It goes without saying that the past year has been a time of momentous change for marketers. In previous articles, I addressed how CMOs and leaders have had to navigate an array of emerging trends, from new digital demands and customer preferences to growing workforce dispersion and diversity. These shifts have undoubtedly reshaped the marketing landscape as we know it and led leaders to seek new operating models and digital solutions to keep pace.

Now, as ongoing global disruption ushers in a new digital and hybrid era, it’s time for leaders to embrace that there’s no turning back. According to McKinsey, the future of work is hybrid, and Forrester dubbed 2022 the “year to be bold” as demands only grow stronger. Strategic marketing leaders must reshape their agenda in line with these new realities to find success this year.

So, where should leaders focus as they reenvision their organizations for the road ahead? Let’s look at the top four areas leaders must prioritize to gain a competitive advantage in 2022:

1. The cost of ineffective communication: Overcome the growing business impact of poor communication to adapt and scale.

Success in a digital workplace requires agility to reinvent operations, but one essential—and overlooked—factor hinders marketers from driving growth: ineffective communication.

In fact, new data released by Grammarly and The Harris Poll estimates U.S. businesses lose up to $1.2 trillion annually due to poor workplace communication—or $12,506 per employee every year. This is especially true for communications-heavy functions like marketing. And now, evolving workforce and customer demands are continuing to amplify the impact of poor communication across organizations.

From the surge of e-commerce and omnichannel to the rapid adoption of new digital tools, brands and customers are showing up and interacting in more ways and places than ever before. In this landscape, achieving clear, compelling, and consistent communication—no matter the channel or context—is critical for both productivity and engagement.

By building a foundation of effective communication internally and externally, leaders will build resilience to grow faster, control costs, and create reimagined experiences for customers and employees alike.

2. CX as a growth driver: Address ongoing market disruptors by delivering exceptional experiences that balance quality and efficiency.

New market disruptions are driving a renewed focus on the brand and customer experience, at a time when it’s increasingly critical to business success.

As consumer spending continues to overwhelm supply chains, experts predict that inflation and higher prices will continue to worsen. This will lead to a far higher bar in customer expectations to pay those prices. In response, CX will reach a critical turning point this year as business and marketing leaders must double down on the customer experience to justify rising costs and keep pace with demands.

Success for brands will come down to a delicate balance of meeting customer expectations with both quality and efficiency—i.e., keeping up with high spending patterns while delivering a better, more consistent experience. Leaders must overcome unwanted brand variability across channels and equip teams with the right tools to quickly and consistently meet customer needs.

Those who deliver consistently compelling experiences will gain an advantage so that when supply chains normalize, they’ve cemented a loyal customer base.

3. The rise of employee empowerment: Engage employees—and customers—by building an empowered work environment that promotes confidence.

Marketers can no longer ignore that the employee and customer experience are inextricably linked. Successful CX depends on first building engaged, productive teams who effectively represent the brand.

But from the “Great Resignation” that shows no signs of slowing down to increasing globalization creating more cross-cultural teams, it’s never been more challenging to engage and retain all employees. In a world where employees have increasing choice, delivering exceptional employee experiences will become a foremost differentiator. In fact, research shows business leaders are prioritizing employee satisfaction and retention this year—ahead of team productivity and customer satisfaction. 

Leaders that deliver a new, location-agnostic approach to EX—i.e., reinventing experiences to be engaging and seamless, no matter the location or context—will come out ahead. Employee empowerment will be at the core of this approach as leaders must embrace new tools and strategies designed to enhance employees’ potential, grow their confidence, and help them be more productive wherever they are.

This focus on empowerment will underpin the digital workplace, lead to new customer and brand experiences, and redefine productivity with experience at the center. 

4. Empathy as an imperative: Prioritize the human connection to meet customer and employee needs.

In many ways, the constraints of the past two years often made interactions more impersonal and transactional. This lack of human connection has left customers and employees alike desiring more empathy and emotionally sensitive support from employers and brands.

But that’s a daunting task when paired with the shift to a hybrid workplace and influx of digital touchpoints that have cropped up in recent months. This leaves marketers with a dual challenge: Keep pace with the sheer amount of interactions happening across systems while delivering higher quality in all of those engagements.

In response, leaders must invest in empathy in the workplace as a strategic business priority. Human-centric technologies play a vital role in this process by helping teams move faster while maintaining the humanity of a brand. With automated and integrated solutions like communication augmentation platforms, leaders can infuse more of a human touch, strike the right tone, and create more genuine connections with employees and customers in all the places they’re already engaging.

___________

As we tread forward, CMOs and marketing leaders must embrace that uncertainty is the only constant they can expect. As Forrester emphasized, the time to be bold is now—and tremendous opportunity awaits for those who reimagine the status quo.

By focusing on the above areas—investing in effective communication, delicately balancing new customer and employee needs, and prioritizing empathy and human connection—marketers will be well-poised to adapt and grow this year and beyond.

___________

For more on how to reimagine success in the hybrid-work era and the business impact of poor communication, download the report, “The State of Business Communication: The Backbone of Business Is Broken,” and visit www.grammarly.com/business. 

This sponsored article was written by Dorian Stone, head of organizations revenue, Grammarly.

The post CMOs, put these 4 trends at the top of your agenda for success this year appeared first on Search Engine Land.

You’ve worked hard to turn the engagement from your recent marketing campaign into leads. Once your suspects have become prospects who’ve finally reached the scoring threshold, you toss the leads over the proverbial wall for sales to work. Later, you learn that after an initial push, your warm marketing leads have gone cold. This is because sales prioritized their list over the leads you sent to them. Moreover, sales doesn’t want you to do any marketing to their prioritized list because you lack the context of the relationships they are actively cultivating. This results in them not sharing data with you.

Misaligned goals. Poor execution due to a lack of communication. A dearth of shared, reliable data. All of it culminates in low trust between the two teams. It’s an illustration of the kind of scenario that can cause a deep divide between sales and marketing. And it impacts revenue.

So what do you do? Let’s take a look at how to fix the funnel.

Use a Buying Group Marketing strategy

According to Forrester, 94% of B2B purchasing decisions are made by buying groups and not individuals. Using a traditional Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach these days is not enough. You have to go more granular to reach the right contacts. You have to go to the buying group.

Buying Group Marketing (BGM) focuses on engaging the key decision-makers inside your target accounts. This approach is about continually monitoring sentiment and engagement with buying groups within your target accounts to curate marketing and sales experiences accordingly. For instance, a finance buying group member likely has different concerns than an IT buying group member. Your content, creative, and delivery should be designed around that.

While traditional solutions have not been sophisticated enough to reliably identify and engage with buying groups, new technologies are emerging that measure probabilities of conversion for the group. Influ2’s Person-Based Advertising solution is a BGM enabler. Person-Based Advertising allows you not only to capture buyer engagement at an individual and buying group level. The score indicates how ripe the individuals are for outreach. This data can then be operationalized through the funnel and in existing workflows through platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Outreach. This allows marketers to notify sales about the engagement activity of the contacts they care most about.

Rethink the MQL

In the life of a lead, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is typically the link where ‘ownership’ passes from the hands of marketing into the hands of sales. Marketing and sales often work independently on either side of the MQL wall.

Marketing casts the content net wide into the sea of possible prospects. Sales goes narrow, addressing specific needs and hot buttons of individuals. When the lead is qualified by marketing, it passes from one world to the next—broad to narrow.

If the MQL is the main KPI you report on as a marketer, it’s not enough. Imagine a world where sales and marketing could work together throughout the entire life cycle of the lead—from initial awareness to closed deal. Getting rid of the MQL would unify the funnel into one holistic buyer’s journey where sales and marketing activities are not separate concepts but rather a well-coordinated effort targeting the entire buying group. It uses all the tools in the toolbox with surgical precision. A holistic effort such as this focuses on the buyer’s experience. A Buying Group Engagement score is a sales and marketing shared metric that could help to better align the teams and provide valuable insight to push the entire account across the finish line.

Our data shows that engaged buying groups get approximately a 2.5x boost in conversion rates on average versus non-engaged buying groups. Marketing that results in engagement at the sales development stage is priceless. In fact, one of our clients who targeted advertising at buying groups even deep in the funnel had great results. Buying groups that engaged with their advertising at the ‘demo stage’ had a 1.5x increase in conversion and at the ‘evaluation stage’ had a 2x increase in conversion.

This is a whole new way of working!

Sales and marketing teams working together

In many companies marketing and sales alignment begins and ends with a joint meeting to define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) so that teams target the right prospects. While BGM requires sales and marketing collaboration through the entire funnel, it’s also especially important messaging is aligned through each stage of the journey.

Without an MQL, the sales development team can prioritize the buying group engagement to hold warm conversations. But keep in mind that while priority goes to buying group engagement, any engagement with marketing effort is a sign of interest. If a target clicks on your ad, there is interest, so salespeople should be aware of every click.

At a high level, working together includes:

• Aligning on strategy, covering areas such as buying group architecture and approaches, personas, personalization, and privacy.
• Creating a relevant experience: from copy to creative from awareness to closed deals, handcrafting buyer experiences to reach prospects as individuals and not types.
• Shared metrics: aligning marketing and sales metrics to end results and each other.

In the end, fixing the broken sales-marketing funnel will drive a different way of working.

It will require a much closer orchestration of activities through the funnel, one where everyone has a clear understanding and agreement about strategy, target audience, and the ideal customer profile. One where operationally, your systems are aligned to your strategy to keep the data flowing. You must define what types of data are critical to your business and what parts of the process you can automate. And you must have regular communication between sales and marketing teams to ensure that you carefully design and administer around the journey, putting the customer where they should be—in the center.

If you would like to learn more about how to implement a Buying Group Marketing strategy, please contact us.

The post How to fix the broken sales-marketing lead funnel appeared first on Search Engine Land.

In our guide to Core Web Vitals tactics using Cloudflare and WebpageTest, we outlined basic requirements for using Cloudflare as a reverse proxy for testing tactical HTML changes with WebpageTest. Our version of the test is simplified from Patrick Meenan’s original concept, which uses HTMLRewriter() to select an element and modify code.

We’re going in-depth with this tutorial, but if you’re just looking for the Cloudflare Worker script, you can find it here.

Our first installment noted that it won’t keep up with changes at Search Engine Land. The LCP was hard-coded and we would need it to interact with a dynamic page and its values. While WebpageTest has, at the time of publication, the most well-thought-out waterfall chart and more details than you can imagine, it isn’t the fastest way to get results.

Lighthouse from the Command Line

Running the Lighthouse CLI (Command Line Interpreter) program with --extra-headers options needed for the test allows us to also simulate standard settings for Core Web Vitals the way we did with WebpageTest. You’ll need to work from a terminal emulator.

The easiest way to install Lighthouse is with NPM (Node Package Manager). Once installed, run the following statement:

$ lighthouse https://sel.deckart.workers.dev
--extra-headers "{"x-host":"searchengineland.com", "x-bypass-transform":"false"}"
--form-factor=mobile
--throttling.cpuSlowdownMultiplier=4
--only-categories=performance
--view

The evolution of our Testbed

Our aim is to demonstrate an evolution from an original concept for a testbed to a project suitable for our future events and articles. The testbed should not be confined to running performance evaluations; that’s just where we’ll start. But, it has to work fairly well for a number of situations with websites and this can prove pretty difficult. We’ll supply methods to help.

For example, sites often use relative paths to asset resources rather than absolute (with HTTP protocol and all). We’ll supply a block to match these so HTML will generally work. After applying this, when things still don’t work, switching troublesome references between the test and test subject hostnames often does the trick, even for CORS policy violations.

That’s where the beauty of Cloudflare’s HTMLRewriter() really shines. Site-wide assets are usually loaded as page HEAD child elements. With flexibility matching like jQuery, even similar syntax, we can select child elements of HEAD when necessary. You can use XPath selectors and regular expressions. Let’s keep it simple and look for relative paths that start with “/” for src or href attributes:

return new HTMLRewriter()
  .on('link', {
    element: el => {
      link_href = el.getAttribute('href');
      if (link_href && link_href.startsWith('/')) {
        el.setAttribute('href', 'https://' + host + link_href);
      }
    }
  })
  .on('script', {
    element: el => {
      script_src = el.getAttribute('src');
      if (script_src && script_src.startsWith('/')) {
        el.setAttribute('src', 'https://' + host + script_src);
      }
    }
  })
  .on('img', {
    element: el => {
      img_src = el.getAttribute('src');
      if (img_src && img_src.startsWith('/')) {
        el.setAttribute('src', 'https://' + host + img_src);
      }
    }
  })

We’re leveraging the power (and cost effectiveness) of Edge Computing to conduct seriously useful tests. Modify the x-host request header to load different sites in the testbed and open DevTools. Transformations may not be needed, but your mileage will vary. Frontend experience gives you a feel for it.

Comment blocks like switches will fail and require a little experimentation (which may be all you need). For example, some asset references may be spelled without HTTP colon. You would need to write another conditional to check for paths where href or src starts with “//” and then modify the selected element value in the script. Try to end up with no console errors the actual site doesn’t have.

Lighthouse gives you LCP

It’s relatively easy to retrieve LCP references using Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights or WebpageTest. Presuming the LCP qualifies for preload, like when it’s not a <div> or a <p>, and when it isn’t already getting preloaded, provide our script the href value by URL ‘query param’ structure (or return HTML with a form) to test for changes to a page’s LCP timing with preload.

Most technical SEO practitioners are handy at modifying request query parameters to process different things in server-side programs, like Google search results. Using the same interface, our script will preload the LCP using the path you apply in the “lcp” parameter value and passes it to a function called addPreloadAfter() for interpolating HTML for the test.

async function handleRequest(request) {
  const { searchParams } = new URL(request.url);
  let lcpHref = searchParams.get("lcp");

  return new HTMLRewriter()
    .on('title', addPreloadAfter(lcpHref))
  .transform(newResponse);
}

The addPreloadAfter() function takes our “lcpHref” value from searchParams.get() and processes it as “href” to build HTML.

const addPreloadAfter = (href) => ({
  element: (el) => {
    el.after(`<link rel="preload" href="${href}" />`, { html: true });
  }
});

Notice the option “html: true”? This is an option setting Cloudflare requires for safety when using Workers with HTMLRewriter() API methods that write HTML. You are going to want to learn its capabilities and constraints for coding your own tests.

Cloudflare’s KV

If we’re ever going to do anything remotely interesting, we need a way to store persistent data between script executions. Luckily, Cloudflare also offers a neat little data storage mechanism called KV that we can bind with our Workers to store a small data ‘value‘ field, accessible by its ‘key.’ It’s surprisingly easy to comprehend and implement. To demonstrate how to use it we’ll write a quick little hit counter.

const counter = await KV.get("counter");

if (!host || counter > 1000) {
  return new Response('hit limit exceeded or x-host missing', {status: 403});
} else {
  await KV.put("counter", parseInt(counter) + 1);
}

Find the KV navigation menu item under Workers.

Once you’ve created a Namespace (“SEL” is used in the example above), use the KV dashboard UI to create your first Key (‘counter‘ in the above case) and assign a starting value. Once set up, navigate back to the Worker dashboard for the interface required to bind our new KV Namespace with Cloudflare Workers so they can access Keys and the associated stored Values.

Bind KV Namespaces to Workers

Choose the Worker you want to bind with and click its Settings menu to find the submenu for Variables (directly under General). Notice you can define environment variables, Durable Object Bindings (which we’ll explore in a future installment), and finally KV Namespace Bindings. Click Edit Variables and add the Variable you want to use in script.

In the following case, you can see our redundantly named ‘KV‘ variable that we’ll be using in the associated Worker script, the one we navigated from. Our use of ‘KV‘ was named for illustrative purposes. Select it from the dropdown, save it, and you’ll immediately be able to use your variable in the script. Create as many scripts and KV Namespaces combinations as you like.

The trick is remembering to bind a Variable you want used in the Worker. It’s so flexible that you can feel free to munge about and make a mess at first. You’ll probably be able to organize it into something cohesive at a later date, which is exactly what you want for being able to prototype applications or author Microservices for use in your applications.

Once you’ve gotten your KV service and starting values set up, navigate back to the Worker and open the built-in “Quick Edit.” Replace what’s there with this updated gist, which includes the hit counter, and everything else written about in this post. Click “Save and Deploy” and you should have the service up and running at your publicly available, Workers demo URL.

Why we care

Our original guide was meant to whet your appetite, get you excited to start and excited for more valuable learning. In order to supply that, we have a free platform and code combination that is simple enough to understand on its own, coupled with a process that should be easy enough to follow and achieve a test result.

Standardizing website testing to demonstrate SEO to developers shouldn’t require understanding code when you can copy and paste script into Cloudflare, follow steps and test certain SEO tactics. Core Web Vitals tests are about as reliable as we’re going to get for improving RUM (Real User Metrics) performance scores for a boost in rankings, given how metrics dependent it is.

The post Evolving Core Web Vitals tactics using Cloudflare and WebpageTest appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Neeva, the ad-free, private search engine co-founded by former SVP of Google Ads Sridhar Ramaswamy, has launched a free basic subscription as an alternative to its full-featured subscription, which costs $4.95 per month. While a worldwide rollout is planned, both subscriptions are currently only available to users in the U.S.

Why we care. Newer search engines, like Neeva, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, are finding novel ways to differentiate themselves from Google and Bing by rallying behind a unique selling point to appeal to a niche, but enthusiastic user base. A subscription fee can be a strong deterrent for new user acquisition, and Neeva is notably one of the few search engines that charges one.

“Even with a limited trial period, hundreds of thousands of users search with Neeva every month, and we think that the introduction of a free tier will drive this to new heights,” the company said in the announcement. If Neeva’s free offering gains traction, search marketers may need to pay attention as organic campaigns will be crucial for reaching Neeva’s users.

However, if free users don’t upgrade to the paid subscription, Neeva may have to adjust its strategy, especially if it can’t compensate for the additional cost of those users with ad revenue.

Free vs. premium. Free subscribers have access to Neeva’s ad-free search engine, however, customization options may be limited.

The premium subscription includes everything in the free subscription, but also includes access to Neeva’s latest search features, membership in a Neeva-hosted community, access to a monthly Q&A with the founders and additional privacy tools, such as a VPN and password manager.

RELATED: Neeva’s ‘FastTap Search’ feature presents direct links instead of a results page

The post Neeva seeks to expand user base with free subscriptions appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Referrals are the lifeblood of any business, accounting for as much as 65% of new business. However, your former clientele isn’t the only source of referral –you also have realtors! The value of connecting with real estate agents is clear –you share the same consumers and complement each other’s services. 

However, while it’s an obvious avenue for mortgage referrals, few pros know how to get referrals from agents. Fewer still know how to keep a steady stream of qualified leads flowing. 

(Offering to buy them lunch or coffee won’t cut it)

In this article, we’re going to give you three actionable strategies to help you build a robust network of real estate professionals that will enthusiastically refer their homebuyers to you.

Let’s dive in.

How to get more qualified mortgage referrals From Real Estate Agents

Drop The Sales Pitch. Build Relationships.

Realtors are excellent salespeople, so they’ll appreciate a good pitch when they hear one. However, coming off too “sales-y” will have the opposite effect you’re hoping for. You might start to sound like competition, making the agent resistant to anything you might have to offer.

Let’s also remember that realtors are not your end consumers. They’re your colleagues and referral partners.

Here’s how to have a “building a relationship” approach that effortlessly encourages more agents to give you leads:

• Learn about the agent. Research the realtor to know more about their business style, clients they serve, and strengths. Even info about associations, hobbies, or other interests could come in handy when getting to know a potential referral partner. 
• Make the first conversations light. Don’t always talk business. Agents often get approached by loan officers looking to take them out to lunch and explore how they can “partner up.” Don’t be that basic mortgage pro. Instead, keep the first meeting friendly and personal. Congratulate them on a recent accomplishment or other noteworthy bits of news. 
• Share your value (but don’t brag). Casually sharing how many referrals you’re getting and how happy those clients are is a subtle way to hype yourself up without pushing it. It’s also a way of letting them know that you are open to receiving referrals and are successful at seeing it through to completion. 

Partner With Them In Social Media Marketing

Here’s what we know: Real Estate Agents are some of the most active professionals on social media. In fact, an estimated 90% of all 2 million licensed real estate agents use social media for marketing their services regularly.

This fact alone underscores their ability to be powerhouse networkers and your most lucrative ally for getting more qualified referrals. 

The key to getting “in” is not to pitch them, to echo the above point. Instead, you need to focus on creating a reciprocating relationship that genuinely adds as much value to their business as it would to yours. Here are some ideas to get started doing just that:

• Help cross-promote special events like live virtual open house events. 
• You can also offer to participate in the event via chat or live stream to answer questions from participants about home financing. 
• Create real estate-related centered content such as articles, infographics, or videos that you can co-brand with the agent. 
• Better still, have them publish the original content on their site and link back to your site for an additional SEO boost.
• Continuing the spirit of offering free valuable content, reach out to their email list. If you’re not already aware, email lists have one of the highest conversion rates. So if your agent has a list of a few hundred emails that they organically grew, it can prove to be a white-hot lead source. 
• Engage with the agent’s social media. Go beyond just liking every post and take the time to comment with additional insight or echo their sentiment. 

Leverage Your Digital Mortgage Tools and Co-Branding Opportunities

Historically, the real estate profession has been historically an in-person profession –at least when it comes to doing open houses and showing properties to potential buyers. So when the industry was suddenly thrown into virtual-only, it posed a significant challenge. 

Fortunately, it seems that both the industry and consumers have embraced a virtual way of home buying as a welcomed alternative to traditional in-person. And much like in the mortgage industry, technology in real estate is proving to be a significant boost to revenue potential.

As such, real estate agents look to partner with technologically savvy mortgage professionals. Products like our co-brandable mortgage mobile app Loanzify are a popular and valuable tool that agents can easily share with their clients. It’s free for the agent and consumer to use, and it’s packed with resources, information, and interactive tools that lead all users back to you. 

Loanzify POS is another tool you can use to win over more real estate referral partners. Keeping every interested party informed is hard, and miscommunication is a major cause of delayed funding and unhappy customers. With Loanzify POS, the agent can have secure access to the loan file with a pre-determined level of access.  They can also be assigned to specific loans.

From the agent’s admin view can see where the borrower is in their journey to approval and can even download the borrower’s preapproval letter to submit with their offers. 

Real estate agents are a powerful resource for finding quality leads, but only you make a conscious and strategic effort. Remember that when you approach it from building lasting relationships, you make it a win-win for everyone. Make it personal, overdeliver, be social and genuine, and leverage your mortgage technology every chance you get. 

Want to learn more about implementing mortgage tech to win over more referral partners? Click below to try it out for free and schedule a live demo with one of our helpful account executives.

Learn More