The desire for a beautiful, modern, sleek website is a lot stronger than the desire for a well-planned and -executed digital marketing strategy — and this has baffled me for years. Sure, an aesthetically gorgeous site may keep visitors combing and clicking through your site for a few extra minutes past your site’s average time on page … but if they’re not clicking through to pages that can transform them into leads and customers, then really: What is the point?

Substance doesn’t necessarily trump style — it’s simply that the latter won’t matter (no matter how appealing your site is) if you don’t have the right content that’s optimized for search and your audience’s interests, needs, and pain points. Speaking with Orbit Media Studios Co-Founder and Strategic Director Andy Crestodina confirms a line of thinking I’ve held for a long time. He’s spent a lot of time exploring website best practices for lead generation and knows first hand the educational process required to get buy-in with the decision-makers in big brands and small team alike.

You may be thinking, “Why does a designer need such a vast knowledge of the underpinnings of a modern online marketing strategy?” The answer is simple: Design is marketing. An elegant typeface and lavish graphic design work will only do so much to enhance brand awareness for any business. What it really takes to “win” with your website, according to Crestodina, is accessibility (in other words, clear messaging,) consistent content creation, and a rich understanding of SEO: what will make your site a champion in search results pages aka (SERPS). The following are 9 modern website design and optimization tenets that I took away from my interview with Andy. Let me know what you think.

Read More: http://craftofmarketing.com/andy-crestodina/

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10 Things I Learned About Website Design and Optimization with Andy Crestodina

A marketing podcast by people who do it for a living: Marketers, Creatives, and Entrepreneurs. Listen in for the tips, hacks and strategies that marketing professionals share with each other...but rarely share in public. The Craft of Marketing is about providing marketing insight and education for those thirsting to be a better marketer but just don't have time to think about it all day long. Whether you are an entrepreneur, business owner, marketer in the trenches or someone who just wants to build their brand, The Craft of Marketing is the source for great ideas that work. Filled with strategies, tips and tactics utilized by some of the best marketing minds in the world, The Craft of Marketing won't just whet your marketing appetite, it'll leave you hungry for more.

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Why Every Marketer Benefits From a Little Social Media Automation

If you’re a small business marketer, you might think social media automation tools are only for professionals. They’re not. Social media automation tools are super effective for any size business in any field.

You know you need to be active on social to connect with your audience. Not just to hawk what you sell, but to share some of your human-ness, how you think, what advice you have to offer. The challenge is keeping up with the pace of social so you are sharing consistently, the right content, on the right platforms, at the right time.

Social Media Automation Tools

That’s where social media automation tools can help, and the advantages are significant.

Pre-schedule your social media posts
Ensure that you are posting consistently, week over week, month over month
Leverage older posts so don’t have to be so reliant on always creating new content
More control over the type of content you share
Post content to multiple platforms
Automate repetitive social publishing tasks
Manage all of your social media accounts in one place
Track your results.
I don’t know a single marketer that isn’t strapped for time, Who doesn’t want to save time on repetitive tasks? Who doesn’t want to become more productive? Who doesn’t want to spend more time doing things that have a greater return on investment and maybe even have some time to do the things you love?

That’s what prompted me to reach out to Laura Roeder, she’s the founder of Edgar, one of my favorite social media automation tools. Laura’s road to recognition didn’t start out focused on being a tech entrepreneur, but she’s always been focused on how to scale.  She began early on as blogger and social media consultant, she was even named one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under 35 in 2011, 2013 and 2014 working with the likes of Marie Forleo & Sir Richard Branson.

Somewhere along the way, she hatched an idea to build a software company that could fill the void she was experiencing first hand, that is, automating the parts of social that could benefit from a touch of technology. Don’t miss the interview with Laura, she’s a powerhouse that’s built an amazing tool you’ll want in your marketing tool belt, she also shares some deep insight into her journey.

The Only Social Media  Automation Tools You Need

How to Crack the Conversion Code

Increasing your conversion rates is absolutely critical to success. It's one of the most powerful levers you can have for driving bottom line results.

Ok, imagine your goal is to increase your sales volume by 100% this year. Where do you start? Making 100% more calls, Creating 100% more content? 100% more time, effort and money into sales marketing?

Hypothetically this could work, but it sure is cheaper to do it by increasing your conversion rate. Don't forget – if you have 1% conversion, going to 2% is actually a 100% uplift in results!

Sometimes the littlest change can lead to massive improvement in your conversion rates. Creating better content, cleaner landing pages, better copy writing for your calls-to-action. Add up a bunch of small tweaks and a couple of big ones can bring dramatic increase in your results.

27 Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rate Right Now-inst

If you want to grow your company, at some point or another you need to come to grips with creating a repeatable process for converting your leads into actual, honest to god, sales. That's what the conversion code is all about, mapping the process that connects your marketing activities to your sales activities and in turn, into the sweet sound of your register ringing like a bell.

Here are 27 ways to increase your conversion rate and crack the conversion code

Everyone is in marketing & sales

If  you have any responsibility for the success of your company and you've ever had the thought that sales and marketing was someone else's job,  I need to  be honest with you, you're wrong. There is no fairy godmother in charge of sales or marketing that is going to save the day. You don’t get to be the idea guy or gal without some responsibility for making the cash register ring. The job of every human being at any company is to make people fall in love with your company, learn more about what you do, make the ultimate decision to use your company or recommend it to a friend, family member or innocent bystander.

Everyone is in marketing and everyone is in sales,  It's just a matter of to what degree and to what extent. Think about it, whenever you want to convince your wife, boyfriend, boss, mother (insert relationship here)  of something that you think is important, exciting to you (possibly not interesting to them) do you not think about ways to present it so that it seems attractive? And then provide useful information about the benefits of doing the thing that you want to suggest? Don't you cite examples of why it might be a good idea?, find good testimonials from trusted friends, colleagues, neighbors, the interwebs, and then at some point ask the question that leads to the answer that you hope will be a resounding yes?  This process is a combination of sales and marketing at work. and it applies whether you're trying to get your 3 year old to eat a vegetable, turn your friend into a date, or convince your hubby to go to your favorite bar (restaurant, movie, club, or gourmet donut shop).

Read the entire 27 ways to increase your conversion rate today.
http://craftofmarketing.com/chris-smith/

27 Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rate Right Now

Creating valuable content to inform, connect and motivate your audience is not only possible, it may be one of the few vehicles left that allows you to do that at scale. The trick is to use a measured approach, focus on understanding your audience and how you can be a part of their journey online and off.. This article explains how to weave content into your marketing strategy. I hope you find a few things here to add to your content marketing arsenal.

In today’s hyper-connected world, grabbing the attention of potential clients is no simple task. People are literally being bombarded with messages from all directions. The average American spends 70% of their waking hours consuming digital media, just thinking of the billions (182 Billion at last count) of emails that hit our inbox every day is enough to make anyone feel overloaded.
 
By now, you’ve probably read enough about why content and content marketing are important for your business. So, I want to answer the question of exactly “what” and “how.” A lot of blogs will say things like "think like a publisher” or "content is king” and while that’s a great general statement I wanted to go a bit deeper and clarify what content marketing is and more importantly what it isn’t.
 
Stop Writing about Everything. So many brands create content and try to cover everything, instead of focusing on the core niche that they can position themselves as an expert around.
"No one cares about your special recipe... Find your niche, and then go even more niche" - Joe Pulizzi
To start off my research I decided to go to the mother ship, Content Marketing Institute or more specifically Joe Pulizzi. If there was ever one person to call the ultimate evangelist for content marketing, it would have to be Joe. Some call him the Godfather of content. Back in 2007, he founded Content Marketing Institute to evangelize and educate on content marketing's ability to drive business results. Today CMI is one of the most well known resources on the subject.
 
I caught up with Joe to chat about everything marketing, from what it takes to build a media company to the launching of a successful conference, think Content Marketing World. We follow that up with the highlights of his latest book, "Content Inc," where he illustrates the consistent success of companies that focus on building a community first before trying to sell a product or service. Make sure you listen to the podcast to get your fill of Joe’s content marketing knowledge.

Read the entire post: http://craftofmarketing.com/joe-pulizzi/

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How Content Marketing Can Be Magic For Your Business

If I told you you could hire an engineer to hack the sales process to create a predictable model for growth, would you do it? That’s exactly what one company did. They hired an MIT alum with an engineering background to rethink the sales and marketing process. Then they went on to build a $100 million company using data technology, processes for predictable hiring, sales and marketing SLAs, inbound marketing and selling. Mark Roberge is that guy. He’s the Chief Revenue Officer for a little software company called HubSpot, where in the first 6 years there he helped increase revenue over 6,000% and expanded the team from 1 to 450 employees.

Mark RobergeWhether you’re building the next $100 million company or just striving to hit the growth goals for your current endeavor, often, the biggest challenge comes down to the task of scaling sales.

I’ve always thought there was a blueprint for success, but everyone seems to talk about sales as an art form, rather than a science. You can’t major in sales in college and there’s lots of fantastic sales people didn’t even go to college. But the formula is real.

We get to explore this and more during the in-depth episode of the Craft of Marketing, during which I pick Mark’s brain to learn how he got where he is today, why creating a repeatable hiring process is the lynch-pin for rapid growth, and what it takes to build predictable, repeatable results.

Listen in for an honest account of what marketing is all about. The tips, hacks and strategies that professionals share with each other but rarely talk about in public.

Takeaways:

- How to hire the same successful salesperson every time
- Setup consistent training processes for every salesperson to insure repeatable results
- Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process
- Focus on demand generation to provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month
- Leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople

Read the entire post: http://craftofmarketing.com/mark-roberge/
Subscribe on iTunes: http://craftofmarketing.com/itunes/

Growth Hacking Your Way to Predictable, Repeatable Success

Why Your Marketing Strategy Stinks And What You Can Do About It.
The goal of any marketing strategy is to help you increase your brand awareness and grow your business. But in order for a marketing strategy to be successful, it has to be realistic and something you actually implement.  Even with all the information on the web about marketing strategy, content marketing and social media, understanding how to make it work together is a challenge for everyone in business.

I’ve had the feeling that we’ve been thinking about marketing strategies all wrong, missing the opportunity to be agile and flexible in our our efforts. This led me to a conversation with Mark Schaefer about all things marketing, but especially marketing strategy. How to leverage content, social and build a strategy that’s dynamic and executable. If you don’t know Mark, he’s a marketing rock star. He’s written five seminal marketing books including, The Tao of Twitter, Return on Influence, Born to Blog  and most recently, The Content Code. The insights here were inspired from our conversation recorded in this podcast.

10 Things you can do to create a better marketing strategy.

http://craftofmarketing.com/mark-schaefer/

10 Things I Learned About Website Design and Optimization with Andy Crestodina

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