Ben Jacobson

What do your new customers feel when they start doing business with you? What do they need to understand and do in order to grasp the value that your product can unlock for them? It doesn’t matter if you’re with a service agency, an ecommerce firm or a software outfit – if new costumers don’t feel that value relatively quickly and with minimal effort on their part, then you don’t have very good chances of retaining them.

Clearly, optimizing for the mobile customer experience is vital — but so far, there’s been a dearth of empirical, actionable data based on real-world conversion rate optimization success. The challenge becomes not just how to optimize, but knowing what to optimize. And as we marketers get over our learning curves, new evidence on mobile conversion rates is starting to show exactly how optimizing specific key areas can have an immediate impact on conversions.

What about those of us who are genuinely interested in using automation to build our businesses but just want to make sure we do so smartly and incrementally, one case at a time, one channel at a time and one triggered workflow at a time?
Welcome to the marketing automation adoption guide for the middle ground. Let’s take a look at the processes and principles involved with the sober, deliberate adoption of automated marketing solutions.

SaaS development pretty much always goes hand-in-hand with agile methodology. Rapid iterations make for constant opportunities, as there’s always an upcoming dev cycle to aim for with a new feature that can change the game. So how can SaaS makers and marketers bake growth into a product’s features? Let’s see what the experts have to say.

The tactics involved in social selling were around long before the internet – offline, direct sales companies like Tupperware and Avon have been using social selling for generations. However, while the tactics may be familiar, the tools of the trade are altogether different.

When it comes to establishing trust, it doesn’t matter how compelling your calls-to-action are, how engaging your content is, or how quickly your pages load on mobile screens. If visitors to your site have any doubts about how trustworthy you are, they’ll bounce right out and never come back.

When you really know your audience, it’s easy to come up with creative concepts that can be sold as product designs. Add to that a savvy automated workflow for advertising, integrated with content assets and email follow up, and you’ll be monetizing hot niches in no time.

What Google won’t tell you, of course, is that you may not actually need AMP to maximize your site’s speed. The company has too much riding on the success of the AMP initiative to admit that it’s redundant – at best – in many situations.

As a B2B marketer, you might find it hard to prioritize. With so many marketing channels, so many content formats to choose from, and constant changes in the field, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Let’s take a look at some guiding principles that are driving the most impact for your B2B marketing peers, along with some tools of the trade that make things easier.

It isn’t enough to ensure your content is optimized for search, promote it through your social media accounts, and wait for traffic to rush in. That’s a strategy based on hope and hope alone. Too many marketers simply put up content with the hope that readers will be compelled to heed some call-to-action. But there are plenty of tried and true strategies that can help make inbound marketing proactive – without being too pushy.

You can use your favorite RSS reader to monitor customized Twitter searches, Twitter lists, and hashtags that relate to your business. Discover how to set up RSS feeds to easily monitor and manage a steady flow of Twitter leads.

A free online course can be extremely effective for capturing attention as it builds authority. You show your audience you know what you’re talking about, and that you’re willing to teach them for free. When people feel that you’ve given them a valuable gift, they’ll be all the more likely to reciprocate by doing business with you.

Who has the time to keep up with all our favorite blogs and social feeds nowadays? Since the majority of podcasts are light in tone and conversational in structure, they make it easy to explore business challenges and trends from multiple perspectives. Listening in on these discussions can feel like having coffee with a group of expert colleagues, deliberating the latest trends in a freeform conversation.

Thanks to the visual social network’s growing active user base, major ROI on direct response advertising, an average annual follower growth rate among brands of 100 percent and new advertising formats and capabilities being rolled out regularly, companies are investing heavily in Instagram-based promotion.

If your site is running at average speeds, then it actually costs you business opportunities and potential revenue. Fast site load times are increasingly central to providing a good user experience, which, in turn, is a critical prerequisite for a visitor to remain engaged.