The traditional blog format—regular, sequential publishing of diary-style entries—no longer makes sense for most businesses. To be honest, it never did.
A B2B website that educates potential buyers isn’t a personal “weblog.” It doesn’t toss out unsubstantiated opinions. It doesn’t age the same way. The earliest articles may cover the most valuable topics, but our throwaway content culture lets older posts rot.
Persuading completely rational people to make a rational decision or take a rational action would be easy. Unfortunately, you’re stuck dealing with irrational thinking, fueled by cognitive biases and emotions.
So, how do you persuade effectively when people are so heavily influenced by subjective (and contextual) factors?
“Rare is the business that has a formal disaster plan, let alone one that covers a global Black Swan event.”
Tim Stewart, trsdigital
An article on growth and marketing in the middle of a crisis—the current one or any other—can seem tone deaf. But nothing gets better if we stand still.
Most businesses struggle with their product pricing strategies. Are you charging too much or too little? What’s the right price to charge so you can grow your bottom line?
Some 73% of Millennial workers are involved in B2B purchase decisions, and 85% of that group uses social media to research products and services for their companies.
Google Analytics shows 104 conversions. Your CRM shows 123 new leads. Heap reports 97. And so on.
It’s easy to get frustrated by data discrepancies. Which source do you trust? How much variance is okay? (Dan McGaw, founder and CEO of McGaw.io, suggests 5%.)
For most companies, Google Analytics is a—often the—primary source of analytics data. Getting its numbers aligned with other tools in your martech stack keeps results credible and blood pressure manageable.
More choice equals freedom, right?
Well, yes, but there’s a good body of evidence that the more choices presented to us, the less happy we are with the one we make.
What does that mean for conversions? Or retention? Or revenue?
In an iconic scene from Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Alec Baldwin lectures a group of salesmen about the correct way of doing business.
In his motivational (read: foul-mouthed) speech, he highlights a very important strategy that still rings true today—especially in the world of conversion rate optimization:
Traffic attribution identifies which sources drive visitors to a web property. And it’s impossible to credit a conversion to the correct source without first knowing how a visitor got to a website.
In other words, the foundation of conversion attribution is traffic attribution. Simple as it may sound, attributing a session to its traffic source can be tricky, even impossible.
As the marketing industry developed, researchers dove deeper into buying behavior and buyers’ minds. One early researcher was Edward Bernays—Sigmund Freud’s nephew—who coined the term “public relations.”
Bernays believed that people could be influenced via crowd psychology and psychoanalysis. His “Torches of Freedom” campaign in the 1920s promoted smoking among women as a symbol of liberation, opening a new market to cigarette companies.
Decades later, in 2002, Dutch marketing professor Ale Smidts coined the term “neuromarketing.” Neuromarketing maps neural activity to consumer behavior to help marketers craft more valuable, science-based campaigns.