editor, Author at Mediastreet

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How Being Uncomfortable Can Be Your Best Creative Weapon

December 3, 2018 No Comments

Would it shock you if I told you that we’re ignoring our greatest creative resource every single day–even stifling it? What would you think if I told you that creative resource had nothing to do with what you do every day of your life?

For the sake of this article, let’s define creativity as the ability to solve problems in an unexpected or surprising way. Many of us may be in careers that are perceived as “creative”: designers, developers, writers, or entrepreneurs. But we don’t force ourselves regularly to solve problems that are clearly out of our areas of expertise. That’s where we’re squandering our greatest creative resource. With routine, people tend to get stuck in patterned forms of thought. By forcing our minds out of our comfort zones, we can become a part of a more intellectually diverse crowd that helps us continue to learn and challenge our own assumptions.Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity

This concept has been called a lot of things, but one of my favorites is “the curse of knowledge.” As Chip and Dan Heath wrote, when we attempt to problem-solve within our own boundaries of expertise, even within our own companies, we assume others know what we do. Nothing is more dangerous. We become incapable of communicating clearly to others, and end up with an idea that goes nowhere.

So, how do we get out of our own way? By challenging ourselves to feel uncomfortable regularly, to solve problems we never would in our day jobs, or to take on projects where we really have no idea what we’re doing. In other words, make that uncomfortable feeling your new hobby. Sounds a little crazy, but other people and companies have experimented with this with great success.Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity

For example, our team worked with Jonathon Parker, an MD/PhD student, on a design project for audio systems. He got a chance to collaborate with a group of mechanical engineers, designers, and artists (individuals he would have never been able to work with in the medical field) on a short-term idea-generation project. Jonathon humbly told us that he learned so much from the group, but he also provided key input on how the brain responded to audio signals–information they wouldn’t have thought of without his expertise. In this particular project, “wisdom of crowds” took on a whole new meaning.

Parker is a modern-day Renaissance Man. It’s easier than most of us think to become Renaissance Men and Women, even if the capacity to do out-of-bounds things doesn’t exist within our day jobs. It seems as if once every few months I see a new workout program that promises results within 30, 15, even 5 minutes of exercise. While I can’t attest to how effective these programs are for the body, the brain can be exercised in similar increments to challenge patterned forms of thought.

The web has an incredible capacity to connect all different kinds of creative people to form communities of diverse thinkers. As people who desire a greater connection with creativity, we can seek out these communities to do things we’d never expect to do–design the next package for a consumer good, write a jingle for a national ad campaign, or even re-sequence protein enzymes.

On the other end, as companies seeking out sources of creativity, we no longer have to resort to expensive focus groups and studies to test out concepts, or even come up with those concepts in the first place. If the web truly becomes a destination for all sorts of Renaissance Thinkers to exercise their creativity, there’s an amazing untapped creative resource just waiting to be challenged.Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity

So, welcome to the 21st Century Renaissance Community, where your grandmother is learning to code and your colleague in accounting is inspiring the next beverage flavor. What are you doing to make yourself feel uncomfortable today?

Sourced from jemebuyan.com

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How The Most Successful People Keep Track Of Their Best Ideas

December 3, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from jemebuyan.com

Being an ideas machine is one thing; giving your ideas the chance to be rediscovered and flourish is another.

Because let’s face it: Ideas are merely forgotten thoughts if they’re not recorded, organized, managed, and implemented. How many times have you heard of a new business and thought to yourself, “I totally came up with that idea years ago”? That’s proof that great ideas mean nothing if you don’t manage them for later expansion and implementation.Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity

While dreamers often have the best ideas, it’s the doers who are getting things done. Below, five leaders share how they record, organize, and manage their ideas.

STAY OBJECTIVE AND GET FEEDBACK

Anne Raimondi, senior vice president of operations at Zendesk

To manage her ideas, Raimondi has a three-step process:

1. Stay objective. If you’re an ideas machine, it can be difficult to to decide which ones are worth filtering, editing, and revising, and which ones you need to let go of (at least for now). For Raimondi, continuously asking, “What problem am I trying to solve?” is crucial so that she doesn’t “fall in love with one idea and miss coming up with a better one.”Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity

2. Ask for feedback. After coming up with a sketch of an idea, getting others to brainstorm with you is a great way to expand and build your nugget from something okay to something great.

Collaborating almost always makes an idea better.

Recently, Raimondi asked two colleagues to help her brainstorm for an upcoming event after she came up with a rough idea. “Including them in the conversation transformed it into something I could never have come up with on my own,” she says. “Collaborating almost always makes an idea better.”

3. Be patient and persevere. Sometimes, the best things take time to become a reality. When you know you have a big idea worth holding on to, don’t forget to take the time to revisit it every once in awhile. Raimondi’s big idea came nearly a decade ago:

Nine years ago, on a cross-country plane ride, while working together at a crazy startup, one of my best friends and I decided that someday, we wanted to build something together. We didn’t know what or when. We just knew it was a goal for us. Almost a decade later, we’re now forming a partnership to invest in talented entrepreneurs we’ve met and worked with over the last nine years. If not for the different journeys we’ve been on, and being patient, our idea wouldn’t be coming to fruition.

ALWAYS HAVE A NOTEBOOK AROUND

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic

For Adams, who is the creator of Dilbert and has a handful of companies under his belt he’s either started or invested in, coming up with new, great ideas is crucial. He’s tried note apps, but finds them too slow. Instead, he has a system that enables him to record for revisiting later:

“I have a seven-second rule in my home,” he says. “I have to be able to reach a working pen and notepad or I risk being distracted and forgetting.”Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity Creativity

He adds: “Smartphones and computers take longer than seven seconds and add distraction. I transfer them to a computer later.”

Additionally, Adams emails himself ideas using the same subject line for all of them.

“That makes it easy to search later,” says Adams when he’s ready to transfer his ideas to the computer for organizing and managing.

But Adams isn’t done managing his ideas: He has a whiteboard in his “man cave” to write ideas on, he starts draft blog posts and saves them in Tumblr, and for his movie script, he’s turned a room into a visual timeline of the film with notecards for scene ideas.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

Sourced from jemebuyan.com

In News

The future of media in driverless cars depends on who owns the data

December 3, 2018 No Comments

By Sara Fischer

The media and advertising industries are anxiously awaiting driverless cars because they’ll create more opportunities for people to view media content and advertising.

The bigger picture: With a finite amount of time in a day, the media industry is doing whatever it can to capture and monetize more of your attention. Driverless cars are supposed to free up hours for people who were previously spending their time behind the wheel.

Yes, but: It’s not clear whether people will be able to fully take their eyes off the road to consume more content.

Right now, driverless cars require drivers to pay attention. As they become more autonomous, the level of attention needed would likely change. The media industry is planning for all scenarios.
Most models have digital screens, but some are designed to help drivers pay more attention to the road by providing better directions, places to stop, etc.
“Others are built for passengers that don’t need to pay attention to driving whatsoever,” said Daniel Castro, vice president at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Driverless cars will dramatically change the way some industries think about marketing and serving content.

Billboards and terrestrial radio, for example, will need to focus their technologies on targeting less-distracted passengers and connecting drivers and passengers to the world around them with more dynamic ads that are targeted by location.

Andy Sriubas, CCO of Outfront, one of the largest billboard companies in the U.S., says these changes, and other changes in tech, have forced the billboard industry to adapt. “I don’t think of us as truly a billboard or transit company. We’re a location-based media company,” he said.

The video industry will reshape the way people consume TV and movies in cars. With 5G connectivity, streaming video will become a seamless experience.

“The question will be what the car company will control in terms of the viewing experiences versus what you can just access on the internet.”

— Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, Consumer Technology Association

For the $190 billion U.S. advertising industry, the opportunities are endless, but privacy around data-targeted ads remains a big concern.

“[P]eople should not ignore how the public will accept the privacy implications of these emerging data-driven technologies and ads.”

— Dan Jaffe, Group EVP government relations, Association of National Advertisers

Between the lines: The U.S. has fewer consumer data rules, so car companies, media companies and advertisers have a lot of room to experiment. Europe has strict data laws, making innovation in autonomous vehicles and the entertainment experience more difficult.

What’s next: Right now, drivers own their own data. But because cars will have different levels of driver participation, there’s no consensus around the future of data ownership.

In the future, the car company could own the data (think GM or Ford, who already ask consumers to opt-in so they can share their data with retailers). In the shared economy (think Uber or Lyft), the ride-sharing service could own it. If stricter privacy laws are enacted, the consumer could own it.

And tech companies that own autonomous vehicle firms are well-positioned to get into the advertising game because of their map data, says SafeSelfDrive founder Jim McPherson.

The bottom line: Whoever owns the data will ultimately decide who controls the content and ads — or at least who gets the revenue.

By Sara Fischer

Sourced from AXIOS

In News

Researchers claim to have permanently neutralized ad-blocking’s most promising weapons

November 30, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from boingboing

Last year, Princeton researchers revealed a powerful new ad-blocking technique: perceptual ad-blocking uses a machine-learning model trained on images of pages with the ads identified to make predictions about which page elements are ads to block and which parts are not.

However, a new paper from a group of Stanford and CISPA Helmholtz Center researchers reveals a powerful machine learning countermeasure that, they say, will permanently tilt the advantage toward advertisers and away from ad-blockers.

The team revealed a set of eight techniques to generate adversarial examples of slightly modified ads that completely flummoxed the perceptual ad-blocker’s model: from overlaying a transparent image to modifying a few pixels in the logo used to demarcate an ad.

What’s more, the team showed that they could cause the perceptual blocker’s model to erroneously identify a page’s actual content as an ad and block it, while leaving the ads unblocked.

The team says that these techniques will always outrace the ability of perceptual blocking models to detect them, suggesting that perceptual blocking may be a dead letter.

We note that detection of adversarial examples [27, 47]—a simpler problem in principle but also one far from solved [14]— may not be applicable to ad-blockers. Indeed, ad-blockers face both adversarial false-positives and false-negatives, so merely detecting a perturbation does not help in decision-making. This challenging threat model also applies in part to ad-blockers based on non-visual cues, e.g., ML-based ad-blockers that use similar features as filter lists [11, 29, 36]. None of these have yet been evaluated against adaptive adversaries.

Moreover, by virtue of not relying on visual cues, these models are presumably easier to attack in ways that are fully transparent to users (e.g., switching ad domains)

Ad-versarial: Defeating Perceptual Ad-Blocking [Florian Tramèr, Pascal Dupré, Gili Rusak, Giancarlo Pellegrino and Dan Boneh/Arxiv]

Researchers Defeat Most Powerful Ad Blockers, Declare a ‘New Arms Race’ [Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard]

Sourced from boingboing

In News

65% Of Consumers Want Personal Responses To Their Review

November 30, 2018 No Comments

By Laurie Sullivan

Customer reviews have become a major part of how consumers buy products — specifically high-dollar products that might have a manufacturer’s defect. Helpful reviews not only appear on the merchant’s website, but also on Yelp, YouTube and in a variety of forums.

For example, there is a forum about a defect in the Ford Explorer 2018. Sirius XM radio gets stuck on “acquiring signal,” sometimes for up to 20 minutes. Written conversations within the online forum point to a design change in Ford’s satellite antenna for the 2018 Explorer that now integrates the 4G modem for WiFi with the Sirius satellite antenna. Others point to an issue with the Ford Sync system.

But consumers really don’t really know the issue. Ford has not responded to any reviews in the forum, leaving some dealerships like Jackson Hole Ford to step up and play referee between the consumer and the manufacturer.

It’s not uncommon, said Josha Benner, cofounder of Uberall, which provides location marketing technology. Pointing to research about Chipotle and Burger King, where customers expressed concerns in reviews and forums about a variety of topics from restrooms to food ingredients, he said that “if the company looks at reviews in a timely manner the company can learn a lot about the product.”

While reviews are nothing new, it’s clear from Uberall’s study, released Thursday, that consumer want companies to personally address their issues and concerns.

The Customer Review Report analyzes how shoppers evaluate the responses of online reviews. This report specifically focuses on physical store reviews, but it makes sense their marketing department should also monitor and comment in forums.

In the Uberall-commissioned survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers conducted between October 1 and October 5, 2018, 74% of consumers cited personal reviews as either moderately important — 40% — or very important–34%. Just 20% said they were slightly important, and 6% said they were not important.

Some 65% of consumers said stores should respond to each customer service review, whether the review is positive or negative.

Some 18% believe they should respond only when the review is negative, while 10% feel they should never respond, and 6% think they should only respond when the review is positive.

In fact 86% said they would be more likely to shop at a store that responds to customer reviews. Of that group, 47% said they would be somewhat more likely, while 39% said they would be more likely. Only 8% said they would be somewhat less likely and 6% said they would be not likely.

About 29% of consumers responding to the survey think stores should personalize their response, while 49% think the response should be somewhat personal and 78% think it should include some personalization. Just 13% said the response should be “not very personalized” and 9% said not personalized.

When asked how often the survey’s respondents check customer reviews to help them figure out where to shop, 57% said they check occasionally, while 19% said all the time. Some 17% said they check rarely and 7% said very rarely.

By Laurie Sullivan

Sourced from MediaPost

In News

What Is Wrong With Current Advertising Systems And How Blockchain Can Help

November 30, 2018 No Comments

By David Petersson

Every day, ads overrun us in our online journey. While this is necessary to keep many free services we constantly use in business, they are also heavily misaligned. We ignore most of the ads we see, find them intrusive, irrelevant and wasting our bandwidth. For the same reason, many companies are also spending ad dollars without seeing sufficient return.

But there are those who are benefiting from this model. After all, digital marketing has overtaken TV ads and it is a medium where marketers can measure the success of their campaigns and adjust accordingly. Google and Facebook are dominating the digital advertising industry. Amazon is currently in fifth place with nearly $2 billion in revenue for the first quarter of this year, but it is catching up fast as more advertisers turn to it.

Advertisers typically look for the company who can “get the word out” about them most efficiently, but they face a dilemma; most of them know by heart that many of the people they target really don’t need their products. However, they assume that if they just keep popping up all the time (and perhaps crack a joke or get undressed), eventually the consumer will surrender and buy. But here is the thing: if the consumer does not trust you, the impact will be minimal.

No one “hates” shopping –quite opposite, people love a good purchase. A good purchase requires knowledge of the products, but no one ever tells an advertiser that they are looking for a new car because they would instantly start spamming us. We prefer to keep that information private because we suspect it would be misused to sell us snake oil instead of really valuable products. In an era where consumers don’t trust advertisers, advertisers are forced to rely on middlemen like Google and Amazon to hint them at what could work best for them.

The reason is simple: Google knows the customers’ intent, Facebook knows the demographics and Amazon knows what many consider as the most important piece of the puzzle: what people buy. However, this puzzle still lacks one missing (and often overlooked) piece: the consumers. The current advertising business is primarily designed to serve the ad networks – not the companies or the clients. Here is where blockchain could help.

A new era

Blockchain is about decentralization and removing middle parties. There are four players in the digital advertising world: ad networks, companies, publishers and visitors. Companies are the ones who want to sell their products or services, and they do so via the “publishers.” The publishers, such as web admins, are the ones running a website and attract visitors, and the companies alike.

The ad networks sit between the companies and the publishers, match them up and take a huge cut in return. This is the player blockchain aims to remove and optimize the system to run only between companies, publishers and visitors.

By removing the ad networks, the cost for advertising will significantly drop for companies. Furthermore, there are no banks involved so transactions are much easier and faster, which is particularly important as advertisers target a global market. But this is not the only benefit.

Blockchain offers immutability, which essentially means a tamper-proof record of everything that has taken place on the network. This means everyone can track the customers’ journey: where and when they started interacting with an ad and what the results where. This also leads to transparency, as both the company and the publishers have correct metrics of the impressions and clicks.

Like always, specific blockchain projects add more features to these general concepts. For instance, BAT gives users full control of the ads they see and even pays them for the ads they watch. To track the watch time, the project collaborates with the Brave browser, which ironically comes with built-in ad blockers.

Adoption

No matter how promising, currently the digital advertising industry is dominated by centralized enterprises. This can eventually change, as more and more people turn to ad blockers and concerns around privacy and information tracking are beginning to rise. Eventually, the buyers are the people that are currently spammed so the ultimate winner would be the one that really takes the customers’ best interest into account. With blockchain, we are moving one step closer to giving power to the individuals.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By David Petersson

I’m a developer and freelance tech blogger interested in cyber-security, AI and blockchain, and try to separate signal from noise in the industry.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Unleash Human Expertise with Pervasive Data Intelligence

November 29, 2018 No Comments

By Chris Twogood

Ironically, while the Internet pervades our lives and sends a continual stream of information into an expanding digital, cloud-based, and data-driven world, the ability to make sense of this data is far from pervasive. In a previous post, I discussed how a recent global survey showed that 81% of senior business leaders want data analytics to be more widespread in their organizations, suggesting that it’s time for pervasive data intelligence to be the new enterprise standard.

Today, nearly every person’s role in a company involves drawing conclusions from data. Time and again, we’ve seen that when organizations make data scalable, frictionless, and available 24/7 to their employees, people across all functions and levels are better able to accomplish their daily work and generate positive business outcomes. And as businesses increasingly invest in augmented intelligence — which aims to tap the potential of humans and technology working together — ensuring a frictionless relationship between your people and your data is more important than ever.

Consider the impact of pervasive data intelligence on the data scientist, whose analysis is too often limited to data subsets due to time and technical constraints. Imagine the impact on the business if she could easily test her analytics in real time on 100 percent of the company’s data. And for the analyst streamlining business and IT processes, a flexible analytic environment supports the needs of various users and allows warehouse data to be combined with social media, IoT and SMS insights. This pervasive data intelligence system can grow with the business, reduce time to value and cost, and incorporate advanced technologies.

As businesses increasingly invest in augmented intelligence, ensuring a frictionless relationship between your people and your data is more important than ever.

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The C-suite also benefits from the real-time, holistic view of the business that pervasive data intelligence provides. For example, the Chief Marketing Officer can leverage pervasive data intelligence to make planning decisions, test marketing strategies, measure deviance and ensure consistent customer experience across multiple channels. He can also better understand industry trends and competitors’ behavior to find ways to optimize campaigns, gain a competitive advantage, and provide effective and compelling value to customers.

As the manufacturer of over 600,000 installed medical equipment products, Siemens Healthcare has experienced the benefits of pervasive data intelligence firsthand. Siemens Healthineers use our cloud-based predictive platform Teradata Vantage to maintain and optimize 240,000 patient touchpoints an hour. Vantage translates these data points into intelligence through an automated process that Siemens Healthcare can scale throughout the global organization. Because this intelligence is delivered seamlessly and in real time, Siemens Healthcare can predict and prevent product maintenance and operational issues. This is vital when your products are responsible for over 70 percent of critical clinical decisions around the world.

“We want to have the right answer before our customers have even the question,” says Stefan Meiler, Head of Data Governance & Analytical Services at Siemens Healthcare.

Today organizations are making big bets that automation, artificial and augmented intelligence, and machine learning will give them a competitive edge. But without committing to “data science for all,” the enterprise will not reap the benefits from their human and technological investments. Ensuring pervasive data intelligence — where employees can seamlessly access relevant, real-time data at scale — will unleash innovation and allow technology to compound human expertise.

By Chris Twogood

Chris Twogood is Senior Vice President Global Marketing for Teradata Corporation. He is responsible for Teradata Brand, Influencer Relations, Content Marketing, Corporate Communications, Global Events, Demand Generation, Account Based Marketing and Digital for Teradata including Web and Social. Chris has thirty years of experience. Chris has extensive experience in the computer industry specializing in Data Warehousing, Decision Support, Customer Management and Analytics

View all posts by Senior Vice President, Marketing

Sourced from Teradata

In News

Twitter cracks down again on millions of suspicious followers

November 29, 2018 No Comments

By Taruka Srivastav

Twitter has substracted millions of suspicious followers again after first removing them in July this year.

As a result of the company’s crackdown on fake users, singer Katy Perry lost about 861,000 followers, according to social measurement firm Social Blade and Twitter’s own account lost 2.4 million followers.

According to Twitter, it discovered a bug where some of these accounts were briefly added back, which led to misleading follower counts for “very few accounts.”

In July, Twitter said: “As part of our ongoing and global effort to build trust and encourage healthy conversation on Twitter, every part of the service matters. Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate.

“Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behavior. In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down.”

The latest move was prophesied by Samuel Scott, a columnist for The Drum, who predicted a new wave of global social media regulation last month.

By Taruka Srivastav

Sourced from The Drum

In News

How to Create Ads That Move People to Action

November 29, 2018 No Comments

By Michael Stelzner

Want a faster, better way to optimize your ads? Did you know that focusing on customers’ emotions can help?

To explore how to use emotional messaging to move people to action, I interview Talia Wolf.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Talia Wolf. She’s the founder of GetUplift, an agency that specializes in conversion rate optimization for websites, landing pages, and advertisements. Her course is called Emotion Sells: The Masterclass.

Talia explains how to research customers’ emotional connection to your product and why applying your findings improves conversions.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

By Michael Stelzner

Sourced from Social Media Examiner

In News

How To Get Consulting Clients Fast Without Using Facebook Ads

November 28, 2018 No Comments

By Nick Tubis

I have noticed lots of business owners are spending on Facebook ads to get new clients. I’m not saying that this is a bad strategy. I myself use Facebook ads as one method for acquiring customers. But the main problem with using ads is that business owners who haven’t truly validated their concept often think the ads will solve their problem of finding clients to book.

Throughout my career of starting and growing business-to-business (B2B) companies, I’ve realized there are a few steps that every single entrepreneur must go through to get initial traction and scale their business.

1. Focus on an isolated market segment.

One of the biggest problems I notice that entrepreneurs, freelancers and consultants make is that they believe everyone is their ideal customer. They say something like, “I help companies with Google Ads or search engine optimization (SEO).”

When I hear this, I almost immediately know that they are having a hard time landing new clients. The reason is that, when you try to appeal to everyone, your business is perceived as a commodity. You should focus on a specific market segment because it is much easier to become the best in the world at something specific than something broad.

As the chief marketing officer at TSD Global, I was in a highly competitive market, selling outsourcing services to medium and large businesses, and we needed to find a way to differentiate. So, the way I solved this problem was by focusing on a market segment — quick-service and fast-casual restaurants.

When you’re picking a market segment, it should be a niche that you are passionate about or have experience in.

2. Identify a painful problem this segment faces.

After you’ve found your isolated market segment, it’s time to identify a specific problem it has. Now, the problem can be something obvious like Google Ads or SEO, but because you’re focused on that one market segment, you’re creating a huge differentiator from your competition.

Let me give you an example of how this works. If I owned a personal injury law firm and am wanting to win more cases for my firm, would I rather hire someone who is an expert in SEO or someone who is an expert in auto accident SEO? The person with specialized knowledge, of course.

3. Learn the ins and outs of your market segment.

Once you have found a market segment that has a problem, it’s time for you to become an industry expert.

Before I started getting traction with the restaurant industry, I researched the industry to learn about what the biggest pain points and risks were. I learned how to speak my prospects’ language and use the same buzzwords they did.

Every market segment has a certain lingo and it can be learned — not within decades, but in days. The shortcut that I use is to read annual reports of the players in my market segment and see how they speak about their industry. You can also use this strategy if you’re selling to private companies because they often share a lot of the same risks, concerns and pain points if they are in the same market segment.

4. Create a solution for your market segment.

Your solution should actually be the easiest part of your business. This is where we combine your scalable skill that solves a problem with your specialized knowledge of your market segment. The solution you should provide for your clients should take them from where they are now to achieving the goal they want.

5. Build your minimum viable credibility.

Minimum viable credibility is something that I don’t hear people talk about in the marketplace. It absolutely blows me away. I hear people say that you don’t need to have any credibility to sell something and I couldn’t disagree more. It’s not impossible to sell someone a high-ticket item without any credibility, but there is a much more efficient way to handle this and build credibility fast.

When I first started selling to restaurants, I was negotiating with the CEO of one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in the country and he kept asking who I was working with and for references. At the time, the service I was providing was a brand new concept and had zero clients in that market segment. So, the way we solved this problem was with a free trial. It ended up working great.

So, my advice is to identify the players in your market segment that could get the ball rolling for your business and give them your service for free in exchange for a case study and testimonial.

6. Leverage personalized direct marketing.

After you’ve established your credibility by getting case studies, you are ready to start generating high-ticket clients. When it comes to generating consulting clients, you can spend more time handpicking the dream clients who you can help in the beginning. Imagine what client logos you would like to put on your website and reach out to them instead of leaving it to chance with Facebook ads. I recommend writing personalized messages on Facebook, LinkedIn and in emails that explain the problem you can solve for their market segment.

7. Leverage automated personalized marketing.

This is my secret sauce, and most people have a hard time executing this properly because they don’t really understand their market segment. After I have validated my market segment by acquiring a few clients with personalized messages, I scale up massively with automated marketing.

I have used a software that allows me to send personalized emails, at scale, that are highly relevant to my market segment and look like I spend 30 minutes researching their company. I have used this strategy and still use this method to book meetings with some of the most powerful executives in America on autopilot.

Follow these steps to create more targeted services and personalized marketing for your prospects. The customer acquisition cost with direct marketing can be a fraction of the price compared to Facebook ads.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Nick Tubis

Founder of Nick Tubis Enterprises, an e-learning platform that teaches people how to start and grow their own freelance or B2B company.

Sourced from Forbes