Ben Jacobson
Marketing Strategy Consultant
Specializes in content, email, social media, branding and influencer marketing.
PROJECTS
The Next Web
Why marketers should stop benchmarking CPC once and for all
You’ve just batched an entirely new keyword list. There are tons of great potential terms and audiences to target. Until you look at the metrics: $50 for a click?
Instantly your momentum drains, and your campaign ideas are thrown out the window.
I see marketers give up at this point all the time. It’s simply not viable at such a high CPC, right? Wrong.
Here’s why over-reliance on CPC is causing massive downfalls in your marketing potential and why you should stop benchmarking it once and for ...
Search Engine Journal
Create Great Content from the Start by Following These 3 Steps
“More content” won’t solve your problems on an ongoing basis if you continue to follow the same misguided processes as a default. Why rely on patchwork to fill in the gaps when you can plan to achieve goals like these from the get-go? A strategy and process refresh can be a great quarterly housekeeping item. If any part is misaligned with your business’s current priorities, now is the time to correct it before your content veers too far off track.
postfunnel.com
4 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Retention Marketing
Retention marketing is often discussed as a whole with the same strategies suggested for every type of business. You rarely see it broken down further to different tactics and tools for different businesses, like B2B vs. B2C. And that’s where we start to go wrong.
marketingland.com
How to get your content marketing team out of its echo chamber
In news media jargon, an “echo chamber” is a situation where information, beliefs or ideas are reinforced or amplified through communication and repetition inside a defined system. When you’re in an echo chamber, whether you’re aware of it or not, you don’t question your sources, and perspectives that deviate from the status quo don’t have any way to get in. Brand publishing is no different, especially when marketers get so focused on ROI that we start over-relying on flawed performance data.
martechtoday.com
5 tools to take your marketing automation to the next level
Let’s take a look at five simple but powerful tools to help marketers ease into the world of automation. These tools can be great matches for just about any business looking to grow their leads, engage their audiences and do so in a more efficient manner.
Search Engine Journal
Avoid These 8 PPC Mistakes to Generate More High-Quality Leads
In my experience, a lot of the people who say that PPC doesn’t work are the ones making mistakes with the way their campaigns are conceived, set up, and managed. Their own efforts aren’t working, so they conclude that the whole exercise is folly. But studies show that there are plenty of marketers getting the results they want. If you’re not seeing that same success from your campaign, step back and look at your strategy to pinpoint where you could be going wrong.
orbitmedia.com
Debunking 5 Big Myths About Neuromarketing
Many view neuromarketing as a type of “dark art,” designed to force consumers into doing a brand’s bidding. And there’s been a lot of tech blog “echo chamber” coverage of it being newfangled, unscientific, nefariously manipulative, and a host of other unflattering adjectives. The reality is that neuromarketing helps marketers get past some of the human barriers in traditional market research, penetrating surface emotions to the subconscious, and measuring emotional markers in real time instead of during recall.
The Next Web
The tech industry needs to get over its obsession with Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley was once known for its innovation and progressive attitude. The tech explosion of the last two decades has transformed the area, turning many of its neighborhoods into some of the richest in the world. And as the money, power, and influence of the tech ecosystem reach new heights, Silicon Valley is gaining a reputation — some of which ain’t pretty. is the Silicon Valley mystique over? Say what you will about its resilience and being “too big to fail” – it’s definitely been under assault in recent months.
postfunnel.com
The Tools Savvy Marketers Need for Implementing Customer Retention Lockdown
Of all the things that B2Bs are focusing on this year, it might surprise you that customer retention is the number one priority around the world. We have to get much better at the key challenges associated with customer retention: listening to our customers; engaging with them across touchpoints; gaining a clearer picture of their entire journeys; supporting them throughout their experiences with our brands, and striving to understand where exactly we’re failing to meet their needs. This got me thinking about how tools can help us solve some of our most pressing retention problems.
The Next Web
You’re targeting the wrong channels for earned media publicity
Too many of us are settling into media mixes quickly and poorly, based on the wrong factors, like what’s most attainable or what will get the most immediate returns. But one way or another, your strategy gets screwed up, if you can even call it a strategy anymore.
postfunnel.com
Why Better Onboarding Means Less Churn: Proven Tactics You Can Try Today
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.
Search Engine Journal
6 Ways You Can Use Twitter in Your Customer Feedback Loop
Twitter remains a great platform both for customers who need to reach out in real time and for businesses looking to learn more about their customers. For any business with customer experience at the top of their priorities list, it’s still a necessity.
marketingland.com
New evidence highlights the conversion lift of mobile optimization ...
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.
orbitmedia.com
12 Rules for Finding the Marketing Automation Mix That Works for You
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.
marketingland.com
10 experts on aligning growth marketing with SaaS product development
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.