Google Adds NEW Interactive Ad Format Targeting Gamers

As paid search advertisers, it’s our job to get the right information to the right people and the right time. We spend countless hours crafting super-specific keyword lists, setting negatives and writing clear ad copy to ensure we’re attracting a highly relevant, qualified audience. Yet, bad clicks still sneak their way through and can dramatically impact conversion rates.

When it comes to mobile devices, a few additional challenges come into play. Since there’s minimal ad real estate on the mobile SERP, advertisers have limited space to “explain themselves” to prospects. Google often serves fewer ad extensions alongside these ads and sometimes even ditches the second line of copy to make room for them.

On top of this, mobile users tend to click more hastily than desktop users. Consider the last few times you conducted a search on a mobile device—I’d be willing to bet that you were multitasking, on-the-go or needed something urgently. In these scenarios, you probably weren’t devoting much time to scroll down the SERP, read each listing thoroughly and select the one that was the best fit for your needs. Instead, most of us click on one of the first listings we see and, if the landing page doesn’t meet our needs, we head right back to the SERP. This is a troubling phenomenon for advertisers, who are paying a pretty penny to bring people their sites.

The search giants recognize that this is a problem and are exploring new, interactive ad formats to reduce the clicks from unqualified searchers. Interactive ads are golden because they allow advertisers to “run an interference” prior to the click. They have the opportunity to showcase their offerings and show users exactly how they can help them before they click through to the landing pages.

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In the past year, Google released dynamic ad formats for the automotive, finance and hotel industry and, just this week, they introduced their latest, most-innovative ad format for the mobile SERP—Trial Run Ads for gaming apps.

NEW! Trial Run Ads for Gaming Apps

When it comes to gaming apps, the goal isn’t simply to convince people to download your product. With most games ranging from $0 to $2.99, this certainly wouldn’t be a very lucrative game-plan. Instead, most app developers make a significant portion of their profits from in-app advertisements. So, their goal is to create games that people want to download AND engage with frequently over a long period of time.

Developers have step one of this process down; people are downloading games like crazy. According to Google, a whopping 41% percent of all apps downloaded in 2015 were games. However, not all of them manage to keep users hooked for the long-term. In fact, one quarter of all installed apps are never even used.

This past December, Google released a brand-new, interactive ad format just for game developers called Trial Run Ads. It’s now extending this format to appear on the Search Network, too (in beta)! With Trial Run Ads, searchers have an option to ‘Try Now’ directly within the ad and test drive the game in a 10-minute free trial before actually downloading it.

Although this isn’t Google’s first foray into interactive ads, it is, by far, the most interactive ad format we’ve seen released thus far.

Who’s Next?

Good question! Google has hinted that it is prioritizing new ad formats for the industries that spend the most in paid search and this new rollout falls directly in line with that strategy (consumer electronics companies are big AdWords spenders). AdWords has released unique ad formats for various other “big spenders” (buy buttons for online retailers, insurer ratings, credit card and mortgage ads for the finance industry, hotel ads for travel marketers and automotive carousel ads for the automobile industry).

So, if I had to place bets on who is next in line, I’d guess the home and garden industry. How cool would it be to peruse new houses or apartments from directly within an ad? That said, it’s impossible to predict what Google has up its sleeve! Stay tuned.

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Google Adds NEW Interactive Ad Format Targeting Gamers

The Ultimate Content Planning Tool That Every WordPress Blogger Needs

When you fail to plan, you plan to fail. This timeless quote from the well-renowned Benjamin Franklin sums up the tough task of getting enough hours out of our day to accomplish our goals. It’s no secret that finding time to blog is a limited resource, which is one of the top 5 marketing challenges for businesses.

Even if you aren’t a business owner, hobby bloggers can find themselves strapped for time. But beyond not having enough hours in a day, it’s also difficult to effectively promote your blog so it can grow to its full potential.

Whether you’re a hobby blogger or a business, planning and promoting is an essential key to blogging success. Effective planning and promotional tools can help add more hours to your day so you can spend more time blogging and less time worrying over your publishing schedule and social media posts.

To get the most out of your blogging, you need a cohesive, all-in-one content planning tool to take your blog to the top—and undoubtedly the best tool on the market is CoSchedule.

CoSchedule: The Secret to Getting Sleep, Writing Your Blog, And Having Time to Spare

Have you ever wondered how successful people seem to have all the time in the world to manage their blog with time to spare? The truth is that they have the same number of hours in a day as you do, but they’ve learned to manage their time extremely efficiently.

When it comes to maximizing your time and getting the most out of your blog, CoSchedule streamlines the process while making you more productive and efficient. Blogging can certainly be a time-consuming process, but CoSchedule is a top-performer for keeping your schedule on track.

But what exactly is CoSchedule, and how does it work?

CoSchedule defines itself as a drag-and-drop content calendar that allows you to plan, publish, and promote your content all from one place. Its competitive edge against other content planners is its ability to combine the Three Ps—planning, publishing, and promoting—into one platform. From there, it integrates posts directly from WordPress or Google Drive so you can update or edit with the click of a button.

Without CoSchedule, both hobby bloggers and businesses will have to use a variety of platforms and resources separately, which takes up tons of time.

These resources include:

• A content calendar created from a place such as Google Drive. Although you can technically use Google Calendar as your publishing planner, it doesn’t offer the features of scheduling and planning content for promotion.
• Bloggers will also need to consider all of their social media platforms that will be used for promotion. There are options on the market to plan and promote blog content, such as Hootsuite, although bloggers will still need to log into a separate platform for scheduling. CoSchedule currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Buffer, and Tumblr.
• If you’re working with a team or even just an editor, bloggers will need to consider their communication method for projects. When blogging teams work within CoSchedule’s platform, it cuts out the need of e-mailing back and forth—the team can communicate directly within a scheduled post.
• Furthermore, bloggers will also need to write their post on either WordPress or Google Drive if they are not using Microsoft Word.
• Time is also the last consideration for bloggers as they map out their blogging plan. From brainstorming blog topic ideas to publishing on social media, the minutes add up quicker than you think.

CoSchedule seamlessly combines many of these resources into one cohesive platform. Furthermore, Coschedule also allows you to link directly to the WordPress post or Google Drive document so you can easily access your work. When you’re dedicated to blogging for hobby or business, there’s essentially no other tool you’ll ever need.

Getting Your Feet Wet With CoSchedule: Your 14-Day Free Trial

Now that you clearly understand how CoSchedule works and its amazing ability to integrate time-saving features, it’s time to head over to their website and get familiar with their interface.

If it’s your first time visiting CoSchedule, you’ll be greeted with an eye-catching homepage that invites you to sign up for their 14-day free trial. The good news is that you’re not required to enter any credit card information to get your free trial, which can be a big turn off to potential customers. CoSchedule offers this trial absolutely free, and you only pay if you decide to sign up on a monthly plan—so you won’t be hit with any fees or unexpected payments if you forget to cancel.

The first prompt from CoSchedule that you’ll get after signing up is naming your calendar. You can change the name any time, so don’t fret too much if you don’t pick the perfect name.

Once you have your calendar in place, CoSchedule will ask you if you’re a solo blogger, or if you’re blogging with a team or large company. For the sake of this review, we’ll tell CoSchedule that we’re a solo blogger.

The next step is to connect your WordPress account (if you have one, which is recommended).

Connecting your WordPress account to CoSchedule is super simple, which is one of the many benefits of using this platform in the first place. You’ll enter the URL for your blog and CoSchedule will then prompt you to enter your username and password. CoSchedule should connect your blog within seconds, and you’ll be given instructions to download the plugin onto your WordPress dashboard.

Installing the plugin is also an easy step, even if you haven’t downloaded any plugins before.

CoSchedule gives a simple step-by-step guide that walks you through the entire process. Read more at How do I Install The CoSchedule Plugin?

This is a step that you really do not want to skip, since this is how CoSchedule connects your blog to the platform. It only takes a few minutes to execute and will save you tons of time down the road.

After you’ve finished connecting your WordPress blog to CoSchedule, the next step you’ll tackle is connecting your social networks. CoSchedule supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Buffer, and its most recently-added option: Pinterest. You can connect the accounts of your choice through the platform by clicking one of the connect buttons as seen below:

From here, you’ll be taken off of the CoSchedule site with a small popup window. You’ll enter your information and connect CoSchedule to whichever profiles you grant it permission. Keep in mind that this option allows CoSchedule to schedule posts on your behalf—but that’s the good news for you, since the idea is to save you time and hassle of posting on your own.

Now that WordPress and your social media accounts are connected to CoSchedule, you’re ready to dive into your calendar—which is where the fun part begins.

Introduction to CoSchedule’s Dashboard and Calendar

CoSchedule’s dashboard is quite simple and easy to navigate. You’ll see your Calendar Name, a link to the Calendar, your Top Posts, and your Settings Tab. As you can see, the dashboard is very straightforward and easy to use even for the beginner blogger.

Once you start using CoSchedule on a regular basis, you will also see notifications on the main dashboard page. These can consist of messages that other team members send on specific projects. You will also see a list of tasks on the right-hand side that need to be completed, are in progress or are pending on the schedule.

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The Settings tab houses numerous integration options, including the aforementioned social media options and WordPress. However, this is also where you can add new team members and guests to collaborate on projects.

You can also make adjustments to the settings of your calendar under the settings tab. This includes changing your calendar name, adjusting your time zone settings, number of weeks to display on the calendar, and even your calendar’s color.

The Top Posts tab is a roundup of your most popular posts sorted by social media popularity. Posts with the highest amount of social shares will be displayed at the top, and the rest follows thereafter. This helps bloggers determine which posts are performing the best, and continuously create similar content to get the most amount of traffic possible.

The calendar tab links you directly to your project calendar, where you’ll have an overview of every blog, scheduled social media posts, and more.

When you first open your calendar, CoSchedule sets up filler content in order to show you the ropes. It’s a placeholder on your blog content calendar where you can begin scheduling posts all on your own. This is a good place to start when you’re starting to learn the ropes within the calendar.

There are 6 key content features that you can add to your calendar:

• Blog posts
• Social messages (stand alone or as part of a campaign)
• Content (eBooks, case studies, press releases, and more)
• Events
• Notes
• Tasks

When you open up the scheduling dashboard, you’ll be introduced to a popup platform where you can:

• Write your title/headline
• Select your content type from the previously mentioned 6 content types (blog post, social message, task, etc).
• Apply a status to your project (e.g. draft, pending, reviewed, scheduled)
• The schedule date and time
• Tasks
• Comments
• Ability to connect a Google Doc or WordPress blog directly within the post
• You can also color code your content on this dashboard to make it easy to sort and organize

Eventually, you can have a calendar that looks like this:

As you can see, there is quite a bit of content scheduled on this calendar. However, it’s extremely easy to edit, adjust, and remove as needed.

In fact, one of the best aspects of CoSchedule is its drag-and-drop feature that makes content planning a snap. You can easily drag and drop scheduled posts and move them around on your calendar to adjust the publishing dates. CoSchedule makes it a no-brainer to create the perfect calendar for your blog, regardless if you’re a solo blogger or you’re managing an entire content marketing team.

The reason that CoSchedule is perhaps the most efficient content planning tool on the market is that everything you need is one place. You don’t have to exit out of the blog publishing dashboard in order to schedule social media posts, blog posts or personally communicate with other people who are involved in the project.

Better Communication, Workflow, and Team Management With CoSchedule

When you post a comment within the dashboard, anyone who is following the content will be notified via email. Once the group is notified, the entire message is delivered within the body of the email. In order to respond, all you need to do is click on the link of the blog post title, or click the red button that says “go to my account.” You’ll then be redirected to the CoSchedule dashboard where you can communicate with your team.

CoSchedule is also highly efficient for those who are managing a large team with a complex workflow. You have the option to manually create tasks within the dashboard and assign them to a specific team member. However, you also have the option to create task templates and assign specific tasks automatically.

Furthermore, you can also create a workflow for a chosen team member so that person is automatically assigned specific tasks that are listed under their designated category. This can relate to graphic designers, content writers, and more. This helps save bloggers and content managers a lot of time when it comes to scheduling assignments.

Igniting Your Social Media Strategy by Using CoSchedule

The CoSchedule calendar dashboard has the option to set up content promotion. In fact, this platform is perfectly engineered to blend content and social promotion together, making your content marketing strategy easier than ever before.

When you’re scheduling a new blog post or other types of content, you’ll see a list of promotion options to choose from. This is where you can schedule your post to be published across social media platforms on the same day, next day, week after publishing, month after publishing, or a custom date.

It’s no secret that promotion is a big piece of the puzzle for getting your content in front of the right audience. KISSMetrics came up with a guide to follow in terms of how often you could promote your content for best results:

To the average blogger, this might seem like a daunting task. Who really has time to post a link on Twitter multiple times a day, and engage readers on 3 more platforms on top of that?

Developing a social media strategy is even one of the top challenges that marketers face with blog and content promotion. It can be difficult to know not only when to publish your blog, but on what social platform and how often.

CoSchedule can help bridge the gap between having audience or readers at all to making a splash in your social media community. The best part is that you can sit down for an hour or so at the beginning of every month and schedule out all of your social posts ahead of time—then your social media strategy is essentially on autopilot.

Best Days and Times to Schedule Blog Posts on WordPress

Did you know that there are certain days and times that is best to schedule your social media posts? Furthermore, there is also a set amount of acceptable social posts to publish each week. See the chart below:

CoSchedule Blog Promotion Guidelines:

Facebook – 5-x10 per week | Best Time – 1-4PM | Worst Time – 8PM-8AM

Twitter – 5x per day | Best Time – 1PM-3PM | Worst Time – 8PM-9AM

Pinterest – 5x per day | Best Time – 2PM-4PM, 8PM-1AM | Worst Time – 5PM-7PM

Google+ – 1-5x per day | Best Time – 9AM-11AM | Worst Time – 6PM-8AM

LinkedIn – 1x per day | Best Time – 7AM-9AM, 5PM-6PM | Worst Time – 10PM-6AM

As you can see, not all social media platforms are created equal. You won’t post as often to LinkedIn as you will on Twitter, and the time of day that you post on each platform can make a big difference in your results. The above chart can help serve as a guide so you can get an idea of exactly when and how often to schedule social media posts on your CoSchedule calendar.

Share Curated Content on Social Media to Maximize Your Reach

If you’ve just started blogging and you don’t have a lot of content to share, that doesn’t mean that your social marketing strategy has to fall flat. CoSchedule can help you maximize your reach by publishing curated content—that way, your social media account will never sit inactive as you continue to craft more blog content.

The idea behind curating content is to share great content from other sources that you think your audience will enjoy. You can mix and max types of content (which is another feature that CoSchedule allows on their platform) to keep things interesting. For example, you can share infographics, videos, slideshows, and eBooks—but you don’t want to find just any content. It needs to be the best of the best.

Another important tip is to consider finding high-quality and helpful content to share that is related to your hobby or niche. You won’t want to stray too far off of your blog’s overall topic or theme, or your customers may become confused or lose interest. Keep in mind that roughly 15% of users will unfollow social media accounts if the content is irrelevant to the theme or brand.

According to Curta, curated content should consist of 25% of your published content. As you’re planning your calendar, keep this percentage in mind to find the right balance. This will help you round out your social media strategy with CoSchedule and make sure that you’re mixing awesome content with your own blog posts every time.

Wondering if there’s an easy way to curate great content? Thanks to CoSchedule’s Google Chrome integration, you can curate content straight from your browser without the need to navigate away. You simply click on the CoSchedule extension button on Chrome and you can grab and share awesome content in seconds.

Enhance Your Social Media Posts With Custom Images on CoSchedule (For Free)

Did you know that social media posts with images generate more engagement? It’s true. In fact, social media updates with images can receive up to an 87% interaction rate from fans.

However, the reality is that we aren’t all graphic designers. And if you’re a hobby blogger, you might not be looking to shell out big bucks in order to get a custom graphic or two. But luckily, that won’t stop you from becoming a social media rock star—and it’s all thanks to Pablo by Buffer.

Pablo is an open source image-editing platform by Buffer. You can choose from a series of images and publish custom text directly on the photo. Pablo allows you to add custom effects, adjust the image size and even select a template that will fit perfectly with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest.

Pablo is perfect for beginner bloggers (or even seasoned bloggers without graphic design skills) for several reasons. First, the idea is that you can create custom images on this platform in 30 seconds. It’s quick and efficient, just like CoSchedule.

Second, since you can integrate Buffer with CoSchedule, you can post your Pablo images directly from CoSchedule’s platform. This makes it ultra easy to share your content on CoSchedule from Buffer in just a couple clicks of a button.

Best of all, using Pablo doesn’t cost a dime. When you’re done, you simply hit the “download image” button and the photo is saved directly to your computer.

Easy, right?

Simplify Your Content Planning and Calendar With CoSchedule

If you’re a beginner blogger or you’re just looking for a way to enhance your content calendar, CoSchedule hits the mark on nearly all levels. You simply can’t find a more cohesive content planning system that integrates with WordPress and provides an abundance of bells and whistles.

No matter what social platform or organizational tool that you use, there’s something for every blogger on CoSchedule. It has over a dozen integration features, and every one of them is able to help your blog stay on its publishing schedule, promote top-notch content, and even help generate more traffic. What do you have to lose by signing up for a 14-day free trial?

After you get yourself set up with CoSchedule, don’t forget to check out Buffer and their awesome open source social media image software Pablo. Once you collaborate all of the innovative features that CoSchedule has to offer, your blog will become virtually unstoppable.

Have you tried CoSchedule before? Did you find our review helpful? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Author: Mike Brown

My name is Mike Brown, I'm a Solopreneur, Blogger, WordPress Enthusiast and Founder at TheBloggingBuddha.com I have seven years of technical experience working in the Information Technology and Web Hosting industries and am currently learning about Growth Hacking, SEO, Technical SEO, Backlink Building, Marketing Automation, Content Marketing, Social Media and... View full profile ›

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The Ultimate Content Planning Tool That Every WordPress Blogger Needs

Get Back on Track: 3 Ways to Identify Your Sales Pipeline Point of Failure

It’s an easy mistake to make, and most of us are guilty of it: we make decisions based off our emotions, which sometimes steer us in the wrong way. And as a sales rep, who could blame you? You’re juggling conflicting priorities that pull you in all sorts of different directions.

Some days you’re focused on sharpening your product knowledge and other days you’re learning to listen better and uncover compelling events. Support teams want you to set better expectations, marketing wants you drive people to a conference, and your boss needs you to forecast more accurately. With all of these moving parts, your productivity is constantly rising and falling, and if you don’t pay attention to the health of your funnel, your income and job security will always be in flux. But with some driver-awareness, you can learn to steer things towards success.

Sales Is Like Driving a Car

The analogy I always like to draw is that sales is like driving a car. As you’re driving, you pay attention to the road, speedometer, and mirrors for helpful feedback that keeps you on track. In sales, you also have constant feedback from the people who ignore your emails, the pitches that backfire, and the deals you don’t win. The problem here is that we sometimes start ignoring this feedback because it can be uncomfortable. So instead, we stick to talking about our wins. But the consequences for ignoring this feedback in both selling and driving are the same: after a while, you’ll drive yourself off the road.

The first step towards staying on course is learning to accept feedback and resisting the urge to defend yourself. It’s important not to see it as criticism because feedback is the only way you can get better. Once you’ve done this, the best place to start looking for feedback is within your sales pipeline, which in many ways is the quantitative accumulation of all of your sales feedback. Based on what’s not going well, you can steer yourself out of a ditch and onto the performance highway.

So, check your mirrors for these three common pipeline problems and learn how to address them to get back on track:

1. Not Enough Leads Coming In

While this is a top-of-the-funnel problem, the issue may not be with your marketing or sales process, but with your perspective. If you’re starting from scratch in a new territory, you’re in a good spot. The best thing to do here is identify what makes a “good target” from other successful reps and start going through the list of companies you have. Spend your time narrowing them down into a few manageable lists, then determine your outreach strategy and get cracking.

But if you have a module of set accounts that you’ve been at for a while, you may be suffering from a bias against familiar companies that you refer to as “dead territory”. Your deep knowledge on prospects in the territory might actually be holding you back. Approach these accounts with a fresh mindset, and make a point of going after the ones that are hard to get and challenging yourself to call everyone in that account or ask to be referred in. Flip things on their head and you’ll start seeing results. As motivational speaker, Jim Rohn said “If you truly want something, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.” So find a way.

If you feel that you have already reached out to every possible company, consider that whatever list you’re working with is like looking at your territory through a straw. You start to think that you’re seeing the whole world when it’s really just a fraction. I know this from vast experience and I’ve often found myself crying “I’ve called everyone in the state of New York!” before suddenly getting a fantastic inbound lead. Take a break and get some outside perspective. Tell your peers what you’re running into and get their feedback on new ideas. There are always more approaches, lists, data providers, and strategies.

2. Leads Aren’t Moving Forward

Are your prospects getting excited or setting up next steps, but then nothing follows through? Perhaps you need to work on your delivery. Work on your pain discovery process and how you apply your product to solve a prospect’s specific problem. Without getting to the pain point plus a commitment, you’re going to just keep having conversations that go nowhere. So, don’t let your discovery calls end until you have discovered their pain. If there’s no pain, then there’s no commitment to move forward in the process and buy.

What does pain sound like? It involves emotionally charged words like fear, worried, serious, terrible, embarrassing, awful, etc. You can discover it through repeated questioning and genuine curiosity, and when you hear those words, dive into them with more questions. Once you have identified a specific pain, demonstrate how your product solves it and secure a commitment to buy. Use a line like, “Great, so if we can help you improve [insert pain point here], is there any reason you wouldn’t be able to sign today?” and repeat back to them what you just heard. This invokes what Psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the “consistency principle” and drastically increases compliance.

3. Full Pipeline, but Nobody Is Ready to Buy

Most people have a hard time telling anyone “no”. The natural reaction is to say “maybe” and then try to avoid you. You can fix this by directly telling people that you want them to feel comfortable telling you they’re not interested, and politely explain that you’ll end up wasting a lot of their time chasing them if they can’t.

Once you have identified that your prospects are indeed interested and you understand their pain points, you need to figure out why they are not acting immediately. Ask questions to see if they’re seriously committed to solving things. When you do finally get to the bottom of things, their reason for not acting may be something like lack of authority, lack of budget, internal politics, need to make a hire, etc. In this case, you’ve finally reached a concrete core-objection that you can work with them to build a mutual close plan.

Feedback is tough, and no one ever said it would be easy to hear. But it’s only through admitting that we’re fallible and listening to our critics that we can identify our blind spots and course correct. Like a driver on the road, if you aren’t constantly checking your mirrors and listening for the honks of other drivers, you’re putting yourself in peril. And the same goes in sales—you need to be able to look at your funnel, see what’s blocking you from merging onto the performance highway, and realize that it might be something that you’re doing. So, it’s time to course correct!

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Get Back on Track: 3 Ways to Identify Your Sales Pipeline Point of Failure

Master the Basics of Presentation Design

Here’s a situation we can all recall: you have to give a presentation, and it’s time to start that slide deck. You start by opening up the application, making a title slide, putting some bullet points on the intro slide, and inserting a cute picture — before you hit a wall. Then you give yourself kudos for getting this far and go get some coffee. Have you ever said to yourself, “I’m just terrible at PowerPoint”?

You’re going about it all wrong.

It’s not about how pretty your slides are (well, it is, but that comes later.) The basis of designing and delivering an awesome presentation is to craft a story and use visuals to support and strengthen that story. Guy Kawasaki famously said, “95% of presentations suck.” We’re here to get you into that 5%.

Three of Salesforce’s experts weighed in on crafting effective, impactful, and beautiful presentations. Sara Cattanach creates content for the keynote presentations at Salesforce Essentials and World Tour events, and trains speakers to deliver great presentations. Aaron Rabideau and Gabrielle Tabios are the masterminds behind the presentation visuals at Salesforce’s largest events, including the Dreamforce keynote. Over and over again, they stated that slide design exists to support the presentation narrative.

If you can’t watch the keynote now, download our free e-book adapted from the presentation.

Start with the narrative

Some of the best presentations — State of the Union, Ted Talks — have little or no visual elements. A slide deck is there to back you up, not to be the central focus. You want your audience members to leave saying, “what a great presentation,” not “what a great deck.” Your spoken delivery of the presentation is what will convince, inspire, or educate your audience.

“Good visuals are not the solution to a poor story.”

Here’s the first secret: Get the narrative, and titles, down completely before you start on the visuals. Otherwise, you’ll be rearranging slides and editing content when you change your story; you’ll end up doing twice the work on the presentation design elements.

When Cattanach is at square one, starting a new presentation, she begins in a spreadsheet by writing out the narrative, each slide title on its own row. When she has the story down, she goes to the speaker for the first round of feedback — before making a single slide.

Secret #2: Write the story of your presentation the way you write an essay. There should be a beginning, middle, and end. Different industries will have different ways of crafting stories, and knowing your audience is essential. Here are a few common structures:

• Thesis, supporting points, conclusion
• Summary, question posed, hypothesis, exploration, conclusion
• Problem, solution (it’s your company), how your offerings work, call to action (e.g. Learn more here, or Go deeper with small-group event sessions)
• For a key or novel idea: What exists now, compare and contrast feature by feature

Every presentation should be tailored to your audience with a clear goal in mind. Is the point to convince investors to back your product? That’s a very different presentation than the first call deck your sales team will use about that same product. A presentation to your peers about research findings may rely much more on text and supporting stats than that same content delivered to an audience who is not as immersed in the field.

“Problem” slide

“Salesforce is the Solution” slide

Why visuals matter

Rabideau breaks slide design into three basic tenets:

1. What’s the story? (What is the narrative, and what should the audience take away?)

2. How does it look? (The nuts and bolts)

3. How does it work? (The usability of the template)

The first step he takes when sitting down with a speaker is to say, “Tell me what it is you want me to know.” Rabideau’s tips center around two basic goals for visuals: have each slide reinforce (not distract from) the points in the narrative, and make the presenter appear to be a knowledgeable and skilled expert.

“Your presentation reinforces your professionalism.”

People are inherently problem solvers. If they see something wrong on a slide, they may not have the design eye to pick out exactly what’s wrong, but their attention will be wrenched from what you are saying to figuring out what’s off. By the same principle, putting up a funny but slightly blurry comic will redirect your audience’s attention to making out the fuzzy joke. Visuals are there to support the speaker, and should never detract from the spoken presentation (read: no slides full of long bullet points or low quality Google-sourced images!)

Taking the extra time up front to clean up your slides reinforces that you are taking your presentation, audience, and message seriously. It’s why companies will spend big money on creative agencies who obsess over the details of an ad — if something is sloppy, it reflects poorly on the company. Set yourself up for success by creating consistency and a high standard for quality throughout your deck.

The basics of presentation design

By now, you should be convinced that PowerPoint is not your starting point. After you have nailed down your story, and the titles of each of your slides, you can finally get to what you came to this article for: creating impactful slides. The minute details and wizardry of slide creation are best left to training courses, but there are some important points to take home.

1. Each slide should convey one idea — if there are two ideas, break it into two slides. Tabios lays out a basic slide breakdown: the top level thing is what you want the audience member to grab right away (a callout, a key visual, or the title). The secondary element supports that first thing, and smaller elements can also be inserted, if they don’t overwhelm the slide.

2. Consistency is key. Slide elements should be aligned: things sit in the same place, are the same color, are the same size, and have the same amount of space between them. Use bold minimally and a maximum of one highlight color.

3. Minimize text. The details of a slide — a picture, callout stat, quote, or subtitle — can support what you’re saying, but the slide shouldn’t speak for you. Newer speakers may need longer titles to help them remember the narrative while presenting. The better you get at storytelling the less you will need those cues, and the more you can pare down the text on your slides to put your audience’s focus on your words.

4. Put a lot of thought into how your images support a slide’s key idea, make sure you use high-quality images, and consider using recurring images. Salesforce uses customer heroes that are tailored to our audience — customers who champion a specific product or are from the segment or industry that best matches who’s in the room. We often introduce this hero at the beginning with a theme — like “customer success” — and then bring him/her back in at later points to remind the audience of that theme. Even if they don’t consciously pick up on the reminder, using a recurring high-impact image will help shape your story arc and give consistency to your message.

Rabideau gave one final piece of advice for designing slides, a pithy manifesto:

“If you can’t afford to be minimalist, be clear.”

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Master the Basics of Presentation Design

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and the Future of Mobile Web

As of last week, there is a new entry in the alphabet soup of web standards: AMP. You may have already noticed the small gray lightning bolt logo in your Google search results, but if not — start looking. It’s about to show up a lot more often. Of course, behind every acronymed buzz word there is a purpose, and the purpose of the Accelerated Mobile Pages project is speed. Or, more precisely, fixing the current lack of it in much of the mobile web.

What is Google AMP?

If you’ve ever seriously considered chucking your phone at a wall, then you’re probably familiar with the problem: slow mobile experiences are irrationally frustrating and slow mobile web experiences rank among the worst of all. Facebook Instant, Apple News, and now Google AMP each promises to “fix” content on the mobile web (and if consumers just happen to get locked into the orbit of only one tech giant along the way, well…oops!).

Facebook and Apple have both taken a closed platform approach. This has undoubtedly set off alarms at Google, since closed platforms are off-limits to googlebot and therefore unavailable for ad sales. While AMP is being developed as an open-source project, the unspoken goal is obvious: keep content where Google can see it and keep it away from Apple and Facebook.

The Ideal Mobile Web Experience

Leaving aside the business interests of multi-billion dollar tech giants, let’s take a moment to imagine a perfect world from the perspective of a mobile web user. Pages would always render correctly the first time, browsing the web wouldn’t drain batteries or monthly data limits, and content would be free from annoying, mobile-hostile ads and tracking codes. And, perhaps most importantly, everything would be fast. In a perfect world loading content on the web should be as instantaneous as moving to a new screen in a native app.

The Reality Today

Unfortunately, however, publishers down here on earth have generally given up on this ideal, probably assuming that it would be a fast-track lane to bankruptcy. “Sure,” they say, “most of what the user wants would be nice for us too, but ads and tracking codes aren’t even on the table — they’re business essentials.” And that is how we have ended up with this:

This approach has, predictably, led to an arms race: publishers find increasingly aggressive methods to generate revenue as users install ever more sophisticated blockers to deal with slow, garbage-filled web pages. In other words: it’s a staring contest and so far nobody has blinked. But the rules are about to change.

What AMP Promises to Do

Take a look at Google’s AMP demo:

Or even better, try it yourself: visit g.co/ampdemo on your phone and do a search for almost anything. Take a look at the carousel of AMP-enabled results right near the top of the page. If you compare that experience to our earlier “ideal,” the two have a whole lot in common: consistent rendering, minimal advertising, and above all, speed. AMP-enabled pages are fast in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of way. As technologist Jeff Jarvis puts it:

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“It’s just a web page — but way faster. A link is no longer an invitation to wait. A link is just a next page, instantly and fully visible.”

How is AMP Different From What we Already Have?

AMP isn’t actually new technology. In fact, AMP is what the web could have been all along, if it had been originally designed with nothing but mobile device performance in mind. This “mobile-only” approach is important because one of the ways AMP achieves its blazing-fast performance is by completely ignoring any device that is not small enough to fit in your pocket. AMP is emphatically not about making desktop websites look good on phone screens, but rather a totally separate, alternative presentation of the same content. It’s the web we already know, except stripped back to the bare essentials and then subjected to aggressive validation and rendering controls.

We should note the irony here: after spending years telling the world to stop building specialized m.site.com websites, AMP is a full-on, tires-screeching U-turn for Google. Responsive design is apparently no longer the only future Google sees, and it can be a bit startling to realize that most of the early AMP implementations look and feel like they just stepped out of a time-machine from the era of IE 5. This will likely change as the AMP standard matures, but it is also a wake-up call that Google believes users want content to come first, especially on mobile.

Why You Should Care About AMP

Let’s be honest: AMP, Facebook Instant, and Apple News all exist because the publishing industry has shot itself in the foot. It will be a while before we know how the battle plays out, but there are two reasons you may want to keep an eye on AMP: user experience and content visibility.

User Experience

To convince your users that sticking around is worth their time, it is important to give them what they want and expect, in the most effortless way possible (this is the reason we built the Branch deep linking service). If you’re a content producer, then AMP contains the promise of huge improvements to your user experience. Of course, if your website already scrupulously follows best practices and doesn’t contain garbage code, AMP likely won’t give you much. But for everyone else, this is a great opportunity to make a major upgrade with fairly minimal investment because a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done for you.

This is an example of what reading in Pinterest Pin with AMP is like:

This is what reading a Pinterest Pin without AMP is like:

Visibility on Google and Others

The AMP project has actually been underway since last May, but you’d be forgiven if you only heard about it for the first time this week. Google put a very big thumb on the scale by introducing that new AMP carousel at the top of its live results page for select, news-related search queries. However, since the list of AMP supporters already contains a Who’s Who of the most important names in both tech and publishing (with the notable absence of Facebook and Apple, of course), it is probable that AMP-enabled pages will continue to get increasingly special treatment in future. Even if your site doesn’t need the speed and usability boost AMP offers, it may still be worthwhile simply to take advantage of the improved visibility for your content.

What Does AMP Mean for Deep Linking?

Here at Branch, our goal is to make mobile deep linking a reality for everyone. While AMP is not explicitly a deep linking technology, it has the potential to greatly improve the web experience for mobile users. Due to this improvement, Google and others are increasingly likely to treat AMP pages as the new “normal,” whether publishers like it or not. We believe anyone involved with mobile deep linking — whether through the Branch platform, another provider, or a custom implementation — should consider possibilities for using this new standard.

How AMP Works Under the Hood

Since you’re still reading, you probably want to know how all this magic actually works. As mentioned earlier, AMP pages exist in parallel to the traditional pages we already visit. This means that in practice the same content will often (if not always) be available in two different versions, connected together with a special tag in the header section of each one. Googlebot already uses this tag for indexing and it’s conceivable that in future mobile browsers (at least, those not named “Safari”) will start to look for it too.

The specification itself is an evolution of familiar web standards, which come together to form three main ingredients: AMP HTML, AMP JS, and AMP Cache.

AMP HTML

AMP HTML is essentially a fork of traditional HTML, and is indicated with (yes, that is a lightning bolt emoji — we’re not in Kansas anymore). There are a number of custom attributes to specify, a few troublesome tags are banned outright, and a sizable collection of new elements are available to provide pre-configured interactivity without impacting performance. In other news, styling is still accomplished with standard CSS.

AMP JS

For performance reasons, AMP JS is the only JavaScript allowed in AMP pages. Yes, you can read that again: it really does mean everything else is blocked unless you use an iframe. Technically speaking, AMP JS is a runtime framework that intelligently manages and prioritizes external resource loading, implements the custom AMP HTML elements, and performs in-browser validation (which is useful for development). But most developers can simply think of this as a magic box. Like the engine in your car, it’s not necessary to understand all the details as long as you know how turn it on.

AMP Cache

If AMP JS is the engine in your car, then AMP Cache is the interstate trucking company that delivers fuel to your local filling station. You won’t even need to think about it unless everything suddenly stops working. Under the hood, this part of the system improves performance by hosting all resources in a single location and optimizing their delivery. While technically optional (AMP pages are hosted on a normal server just like every other HTML file), every AMP implementation comes with an implicit agreement that all content must be available for crawling and caching by third parties. Anyone can use a CDN to set up and run an AMP cache, but only content in Google’s cache (which Google has stated can be used without restriction and at no cost) is currently getting preferred search results treatment.

AMP Also Has Some Secret Speedy Rendering Sauce

While these three ingredients reduce the amount of data in each page and deliver it to the user really quickly, AMP is also designed to be intelligent in its rendering process. Bandwidth and CPU are focused on things the user is likely to see right away and content is strategically preloaded, so that in many cases the next page has already been prepared before the user even requests it. To make sure layout is calculated correctly the first time, explicit sizes are required for all elements, CSS must be inline, and third-party JavaScript is only permitted inside iframes. All of this combines to ensure the AMP runtime can load resources in the most efficient order (i.e., text before embedded videos, ads after content) without re-rendering the page and disrupting the user experience.

The AMP Project Is an Exciting First Step

There are still many unanswered questions about how AMP will develop. Yes, the user experience is far more pleasant, but that comes at a significant loss of flexibility for publishers — something they will likely be reluctant to give up especially if ad revenue falls. Initial adoption has been strong but it remains to be seen whether AMP can help resolve the already-fragmented mobile content ecosystem — especially since two of the three biggest tech players aren’t on board.

That said, it’s not difficult to imagine a future in which content on the web really does exist just as content. A future where pages don’t just passively accommodate different apps, devices, and platforms, but can be actively customized to provide an optimal experience. AMP is already a big step in this direction and we at Branch can’t wait to see what happens next. Stay tuned for further updates!

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Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and the Future of Mobile Web

It’s Time to Rethink Your Company Culture

I’m a firm believer that companies need to drop the stuffy, formal act. Imagine walking into an office where there are strict sets of rules and company policies everyone is expected to follow at all times. Imagine:

• Have to be in the office by 9am sharp every day? Nope.
• Business suits only? No thanks.
• Rules against chit-chatting with coworkers in the elevator? Hard pass.

Perhaps there’s a reason why we romanticize the startup culture and we don’t use that same tone when talking about corporate offices. When I think startup culture, I think of laid back but highly motivated individuals wearing jeans and a t-shirt in an open-plan office. It’s a stark comparison to the cubicles and clean-cut, suit-wearing folks I picture at a Fortune 500 company.

As a disclaimer, I should probably mention I wear a suit to work. Not because my company dress code mandates it or because some higher being says I need to look like that guy on Wall Street. Wearing a suit is part of my personal culture – it’s like a reminder to myself that I’m here to get work done and the minute that jacket comes on it’s go-time.

No one likes working in a toxic environment and sometimes the simplest fixes around the office can make a world of a difference to your employees. For some enterprises, I suggest employees focus on rediscovering their value proposition through team building exercises. Rethinking every detail from a sales funnel to how your employees interact with one another can have a huge impact on your company down the road.

Have you evaluated how efficient your employees are with their emails? Do you change up the interview questions every now and then? It might be time to re-evaluate your enterprise from the ground up.

Every business is different so we should expect workplace cultures to differ too. It doesn’t matter if your business is raking in millions of dollars annually or just getting off the ground – a great workplace culture is also a productive one.

Talk to Your Employees

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This is pretty simple, but you’d be surprised to hear how many employees leave a job because they were underappreciated. Call it a culture problem or a communication problem, but at the end of the day, there’s no excuse for it.

Talk to your employees. Find out what’s going on with them: what do they like to do on the weekend? What’s their preference for the company lunch? Understand their work frustrations and take time to listen to their career passions. You don’t have to shower them with praise to make them feel appreciated. Instead, show interest in them as if they’re actual people (because they are).

Sit down with your new hires the first week on the job and get to know who they are – not as your employees, but as unique individuals. Saying hi in the hallways or in passing goes a long way with your workers and it shows them that you’re not a stuffy, holier-than-thou boss.

Let Your Team Be Themselves

The best companies I’ve worked with all shared one trait – they let their employees be themselves. Want to wear a comfortable hoodie to work? Go for it. Want to decorate your workspace with pictures of dogs? Have a blast. At the end of the day, what really matters is that they feel comfortable as themselves at work.

Of course, there’s a balance that leaders have to enforce. I’ve seen great company cultures suffer because there was too much leniency and employees suffered because of lower standards. That said, if they want to be themselves on the job and it doesn’t get in the way of their productivity, let them. Happy and comfortable employees do the best work.

Stop Working Every Now and Then

One of the staples of startup culture is the drive to constantly improve. It’s inspiring and it’s great, but take a damn break every now and then and spend some time with your team. There will always be time to work. Take some time every week, close your email, and grab a case of beer for the office. If it’s not Friday afternoon and beer isn’t in the stars, grab a coffee. Whatever your pleasure, just drop the work guise and hang out with your team.

Seriously, take a break. My eyes start crossing when I stare at my computer screen for more than a couple of hours, don’t yours? Sometimes I find myself drawing a blank on an assignment. And it’s not uncommon in a lot of workplaces either. A quick reprieve from your office can help you recharge.

It’s by far the best way to create a great company culture. Some companies I work with have instituted in-office happy hours at four every Friday. Guess what? It works. Everyone drops what they’re doing and simply enjoys spending time with each other. The result is a group of people that love working with one another. At the end of the day, that’s all you can ask for in a superb culture.
To be frank, people don’t want to work in corporate environments that feels suffocating. They want to work to live, not the other way around. Startup and small business cultures offer the opportunity to make this a reality, and countless people – particularly millennials – are foregoing standard opportunities for companies they genuinely like.

Author: Barry Saltzman

Barry Satlzman is CEO of Saltzman Enterprise Group and Partner at Culture Measures, a business focused on turning the art of culture into a science. Throughout his career Barry has led multimillion-dollar turnarounds, quadrupled revenue growth, and helmed global 100 companies in a range of industries, including IT services, professional... View full profile ›

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It’s Time to Rethink Your Company Culture

Your Starting Lineup: Four Personalities of Great Customer Success Managers

If you’re a SaaS company just starting or looking to scale your Customer Success Department, you know the importance of finding the right candidates to manage, retain, and grow your valuable customers. The right team mix of personalities, talents, and skills will be vital to deliver customer success and fans.

With March Madness starting today, I would like to share four personality traits of great Customer Success managers (the winning lineup). These personality traits help customer success managers and teams deliver success and wins on a daily basis.

The Role of Customer Success Managers

The role of the Customer Success Manager (CSM) has gained significant attention over the last couple of years. Coupled with the rapid growth of subscription-based software companies, financial benefits of retaining customers, and revenue dollar expansion goals, the minute you post a customer success manager job position, you’re likely get an inbox full of resumes, cover letters, and referrals.

But finding the right kind of candidate for the critical Customer Success Manager role can be extremely challenging. While the role does involve some selling, the profile is much different than a sales profile.

Customer Success Team Member Profile

The Customer Success role involves helping the customer solve problems, but the profile is different than a customer support profile. And finally, while the role will involve answering onboarding and training questions, the role is different than the profile of a sales enablement professional or trainer. It can be difficult to find the right personality types to fit your CSM starting lineup.

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Professionals fitting the customer success profile will possess varied skills depending on the responsibilities that a company chooses to attach to the role. The most effective CSM teams combine two or more of the following traits and are driven by collaborative relationships between them.

Four Personality Traits of Great Customer Success Managers

1. Fanatical Drive for Success

In a LinkedIn post, Dmitry Shkliarevsky uses the term “fanatical drive for success” to describe a CSM. He explains: “You need to wake up every day planning on how you will make a difference. It’s not a competition with others as much as with yourself. How do you best solve a problem or make an impactful change? There is no ego involved here just pure ambition to want to make things better than they were yesterday. And the more you can affect others the more they will want to do the same. This is precisely how great companies are built and powerful cultures formed to solve problems in new and interesting ways.”

I could not agree more with Dmitry’s assessment. A CSM that doesn’t wake up with urgency and purpose and a drive for making their customers successful likely doesn’t have what it takes for the long haul and won’t make it out of round 1, let alone the Final Four.

2. Manage & Measure Outcomes

The old adage of “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” applies greatly to the CSM role. However, in the customer success world, it’s imperative to have more than metrics, but rather a strategy of how to avoid problems before they arise. This is why Customer Success Management Platforms have become an important part of a CSMs role as these platforms help your team measure and track the overall health of customers and are a go-to solution to help your team be proactive and anticipate customer needs. Solutions like this can help your team avoid constant fire drills that cause them to be reactive instead of being proactive.

Make sure you have clear Customer Success Department goals and KPIs. These indicators will help you determine if your are winning daily. Whether it’s customer referenceability, renewal rates (logo/dollar), expansion opportunity creation, NPS scores, communication engagement metrics or any number of other metrics, make sure to always set a bar above the trend line. Make sure you can measure your metrics on a daily basis and define what a win looks like. A combination of the right metrics and focus will help your team create the right behavior to make your customers successful. To progress to the Final Four of Customer Success, your Customer Success Team needs to consistently achieve daily metrics that deliver daily customer wins.

3. Empathy & Calmness in the Face of Fire

Customer Success Managers usually need to have a lot of empathy towards their customers in order to be good at their job. Why? It helps them to anticipate how their clients think and behave. Empathy allows CSMs to actively understand how a customer is feeling towards their product and service. Ask one simple question, “Do you love using our product or service?” And make sure you have a way to capture the honest responses and set proper expectations to resolve them. Being empathetic is a personality trait that is needed to be an awesome CSM.

A good CSM understands the importance to keep calm when facing customer challenges. Calmness in the face of fire is another important trait of great customer success managers. Even when they are faced with fires out of their control. They quickly rally around a way to set proper expectations and follow up with a proposed solution. As we know, learning to perform under pressure and under challenging circumstances is where the champions and greatest brands are built. Make sure that you train your team on the best ways to deal with current customer challenges and mishaps. Collaborating on different ways to solve customer problems can help your CSM team prepare for the unexpected and win.

4. Engineer the Customer Experience

Great Customer Success Managers actively use each customer engagement to improve and engineer the customer experience. They understand that customer relationships are built on positive engagements and experiences. They have personality traits that allow them to quickly find ways to uniquely take care of their customers. They also find ways to surprise and delight their customers with awesome service and follow up, thank you notes, and timely proactive engagement.

Make sure to create an environment where your CSMs are empowered to positively impact your customers. You can help empower your CSMs by making sure there is a clearly defined customer journey and budgets to continue to engineer and improve the customer experience.

Exceptional CSMs aren’t born with inherent skills that can’t be taught. In fact, while some may have an aptitude for the “intangibles” mentioned above, many good CSMs become exceptional with time and attention. They seek to model those who are great CSMs and through attention, training, and experience can become exceptional too.

If you’re a Customer Success Leader, look for these personality traits in your CSM starting lineup. And for those who are already CSMs, sharpen your skills by focusing on these traits and work at them until they become second nature.

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Your Starting Lineup: Four Personalities of Great Customer Success Managers