -- whether it’s someone who’s hesitant to buy, or a happy customer you’d like to upsell -- you won’t be able to write persuasively.

2) Leverage social proof.

Why it works: Social proof describes the tendency to make choices based on other people’s decisions, because we believe those decisions reflect the right choices. You're already leveraging the concept of social proof through customer case studies and social proof, why not extend these efforts into your emails?

How to use it: Reference high-profile customers or the size of your customer base. If you're trying to move a potential customer towards a purchase, try pointing out how many of their competitors and peers use your product.

Examples:

• The McDonald’s slogan “Billions and billions served” calls out the company’s giant customer base.


• Yelp’s success is a result of its user-generated content: Crowdsourced reviews that leverage the power of social proof.

3) Get your foot in the door with a small ask.

Why it works: Once someone says “yes” to a small ask -- the proverbial foot in the door -- they’re more likely to agree to future requests.

How to use it: Ask your recipient a question that they are unlikely to say no to.

Examples:

• If you sell software that tracks target accounts’ trigger events, an easy way to get a first “yes” is to confirm that their sales team wants to improve their prospect outreach.

4) Include a headshot in your email signature.

Why it works: When we make eye contact with people, we feel a subconscious sense of connection. In one Cornell University study, researchers edited images of the Trix rabbit mascot, then asked adults to pick between several cereal boxes bearing different versions of the image. Participants most often chose the box where the rabbit was directly looking at them.

How to use it: You can’t make actual eye contact through email, and by no means should you include a massive photo of yourself in the body of an email -- that’ll just make people uncomfortable. But it can be easy to forget that there’s a person on the other end of your emails. Including a small headshot of yourself in an email signature is a subtle way to remind people that you’re human, too.

5) Agitate and solve the problem.

Why it works: Even if the person you're emailing is already aware they have a problem in one area or another, it doesn’t mean they’re prepared to solve it. But emotion is a powerful thing. Whether it’s subconscious attachment to the old way of doing things causing inertia, or fear of making the wrong decision, your prospect won’t always warm to your product immediately.

To convince them, you’ll often have to talk about the problem in emotional terms, then swoop in with a solution to demonstrate how you can help.

How to use it: While you should never attempt to over-exaggerate a business pain or spin one out of thin air, use the agitate-and-solve technique when it’s clear they haven’t fully conceptualized the cost of inaction.

Find out what matters to them. Is it personal professional achievement that drives them forward? A desire to grow the business’ bottom line? Then show how inaction will only worsen their current situation, and demonstrate why your product would help.

Example:

• An office supply salesperson could seek out its competitors' clients who had been impacted by late shipments. She should probe into the significance of these delays, getting prospects to talk through the immediate and ripple effects. Then, she can describe her own company's efficient service and customer support.

6) Include a reason.

Why it works: Giving people a reason why you need something -- no matter how ridiculous -- makes it far more likely they’ll do what you ask.

Psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a study in which experimenters asked to skip ahead in line at a Xerox machine. When they asked, “I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?", they were allowed to skip the line 60% of the time -- not a bad outcome.

But when they asked, “I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”, 93% were allowed to skip the line.

Despite the fact that everyone else in the Xerox machine line needed to make copies, they complied with the request simply because the experimenters provided a reason.

How to use it: We wouldn’t recommend making up ridiculous excuses to get your prospects to sign a contract -- that’s not good for anybody. But even providing a simple explanation -- “I’d like to set up a meeting with you because I can help with X strategy” -- could pay huge dividends.

Example:

• Instead of writing, "I'd like to set up a conversation so we can discuss your project management software strategies," try this instead: "I'd like to set up a conversation to discuss your marketing strategy because we've seen similar companies increase their lead generation by 40%."

7) Remind prospects it’s their choice.

Why it works: Nobody likes to be told what to do. And even if you’re not being pushy or aggressive, many people will still chafe at the suggestion that you know what’s best for them.

A simple reassurance that you’re not attempting to push your preferences or worldview onto them is powerful. Across 42 psychology studies involving 22,000 subjects, it’s been demonstrated that using a phrase like “But the decision is yours” could double the chances that someone would say yes to a request.

How to use it: You don’t want to overuse this one -- tempering every recommendation you make by reminding prospects they have no obligation to listen to you isn’t a great idea. But when you’re asking for a larger commitment or are dealing with a jumpy prospect, dropping in a reminder that you’re not here to force them into anything can be a powerful technique.

Example:

• A software salesperson could write this message to a prospect skittish about switching platforms:

When we last spoke, you mentioned that you were worried about migrating your system from your current tool to ours. Sales Engineer Sally put together this this high-level overview of the process, which is designed to be as easy on our customers as possible -- we can discuss this on our call tomorrow. In the meantime, based on our previous conversations I strongly believe this switch is the best long-term solution for your company -- but of course, the decision ultimately rests with you. Let me know what you think."

How do you make your sales emails more persuasive? Let us know in the comments below.

How to Rank Twitter Bios for More Leads

Your Twitter Bio is just like any other page: the number and quality of the incoming links affects the PA (Page Authority). Although outgoing links from Twitter are nofollowed, increasing your PA and influence is valuable for making your tweets and bio rank in the serps.

If your business is in a particular competitive niche or you have a new site, ranking your Twitter bio and using it to drive potential buyers to your own site can be faster and easier.

Why Would You Want Your Twitter Bio to Rank?

Ranking your Twitter bio is primarily to get customers, of course! Having a Twitter bio on the home page of Google is very possible as you can see in this example for an SEO agency whose Twitter account @topcharlotteseo was third for the phrase "Top Charlotte SEO". SEOing obviously can rank Twitter bios.

If your site is new or does not have any authority yet, gaining visibility through ranking your Twitter (or other social network bios) could be faster. As with any other page you want to rank, how many incoming links you have and the PA of your Twitter bio affect where it ranks.

The Twitter account in this example has 252 incoming links and a PA of 59. Typically, the Twitter account with the most influence for the desired keywords ranks highest.

According to SEO consultant and trainer Adrienne DeVita of Digital Media Cube:

"All of Google’s algorithm ranking factors apply to Twitter rankings, too. For example, Google bots automatically see the bounce rate if a searcher hits "back" immediately; the interaction on the landing page it links to; the keyword relation to the search; the page authority on that page; and the click through rate from their SERPs. Strive to use your phrase as the first words in your bio and tweets whenever it makes sense grammatically for the person searching – and make sure your phrase is within the first 90 characters. Put any secondary phrase you wish to rank for in characters 91-115.”

When your Twitter bio or your tweets rank, you can use them for lead generation. There are now tools that search for Twitter users and reach out to them to start interactions. The best I know for automating lead generation on Twitter is Socedo.

How to Automatically Capture Leads on Twitter

As you can see in the screen capture below, you can choose your target audience by checking their profession or interest. Once it identifies someone in your audience, it favorites one of their tweets automatically. Then an hour later it follows that user.

After the user follows back, Socedo can (depending on how you have your account configured), either:

• Start a conversation by sending them a personalized tweet


• Send them a message and link to your lead capture landing page

Your sales team then decides whether to follow-up (by approving them), or not follow up (by declining within Socedo) or set lower priority to leads they may wish to engage at a later time.

Analytics built into Socedo allows you to modify your targeting and better qualify your leads based on your results. This video shows how it works:

If you want more details on how Socedo works, read How to Generate and Close Social Leads On Twitter. Now that you realize how important Twitter can be for your business, let's talk about how to keep track of your conversations there.

Business Dashboards for Tracking Twitter

Remembering to keep on top of what you're doing on Twitter in addition to everything else related to your SEO rankings is a challenge. Fortunately, there is a simple solution: Cyfe. Kristi Hines wrote a comprehensive blog post with a screen capture showing 15 of their widgets. Check out that link for all the widgets that already exist for Twitter (and Klout, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, and YouTube).

Cyfe offers 8 Twitter widgets plus Twitter search plus Klout and bit.ly (to see clicks on your shortened links). Here is an example layout from my Cyfe account showing the Twitter overview, Moz numbers, Twitter tweets, Twitter lists, bit.ly stats, Twitter search results for the search "growmap", Twitter mentions, Twitter favorites and SERPs – a new widget I'm testing that hasn't populated yet.

Adding a widget is as easy as clicking on what you want and doing some very simple configuration. You can resize and move each window to wherever you want it. When you mouse over graphs, additional information appears in a pop-up. These are only a few of the massive number of widgets available for other social networks, analytics, advertising, sales and finance and much more.

The image below shows details for a specific date showing tweets, following, listed (in Twitter lists), and Favorites. This data is not live so there is a delay of about 24 hours. (You can see another example in Kristi's post linked above.)

Should You Bother to Rank Tweets?

We focused on Twitter bios rather than tweets first because Google indexes only 7-9% of all tweets according to this comprehensive study by StoneTemple on how tweets could impact your SEO and what tweets Google is likely to index. It includes:

• Data on 133K+ tweets to see how Google indexed them


• Of 138,635 tweets only 7.4% were indexed!


• Twitter users with more followers have more indexed tweets (21% > 1 million; 10% for 10k-1M; 4% under 10k followers)


• Images and/or hashtags seem to "increase your chances of getting indexed, as the percentages are significantly higher than the average overall percentage of 7.4%."


• "26% of the tweets with an inbound link from sites other than Twitter got indexed. That is nearly 4 times as much as the overall average rate of indexation."

See that post for more details on their study. As you can see, getting your Twitter bio to rank – and keep ranking – is far more likely than getting any particular tweet indexed – much less getting it to stay on page one in the search engines.

Twitter Best Practices

Some of us have been power users of Twitter since they started. I've gathered everything you need to know about Twitter into one post called Twitter Best Practices. From the basics for beginners to advanced strategies, everything important to know is in or linked from that post.

Have questions? Leave me a comment and I'm happy to assist.

Twitter Best Practices from Julie Weishaar

The post How to Rank Twitter Bios for More Leads appeared first on SEO Chat.

SearchCap: Republican Debate & Google, AdWords iOS App & Adobe Report

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

The post SearchCap: Republican Debate & Google, AdWords iOS App & Adobe Report appeared first on Search Engine Land.



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Targeted Link Building in 2016 - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

SEO has much of its roots in the practice of targeted link building. And while it's no longer the only core component involved, it's still a hugely valuable factor when it comes to rank boosting. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over why targeted link building is still relevant today and how to develop a process you can strategically follow to success.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about four questions that kind of all go together around targeted link building.

Targeted link building is the practice of reaching out and trying to individually bring links to specific URLs or specific domains — usually individual pages, though — and trying to use those links to boost the rankings of those pages in search engine results. And look, for a long time, this was the core of SEO. This was how SEO was done. It was almost the start and the end.

Obviously, a lot of other practices have come into play in the industry, and I think there's even been some skepticism from folks about whether targeted link building is still a valid practice. I think we can start with that question and then get on to some of these others.

When does it make sense?

In my opinion, targeted link building does make sense when you fulfill certain conditions. We know from our experimentation, from correlation data, from Google's own statements, from lots of industry data that links still move the needle when it comes to rankings. If you have a page that's ranking number 4, you point a bunch of new links to it from important pages and sites around the web, particularly if they contain the anchor text that you're trying to rank for, and you will move up in the rankings.

It makes sense to do this if your page is already ranking somewhere in the, say, top 10 to 20, maybe even 30 results and/or if the page has measurable high impact on business metrics. That could be sales. It could be leads. It could be conversions. Even if it's indirect, if you can observe both those things happening, it's probably worthwhile.

It's also okay if you say, "Hey, we're not yet ranking in the top 20, but our paid search page is ranking on page 1. We know that we have high conversions here. We want to move from page 3, page 4 up to page 1, and then hopefully up into the top two, top three results. Then it is worth this targeted link building effort, because when you build up that visibility, when you grow those rankings, you can be assured that you are going to gain more visits, more traffic that will convert and send you these key business metrics and push those things up. So I do think targeted link building still makes sense when those conditions are fulfilled.

Is this form of link building worthwhile?

Is this something that can actually do the job it's supposed to do? And the answer, yeah. Look, if rank boosting is your goal, links are one of the ways where if you already have a page that's performing well from a conversion standpoint — from a user experience standpoint, pages per visit, your browse rate, things like time onsite, if you're not seeing high bounce rate, if you have got a page that's clearly accessible and well targeted and well optimized on the page itself — then links are going to be the most powerful, if not one of the most powerful, elements to moving your rankings. But you've got to have a scalable, repeatable process to build links.

You need the same thing that we look for broadly in our marketing practices, which is that flywheel. Yes, it's going to be hard to get things started. But once we do, we can find a process that works for us again and again. Each successive link that we get and each successive page whose rankings we're trying to move gets easier and easier because we've been there before, we've done it, we know what works and what doesn't work, and we know the ins and outs of the practice. That's what we're searching for.

When it comes to finding that flywheel, there are sort of tactics that fit into three categories that still do work. I'm not going to get into the individual specific tactics themselves, but they fall into these three buckets. What we've found is that for each individual niche, for each industry, for each different website and for each link builder, each SEO, each one of you out there, there's a process or combination of processes that works best. So I'm going to dictate to you which tactics works best, but you'll generally find them in these three buckets

Buckets:

One: one-to-one outreach. This is you going out and sending usually an e-mail, but it could be a DM or a tweet, an at reply tweet. It could be a phone call. It could be — I literally got one of these today — a letter in the mail addressed to me, hand-addressed to me from someone who'd created a piece of content and wanted to know if I would be willing to cover it. It wasn't exactly up my alley, so I'm not going to. But I thought that was an interesting form of one-to-one outreach.

It could be broadcast. Broadcast is things like social sharing, where we're broadcasting out a message like, "Hey, we've produced this. It's finally live. We launched it. Come check it out." That could go through bulk e-mail. It could go through an e-mail subscription. It could go through a newsletter. It could go through press. It could go through a blog.

Then there's paid amplification. That's things like social ads, native ads, retargeting, display, all of these different formats. Typically, what you're going to find is that one-to-one outreach is most effective when you can build up those relationships and when you have something that is highly targeted at a single site, single individual, single brand, single person.

Broadcast works well if, in your niche, certain types of content or tools or data gets regular coverage and you already reach that audience through one of your broadcast mediums.

Paid amplification tends to work best when you have an audience that you know is likely to pick those things up and potentially link to them, but you don't already reach them through organic channels, or you need another shot at reaching them from organic and paid, both.

Building a good process for link acquisition

Let's end here with the process for link acquisition. I think this is kind of the most important element here because it helps us get to that flywheel. When I've seen successful link builders do their work, they almost all have a process that looks something like this. It doesn't have to be exactly this, but it almost always falls into this format. There's a good tool I can talk about for this too.

But the idea being the first step is opportunity discovery, where we figure out where the link opportunities that we have are. Step 2 is building an acquisition spreadsheet of some kind so that we can prioritize which links we're going to chase after and what tactics we're going to use. Step 3 is the execution, learn, and iterate process that we always find with any sort of flywheel or experimentation.

Step 1: Reach out to relevant communities

We might find that it turns out for the links that we're trying to get relevant communities are a great way to acquire those links. We reach out via forums or Slack chat rooms, or it could be something like a private chat, or it could be IRC. It could be a whole bunch of different things. It could be blog comments.

Maybe we've found that competitive links are a good way for us to discover some opportunities. Certainly, for most everyone, competitive links should be on your radar, where you go and you look and you say, "Hey, who's linking to my competition? Who's linking to the other people who are ranking for this keyword and ranking for related keywords? How are they getting those links? Why are those people linking to them? Who's linking to them? What are they saying about them? Where are they coming from?"

It could be press and publications. There are industry publications that cover certain types of data or launches or announcements or progress or what have you. Perhaps that's an opportunity.

Resource lists and linkers. So there's still a ton of places on the web where people link out to. Here's a good set of resources around customer on-boarding for software as a service companies. Oh, you know what? We have a great post about that. I'm going to reach out to the person who runs this list of resources, and I'm going to see if maybe they'll cover it. Or we put together a great meteorology map looking at the last 50 winters in the northeast of the United States and showing a visual graphic overlay of that charted against global warming trends, and maybe I should share that with the Royal Meteorological Society of England. I'm going to go pitch their person at whatever.ac.uk it is.

Blog and social influencers. These are folks who tend to run, obviously, popular blogs or popular social accounts on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn, or what have you, Pinterest. It could be Instagram. Potentially worth reaching out to those kinds of folks.

Feature, focus, or intersection sources. This one's a little more complex and convoluted, but the idea is to find something where you have an intersection of some element that you're providing through the content of your page that you seem to get a link from and there is intersection with things that other organizations or people have interest in.

So, for example, on my meteorology example, perhaps you might say, "Lots of universities that run meteorology courses would probably love an animation like this. Let me reach out to professors." "Or you know what? I know there's a data graphing startup that often features interesting data graphing stuff, and it turns out we used one of their frameworks. So let's go reach out to that startup, and we'll check out the GitHub project, see who the author is, ping that person and see if maybe they would want to cover it or link to it or share it on social." All those kinds of things. You found the intersections of overlapping interest.

The last one, biz devs and partnerships. This is certainly not a comprehensive list. There could be tons of other potential opportunity to discover mechanisms. This covers a lot of them and a lot of the ones that tend to work for link builders. But you can and should think of many other ways that you could potentially find new opportunities for links.

Step 2: Build a link acquisition spreadsheet

Gotta build that link acquisition spreadsheet. The spreadsheet almost always looks something like this. It's not that dissimilar to how we do keyword research, except we're prioritizing things based on: How important is this and how much do I feel like I could get that link? Do I have a process for it? Do I have someone to reach out to?

So what you want is either the URL or the domain from which you're trying to get the link. The opportunity type — maybe it's a partnership or a resource list or press. The approach you're going to take, the contact information that you've got. If you don't have it yet, that's probably the first thing on your list is to try and go get that. Then the link metrics around this.

There's a good startup called BuzzStream that does sort of a system, a mechanism like this where you can build those targeted link outreach lists. It can certainly be helpful. I know a lot of folks like using things like Open Site Explorer and Followerwonk, Ahrefs, Majestic to try and find and fill in a bunch of these data points.

Step 3: Execute, learn, and iterate

Once we've got our list and we're going through the process of actually using these approaches and these opportunity types and this contact information to reach out to people, get the links that we're hoping to get, now we want to execute, learn, and iterate. So we're going to do some forms of one-to-one outreach where we e-mail folks and we get nothing. It just doesn't work at all. What we want to do is try and figure out: Why was that? Why didn't that resonate with those folks?

We'll do some paid amplification that just reaches tens of thousands of people, low cost per click, no links. Just nothing, we didn't get anything. Okay, why didn't we get a response? Why didn't we get people clicking on that? Why did the people who clicked on it seem to ignore it entirely? Why did we get no amplification from that?

We can have those ideas and hypotheses and use that to improve our processes. We want to learn from our mistakes. But to do that, just like investments in content and investments in social and other types of investments in SEO, we've got to give ourselves time. We have to talk to our bosses, our managers, our teams, our clients and say, "Hey, gang, this is an iterative learning process. We're going to figure out what forms of link building we're good at, and then we're going to be able to boost rankings once we do. But if we give up because we don't give ourselves time to learn, we're never going to get these results."

All right, look forward to your thoughts on tactical link building and targeted link building. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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Mobile Payments: Awesome or Overhyped?

So, we’re firm believers that your buyers should have several different options when it’s time to pay for their purchases. You don’t want to lose a sale just because you only take credit cards and your buyer only uses PayPal. What happens when buyers have way too many options for mobile and online payments?

The Walmart of Mobile Payments

No, really, Walmart decided to release their own mobile payment program called Walmart Pay. Who wants to play second fiddle to Apple forever? Not Walmart, that’s for sure. And with a retail app that boasts 22 million active users, a mobile payment option seems like the right way to go, right? If buyers are on board enough to download and use your app, then they’re probably all in on the payment options, too.

Well, buyers weren’t quite so impressed with the Walmart Pay option. It’s not that it didn’t work or that it didn’t offer a viable payment solution. Buyers simply had their payment plans worked out already. Why make the switch from the payment option they’d always used just because Walmart introduced something new?

Apple’s Not So Awesome, Either

We know that 4.9% of Apple Pay eligible sales were actually paid with Apple Pay during the holiday shopping period of 2014. It was new technology, and surely the idea would eventually catch on. That optimism should have led to a higher number of Apple Pay purchases on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but it didn’t.

This year, during the holiday shopping period, Apple Pay eligible transactions actually almost halved. Instead of growing, only 2.7% of eligible sales were completed through Apple Pay. Isn’t this supposed to be the answer to all online sales? Seems consumers disagree.

Growth in Awareness and Use

With over half of online purchases made this past year on mobile devices, it’s obvious buyers love the convenience of mobile shopping. Of those buyers, 52% only recently realized that their phones could be used as a payment device. Did they jump immediately into using Apple Pay or another mobile payment option?

Nope.

Since its introduction, the use of mobile payment has only increased by 1% year over year. That’s a pretty clear sign that consumers just aren’t that into it. What’s not entirely clear is why buyers have been slow to adopt mobile payment options.

What Would Change Things?

In the face of overwhelming proof that consumers need to feel safe when making online purchases, mobile payment options consistently take that secure feeling out of the payment process. Yes, sellers need to remove as much friction as possible between the “want” and “own” stages, but some friction is necessary. When buyers don’t need to enter passwords or PINs, they may feel as though the payment process is too easy. And if it’s too easy for them, it’s easy for someone who might attempt to steal their financial information.

Then again, maybe the market is just too saturated as it is. Those who enjoy using online wallets may just stick with their years-old PayPal account, while the rest are fine entering their credit card information any time they want to make a purchase. To interrupt the status quo may require a great deal more innovation than we’ve seen so far.

What are your thoughts about the slow adoption of mobile wallets?

How to Use Google Analytics to Help Shape Your Marketing Strategy

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, it can be a little daunting at first. With so much data available to dig through, it’s hard to know where to look to find the most important metrics.

Marketers that want to better understand their audience, and strengthen their marketing strategy, need to know how to best utilize all of the data available inside Google Analytics.

Without knowing which sections to pay attention to, you could spend hours digging through the platform and walk away with your head spinning.

Similarly, without analyzing your website traffic, it’s hard to assess the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy and know when it’s time to make a shift.

If leveraged correctly, Google Analytics can provide valuable insight into who visits your website, how they got there in the first place and what pages they spend the most time on; this is powerful data for marketers that can be used to enhance their strategy.

An Overview

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for brands, bloggers or businesses alike. Through use of Google Analytics, you can uncover a tremendous amount of data about your website that can be used to enhance your marketing and business development strategies.

The back end of Google Analytics is broken down into eight main sections: Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.

Almost all eight sections contain sub-sections that provide a ton of data, but not all sections are critical for marketers to pay attention to.

Before we dive in to the sections that matter most to marketers, let’s get familiar with some basic Google Analytics terminology:

• Users: These are people who have visited at least once within your selected date range, and includes both new and returning visitors.


• Dimensions: These are descriptive characteristics of an object. For example, browser, exit page and session duration are all considered dimensions.


• Metrics: These are individual statistics of a dimension, such as Average Session Duration or Screenviews.


• Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of single-page visits, meaning that someone left your site from the same page at which they entered; aka, they didn’t interact with your site.


• Sessions: A session is the period of time that a user is actively engaged with your website.

Now that you’re familiar with the Google Analytics sections and terminology, let’s dive in to the areas that you want to pay most attention to in order to save time and strengthen your marketing strategy.

Zeroing in on what matters most

There are three sections that matter most to marketers: Acquisition, Audience and Behavior.

The Audience section provides a tremendous amount of data about your website visitors. It contains multiple subsections that provide information about the gender, age and location of your website visitors. You can also uncover information about their interests, as well as the browsers and mobile devices used to access your site.

The Acquisition section will provide detailed information about how people arrive to your site. Digging in to the “All Traffic” tab will show you exactly how people are arriving at your website – whether it be a search engine, social media site or blog that you’re a contributor for.

The Behavior section helps you understand how people are interacting with your site. You’ll visit this section to better understand which pages on your website are the most popular.

Focusing on these three sections will help you save time when digging through Google Analytics.

When used together, the information uncovered can help you make decisions about which marketing efforts (be it guest blogging or social media posting,) are most useful in driving website traffic.

Analyzing these sections within Google Analytics will provide you with insight that will enable you to make smarketing (smart, marketing) decisions about the type, tone, and placement of content that you use on your website.

Traffic Channels

Before we dive into who exactly is visiting your site, it’s important to understand how they’re getting there.

To see your various traffic sources for a set period of time, go to the Acquisition tab and click the “All Traffic” dropdown. Select the “Channels” button, set the time period at the top of the viewing pane and scroll down to see the results for the give timeframe.

Here’s a simple breakdown of what these different channels mean:

• Direct: Visitors that came directly to your website. They either typed your URL right into their browser, clicked on a bookmark or clicked a link in an email. Direct traffic is a strong indicator of the strength of your brand.


• Organic Search: You can thank search engines like Google and Bing for these website visitors. An organic visitor is someone who got to your website by clicking on a link from a search engine results page. A lot of organic traffic is a strong indicator of the value of your content and SEO strategy.


• Paid Search: You’ll find any paid search (think Google AdWords) campaigns in this viewing pane. A lot of paid search traffic means that you’re Google AdWords are working well.


• Referral: This represents visitors that clicked a link on another site to land on your website. Years ago, before social media was what it is today, all other traffic (that wasn’t direct or organic) fell under the referral tab. Within the past few years, Google created a separate tab for social traffic, which makes it easy for marketers to focus in on just the websites that are driving traffic to their site. If you guest blog, this is the section to visit to see how much traffic is being driven to your site from your guest blogging efforts. A lot of referral traffic means that you’re being talked about (and linked to) from multiple other websites.


• Social: As a social media marketer, this is my favorite section within Google Analytics because it shows me exactly what social media channels drive the majority of traffic to my site. This data can be used to shape your social media strategy.


• Email: The number of visitors that came to your website from an email campaign. If you do a lot of email marketing, you’ll want to dig through here to see how effective your campaigns are.

Looking at the traffic channels will allow you to see which channel is the largest driver of traffic to your site. You’ll notice that the Channels are listed in order of driving power; the Channel at the top is the one that drives the majority of site traffic.

To dig deeper into the data, click each Channel to see more information.

For example, when I click Social, I can see the entire list of social media sites (again, listed in order of most to least powerful) that drove traffic to my website during the selected timeframe.

Analyzing the power of different channels will help you decide which efforts to focus on, and potentially spark ideas to increase traffic from other channel types.

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Make better marketing decisions by knowing who is sending you signups, not just which channels are sending traffic. Request a personal demo of Kissmetrics to learn more.

Here are a few ideas to increase traffic across all channel types:

• Direct: Share the link to your website with friends and family the next time you’re with them. Tell them to type it directly into their browser and voila! You just got a nice direct traffic boost.


• Organic Search: Make sure that you’re utilizing H1 and H2 tags, meta descriptions and keywords in all of your website pages and content updates. The stronger your SEO, the greater likelihood that someone will find you on a search engine.
  
• Paid Search: Try adjusting your keywords and/or targeting options to make your ads more relevant.


• Referral: Start reaching out to popular blogs and forums in your industry to see if you can guest post or perhaps be featured on their site. Contributing content to other sites is a great way to increase your referral traffic.


• Social: Increasing the frequency of your posting, and the number of links you share on social media will undoubtedly result in a boost of social traffic. I recommend increasing your efforts on one channel at a time to see what drives the largest impact. For example, make February your Twitter month; aim to tweet a lot of links that drive back to your website and at the end of the month, analyze the website traffic. Then, come March, turn that attention over to Facebook and see which social channel drove more traffic. (If you want to learn how to see which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website, refer to this Kissmetrics blog post that I wrote on setting up Advanced Segments.


• Email: Start including more calls to action and links in your email campaigns. Make sure that your calls to action stand out in your email templates and serve to drive people back to your website.

Once you’ve implemented some of these ideas, take the time to review the Channels breakdown again to see the impact of your efforts.

If your efforts to grow traffic from one channel go unnoticed in your analytics, try a different one!

For example, let’s say you have a ton of referral traffic and very little organic traffic. If your attempts to improve SEO and grow organic traffic have little impact, it’s probably not worth the effort. You’re better off continuing to guest blog, as it’s proven to be a critical marketing activity that is worth your time and effort.

Audience Demographics

Understanding who is visiting your site in terms of their age, location and gender is the best way to tailor your site to suit their interests and preferences.

If you want your website content and imagery to appease and resonate with your audience, you need to know who they are.

To find this information, head over to the Audience tab. You’ll want to focus on the sub-sections of Demographics and Geo.

First, let’s look at the Demographics of Age and Gender.

As you can see, the majority of my website visitors are aged 25-34, followed by those aged 35-44.

Knowing this, I aim to create content that is geared towards, and valued by, young professionals. Some examples are tips for professional development and advice for managers leading a team of employees.

Understanding how old your website visitors are, and whether they’re male or female, is helpful if you’re looking to capture their attention when they land on your site.

For example, if 90% of your website visitors are women, you could deliver a more personalized website experience for them by starting your “About” or “Welcome” page with “Hey ladies!”

Through analyzing the Gender section, I can see that the majority of my site visitors are female. It’s not skewed too heavily though, so I don’t want to tailor my site to females only. That’s why I’ve chosen my website colors to be black, white and green; I wanted to create a sleek and clean aesthetic that would be appealing to both men and women.

Digging in to the age and gender of your website visitors is useful if you want to craft creative content for your blog posts and website pages that captures their attention and gains their trust.

For example, telling your fans to “Treat yo self” to a free guide on your website isn’t going to resonate with individuals in their 60’s. However, it WILL get a chuckle from millennials.

Finally, you want to look to see where your website visitors are from. Looking at the Location tab under the “Geo” dropdown will show you the countries, states and cities of your website audience.

When you first click “Location” you’ll be shown the list of countries. Not surprisingly, the majority of my website visitors are from the United States.

Looking at the different states is a great way to gain insight that can be levered for any AdWords or paid Facebook campaigns you’re going to run. You want to target those states and cities that you see are frequenting your site.

I can see that New York dominates the results by a large margin. That’s not surprising since I live there and the majority of my mentors, friends and family live in New York as well.

Clicking on the individual states will bring you to the list of cities, within that state, that your website visitors come from.

Since I currently live in Buffalo, I’m not surprised to see Buffalo and other Western New York cities at the top of the list. I also see New York City, which is expected since that is where the majority of my friends and family reside.

If you don’t see your city as the top city, you might want to consider shifting your marketing strategy, and content, to target those in your geographic area.

Content Drilldown

Last but not least, it’s important to dive in to the content to see which pages people spend the most and least time on.

To do this, click the Behavior tab and go to the Site Content drop-down. You’ll want to look at the Content Drilldown, as well as Landing and Exit Pages to see which pages are most viewed on your website.

Content Drilldown is the overview of which pages on your website are visited the most.

Seeing which pages, and blog posts, are most viewed by your audience is helpful in guiding your web development strategy; you want to create more of what works.

Through analysis, I can see that my homepage and services page are the most popular. I can also see that the page on my site that has all of my marketing blogs is more popular that the blog page itself, which shows me that my audience values marketing content.

Now, you want to head over to the Landing Pages view in order to see what pages people are landing on when they get to your site.

The Landing Pages view is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your social media and promotional strategy, as you hope to see the blogs and website pages promoted most at the top.

For me, that would be my homepage, services page, free social media guide page and Bravery Beats blog post. Those pages are the ones that I promote the most, as they provide the most value and information that I find relevant for my audience.

It’s important to me to see my free social media guide at the top of the landing page list, as this page is a free giveaway that I’m using in part to provide value, and in part to build my email list.

Analyzing the traffic of this page is a good way for me to assess both the value and popularity of the giveaway.

If you don’t see your most important and/or promoted blog posts and website pages in the list of the top ten landing pages, it’s time to either reevaluate their value and/or your promotional strategy to ensure you’re driving traffic to those pages through social media and email marketing campaigns.

Spending time in the behavior section will allow you to develop an awareness of what content your website visitors find the most valuable. You can use this as a guide for what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to blog topics and page types.

For example, if you notice that the top visited pages are all blog posts about social media, yet none of your design blogs are ranking in the top, you want to spend more time blogging about social than you do about design.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool.

By paying attention to the demographics of your audience, you’ll be able to create content and imagery that you know your audience desires. This allows you to craft a customized and relevant site experience for your audience that will keep them coming back for more. (Thereby increasing your direct traffic!)

When you start monitoring your referral traffic, you’ll start to see which guest blogs are helping to increase your online visibility. This will help you save time by focusing only on the guest blogs that provide a return (in the form of website visits) on your content creation efforts. Similarly, by diving in to your social referrals, you’ll be armed with data to decide exactly which social media channels are the best to share your blog posts on.

By utilizing, analyzing, and focusing on these various sections within Google Analytics, you’ll have a deep understanding of who your audience is, what they want and how they find you.

About the Author: Julia Jornsay-Silverberg is a social media marketing consultant and coach with a passion for helping small businesses use social media to build brand awareness and connect with customers. Check out her free guide, “Socially Strategic” to help you get started strategically on social media. You can also find her on Twitter and Periscope.

3 Ways to Use Customer Behavior History to Predict the Future

Look, no one has a crystal ball at the ready to tell you who’s going to buy what, and how much, and when. Does that mean you have to wait around to see what a customer’s going to do? Of course not. You can learn a lot about your customers by studying their habits—past visits to your site—to predict what they’ll do next. It’s just a matter of knowing what information you need and when to use it.

From Search to Landing Page

One of your best friends when determining customer behavior predictions is your Google AdWords account. This program determines all the keywords your buyers searched, which of those searches resulted in clicks through to your site, and which of those clicks through resulted in a sale.

Once the buyers have clicked through from AdWords to a landing page on your site, you can use that information to lay a path from start to purchase. After all, you already know what they’re looking for. They told you when they searched Google for it. Should you slow them down in their search by leading them to a generic landing page? By creating more clicks instead of directing them right to the shopping cart and checkout? Of course not. When a buyer tells you what they want to buy, you remove all obstacles.

From Social Media to Website

It’s harder to pin down a visitor’s reason to stopping by when they come through social channels. The hardest of all is a click to the address in your company profile. You can assume that social proof is important to that buyer and react accordingly, but you won’t get much more information than that.

Clicks through from specific social posts, however, can tell you a lot more about the buyers’ thought process. Did they visit to read a particular blog? You might surmise they’re looking for more information. Did they click through an image of your hottest products? Maybe they’re in the market for one of those products, or maybe they just like to know what the trends are.

Every action on social marketing channels will help you narrow down the information you need, so don’t give up. The more information you have about your visitors’ past behavior, the easier you can predict where they’ll go next.

From First-Time Buyer to Loyal Shopper

Past purchases give you the greatest insight into buyer behavior, don’t they? That’s why you can’t consider the transaction complete once you’ve received payment. Now you know more about that buyer than you ever had, so you can’t just let them walk away forever.

The information you gather after this purchase will tell you what you need to know to move forward. Was the purchase a gift or something necessary to the buyer? Did he or she purchase accessories? Did the buyer spend a lot of time making a decision—evidenced by multiple visits to your site, comparisons between products, and perhaps even conversations with customer service?

What you learn will help you determine if you should continue providing gift ideas to the buyer or if they need more information about similar products for their own use. If they often buy the accessories needed to make your products bigger and better, then they’re probably going to appreciate upselling and cross-selling information.

You never want to make your use of past information creepy, so be careful when showing your hand. Buyers will appreciate a PPC click leading to a landing page, but they may not want to see ads for that exact product following them around for days after their initial search. They might enjoy their social media clicks leading to the right information on your website, but they may get a little freaked out if you strike up a Twitter conversation out of the blue. Your goal is to smooth the path between want and own, to provide the information buyers need as soon as they need it—not to be a stalker.

The Five-Step Process for Writing Powerful Call-to-Actions By Reverse-Engineering Customer Mindsets

For me, growth hacking is more than just a mindset. It’s about the desire to take tradition and flip it on its head. It’s about leveraging the way we’ve always done things and manipulating those processes to achieve a much better result. It’s about the various interpretations of data and the creative inspiration we draw from them to solve problems and create opportunities.

If you’re growing a product or a startup, you’re probably already aware of the importance of testing which calls-to-action drive the most adoption. Without supplying a nudge for a user to take action, you might get no traction at all, even though your offering may be outstanding.

A call-to-action is the final frontier, separating the discovery of your product’s value proposition and the actual journey a user will take to experience it. It’s like the starter’s gun on track day. After you have attracted users (i.e., runners) who have found the start line, then you need to motivate them to run the journey to the finish line (being a point at which your business objectives are met, such as making a sale, hopefully repeatedly).

Where to begin, though? You could start with the usual “buy now” or “start today” and keep A/B testing to find the most frictionless point of entry. But that approach, even though it may be effective, assumes what you’ve seen elsewhere is “best practice” and therefore should work.

What if you had a starting point so powerful it was almost an unfair advantage? Enter the psych-dive.

How Did This Come About?

I sat down with a psychologist friend of mine the other day, and after all the pleasantries were exchanged, we got to talking about product growth and human behavior. While I’m sure most psychologists are used to putting people on the spot, it was an interesting sight to see how uncomfortable I made him with the question I posed.

I asked something along the lines of: “Michael (name changed to protect his professional integrity), you deal with people and data sets all the time, and you know all about psychological profiling and making educated assumptions in order to help people overcome compulsions, right?”

“Yes,” he nervously replied.

That was my green light. “What would you need to do to turn the tables? To use profiling and data-driven stereotyping to amplify a compulsion?”

He paused, conflicted, partially by the thought of flipping his power for doing good on its head and partially by the surprise of such a request.

What followed was a discussion of the process one could use to profile, generalize, and deconstruct marketers’ tendencies to create more impulsive calls-to-action.

Flipping the Way a Psychologist Cures Compulsion

The main building blocks for the way a psychologist helps someone out of their compulsive need to do something include the following: helping them understand themselves, their habits, and their psychological needs and helping them understand how they use an addiction to fill those needs in an unhealthy way. A psychologist then helps them find new, healthier ways to address those needs (like using exercise to feel better instead of drugs).

Cognitive Modeling of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Source Paul M Salkovskis, Elsevier)

Theoretically, to reverse-engineer that process and increase the likelihood that someone would become compulsive around a product, you would do the opposite. You would try to keep them from being aware of themselves and their habits. You would keep them out of touch with themselves, and encourage them to use an easy, quick-fix solution.

This is already happening in real life. People use Facebook unconsciously. Users have never made an active decision to start spending a lot of their time online looking at other people's posts and photos. It just happens.

People rarely say they LOVE Facebook, or that Farmville is the BEST. They probably say something like, “I waste waaay too much time on Facebook” or “I spend sooo much money on my farm.” This compulsive relationship, albeit seemingly invasive, is a sign the user has been drawn in to the experience and is there to stay.

Ethically, there also are a lot of questions to answer here. Yes, your business needs to make money. That's the bottom line. However, at the same time, each person and business has some decisions to make about "how bad" something is. Most of us wouldn't rob people at gunpoint even if it was rather profitable, because that's just wrong. But most of us wouldn't feel too bad about selling chocolate cakes, even though chocolate cakes are technically bad for people.

Somewhere on that scale is a place where it starts to get a little gray. Is it unethical to deal drugs to poor people who can't afford them? Or, are they the ones who decide to buy the drugs and you're just providing a service? In other words, how comfortable are you with your business model and the extent to which you encourage/market/manipulate people into wanting your product?

With that said, here’s how to immerse yourself in the deep workings of your target audience for better calls-to-action.

Psych-Dive Analysis for Better CTA Triggers

Different segments of society are compulsive in different ways. You have an aging demographic that was brought up in the era of glorification of cigarettes and alcohol (before cigarette companies started to pay out compensation for smoking-related impairments), just like you have a sector of the technologically-native young adults who take to Snapchat and Candy Crush as if they were the only things keeping them interested in life.

Here are four steps for how to uncover compulsions in your key target audience and craft better calls-to-action from the get-go.

Step 1: Craft a Survey

To craft brilliantly effective calls-to-action laced with compulsion, you need to get a solid idea of how your typical market segment thinks and acts with other things generally considered compulsive behavior. These types of assumptions are easy to guess, especially if you classify yourself as similar to the very users you’re trying to target. But, like most assumptions, it’s easy to get it wrong.

Clarity around how your users become compulsive can only be achieved with research. If someone else has already done the hard work and you find your answers via a research piece on Google, then great. But, chances are, what has worked for someone else might not work for you. If, like 99% of scenarios, existing data just doesn’t cut it, you need to take charge and source these answers yourself.

The most effective (albeit, most annoying to respondents) method is a survey. It’s important to be concise if you intend to get a decent rate of response. I always try to keep my questionnaires to a maximum of 10 questions, and largely base these around behaviors. Behavioral questions are some of the most powerful insights into your target market because they unlock answers about how the user’s mind operates. I also ensure absolute anonymity to increase the likelihood of natural responses.

Questions you ask here should serve the purpose of unlocking insights into the behavior of your target audience. These are questions that, once collated to create an overall persona, tell you exactly what motivates their actions.

With limited bandwidth, each question in your survey needs to count. So how do you decide what to ask? Humans, regardless of demography or psychography, always “want” something. Generally those things include elements of personal, social, and career life. Here are three things to consider when formulating questions for your survey:

Biological Compulsion

It’s easy to understand and relate to biological urges to eat and sleep. Questions that relate to demand-based acquisition of biological needs and desires that truly make us “human” can unlock a lot about what intrinsically motivates a user. Biological compulsions cannot really be switched off, and they drive our very existence.

Primal instinct at its finest. Deliveroo’s “Find Food” call-to-action says it like it is.

Experimental and Social Compulsion

Another great avenue for discovering compulsion is to explore things like relationships, social interactions, and drug and alcohol use. These types of insights can tell you if a user relies on external influences to trigger a decision. A great CTA in this instance would be something like “Join your friends” or “Let’s socialize” because these tap into urges to be “connected.”

When all you want to do is belong, click Meetup’s “Start a Meetup” call-to-action.

Aspirational Compulsion

Finally, studying attitudes about money, career, and material things can help you understand how a user may be motivated to part with their money to make a pain point go away, as well as what their end goals are in life. This assists with understanding what angle you need to take in order to get a user to believe they “need” your product. If you’re aware that your target audience is driven by the desire to excel in life, you’ll be able to create a CTA that reflects this, like “Make money now.”

By tying in the money aspect, Uber’s call-to-action attracts exactly the type of driver they want.

It’s also a good idea to provide an incentive for completing the survey. This method may be frowned upon by market research experts who argue that an incentive will skew results. But I’m of the belief that, with enough responses, those that are skewed positively or negatively will be outweighed by the respondent majority. SurveyMonkey has a great little guide to calculate how many responses you need for statistical confidence.

The incentive could be as simple as offering use of your product for free for the first year, or a substantial discount, or a limited early access. Alternatively, it could pay to supplement your survey with incentives of products or services that target the same market segment you do (for example, a free three-month trial of a non-competing and popular SaaS product).

The way to do this is to include an optional field at the end of the survey that asks for an email address and stipulates that the email will only be used to notify the person about their eligibility for your incentives.

Step 2: Find Your Market

Once you have your survey and incentives ready, it’s time to get your target audience to actually take your survey. Finding people to complete it can be hard. If your target audience is easy to locate physically, try going there and asking as many people as possible to take it. If you have contacts that are highly influential in your target market, try to leverage them.

Alternatively, you can always post your survey to an online medium that your target audience uses prolifically. Or, you can demographically and geographically target your audience through paid advertising.

For example, we compiled a survey at GRONADE for a recruitment startup. Once the survey was ready to go, we sent it out to the founder’s existing database. We supplemented those responses using LinkedIn’s ad targeting system, targeting by job role, seniority, and geography, for better quality survey results.

Targeting the right audience for a survey using LinkedIn

Step 3: Supplement Your Data

When you’ve collected your responses and have an idea of what the general consensus is about the behavioral activity of your target audience, it helps to get extra context. A good idea is to take your target market criteria and search for census and journal research data that provides supplementary information about your target audience.

For example, if you’ve discovered that your dominant target market is entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, it might be beneficial to also search for information about what they earn, how uncomfortable their living arrangements are, or even how well they do at mathematics (see page 45 of the 2015 Silicon Valley Index). This helps you build a complete profile of your audience and helps you make better decisions about what might motivate them to click your call-to-action.

Searching Google for related journals on the survey topic

With census data, you get a very particular insight into household, employment, financial, and cultural information. Some journals and other market research (which has been made public) might help you understand saturation data around device and app usage, and maybe even motivations for what makes a specific user set purchase.

Step 4: Create Hypotheses about Your Market

So now you have your collected your survey responses and supplementary data. This collection of knowledge about your potential user base is pretty powerful. With this information, you’re able to create hypotheses around what makes your audience “compulsive.”

In any particular demographic, you're not often going to have just one psychological profile, but many. Every person has a pretty unique cocktail of needs, wishes, and desires based on who they are, how they grew up, and what's on their mind.

Here are some example assumptions from previous research we performed at GRONADE. If we were to address a segment of Australian males aged 18 to 21, some common threads we could leverage are:

• Isolation: They feel lonely and want to be closer or more connected to other people. It’s the same reason people do ecstasy (which promotes feelings of closeness) as a drug and use Facebook – it makes them feel as if they’re bonding, they have friends, and there’s some kind of common ground.


• Boredom: Life doesn’t seem interesting. Their job is boring and nothing new is happening. They need to find something to keep themselves entertained. This is where the thrill of trying something dangerous, like drugs at a wild party or solo skydiving, comes in to play. It’s also the driver of many television successes like House of Cards and Breaking Bad because they can immerse themselves in something far more exciting as an escape. They live vicariously through television characters.


• Distraction: Things aren't going well. There is a problem at work, at home, with relationships, or they just doesn't feel good about themselves. They feel anxious, stressed, or worried. Something offers a distraction, often one that numbs or soothes the pain or stress. They’ll use any means to distract and relax, such as scrolling through Instagram, instantly responding to snaps via Snapchat, or they'll smoke. It’s a way to deal with anxiety at the expense of productivity.


• Lack of purpose/accomplishment: They feel they are not achieving anything and not getting anywhere. Some habits, like playing World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or Angry Birds make people feel as if they’re really getting somewhere or making a difference (like saving lives and becoming a war hero) and that makes up for the fact that their real lives don’t offer much sense of accomplishment.

Most people aren't very aware of their own psychological needs. If you ask someone why they bought a Ferrari, they will say, "because I have always loved cars" not "because I feel unaccomplished and having an expensive car makes me feel important and powerful" (i.e., it's signaling my status).

You could guess at someone's inner needs through lots of clues (such as appearance, behavior, and purchasing habits). Someone who buys expensive brand name clothing might be giving a clue that they care a lot about looking important. Or, it might be a clue that they care a lot about fitting in, so they buy what all their friends are buying.

Step 5: Call-To-Action Logic

Brainstorm a list of words that come to mind when you assess the results you have. When you have a healthy list of around 10 to 20 words, use Thesaurus.com to expand the set of keywords to a list of action words you feel will have the greatest impact.

Use a thesaurus for alternative keywords to impact assumption trigger words

Select five of your favorite, most evocative keywords to kick-start your initial A/B test batch of calls-to-action. This is a good start for your experiment to learn the most effective call-to-action to use.

The best approach to find a CTA that works is to tap in to the fears and attributes you uncovered in your research. If we use the commonalities I mentioned above for middle-class Australian men aged 18 to 21, we could assume the following five calls-to-action would be a good foundation group. Of course, these should be tailored to the actual product you’re offering, though in these examples, I’m representing the most obvious results based on the research:

1. Be Together, Now (playing on the isolation aspect and the longing for connectedness)


2. Your Thrills Await (a counter to the boredom aspect)


3. Escape Today (a ticket away from the mundane)


4. Make a Difference (a way to satisfy the desire for accomplishment)


5. Take Control (a real power move in a world where sometimes all seems out of control)

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you still need a compelling offer. If your product sucks, no psychological trickery is going to vacuum fat stacks out of someone’s wallet.

Apple never says, "If you use Apple products, you're smart, creative, and stylish.” It’s just implied.

If you have something people will feel good about using or buying and you can create a compelling action-point for your core target audience to begin the journey and use your product, it’s a much stronger position to be in.

To do that, you need to become intimate with who your target audience really is, how they behave, what makes them feel compelled to take action, and then speak their language to engage their trigger finger. If you can do that enough times and can keep them happy, engaged, and converting repeatedly on specific business objectives, that is a sure-fire recipe for growth.

About the Author: Tomer Garzberg is the CEO and Founder at GRONADE Growth Partnerships. They grow seed- and venture-capital-funded startups and enterprise products. GRONADE is a blend of man and machine on a mission to systematize growth. Say Hi on Twitter @TomerGarzberg.