If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. – Haruki Murakami
Becoming the best at what you do is a never-ending process. The best of the best have an insatiable hunger for knowledge—for new and better ways to get things done.
No-code and low-code tools are on the rise, with thousands of businesses and makers turning to a faster and cheaper way to test, validate, and build out their ideas. Leading the way, you have companies such as Zapier, Webflow, and Airtable transforming the way we work.
As the reliance on these tools continue to grow, so too does the opportunity for technical and non-technical marketers alike to gain an edge and advance their marketing skill set. Marketers and businesses who take advantage of no-code and low-code now will be in position to reap the rewards. Those who ignore the shift will be passed by.
So, as a marketer, what skills should you learn now to set yourself up for future success? For businesses, what’s the most effective way to approach building applications and software using no-code? We’ll take a look in this article.
What worked in SEO, content, and growth just a few months ago may not be effective today. Making things even more challenging, there’s so much noise. Is that top-ranked content on Google actually the best thing out there? Or is it the same “me too” content?
We identified top marketers based on some good-but-imperfect criteria (e.g., mentions on marketing sites, social media presence, recent presentations, etc.).
Then, we used that expert seed list to gather opinions on which people, sites, and books all marketers should listen to, read, or watch.
Sales and marketing misalignment reduces revenue, lowers the quality of customer service, and can even dampen company culture. So how do you get aligned?
This post, based on our experiences, covers:
![Testing the Presenter’s Paradox – Do People Really Average (Not Sum) Object Values? [Original Research]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/DSL-w-freebie-320x160.jpg)
This study examines people’s tendencies to average, not sum, values of items in a list or presented as package deals.
We provide 3 perspectives: 1. we outline what products and lists two academic studies have tested, 2. we duplicate a product and list test with a larger sample size to try and replicate the findings, and 3. we then apply the test to six new products, three experiential products (travel package, hotel night, massage) and three physical products (camera, printer, kitchen mixer).
![Do Review Stars on Google Help Click-Through Rate? [Original Study]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/stars-320x160.jpg)
You know when you search for something on Google sometimes you see review stars next to a search result?
Like here:
Does it work to attract more clicks?
Inspired by our study Which Types of Social Proof Work Best?, we set out to quantify review stars as a way to increase click-through rates (CTR) in search engine results pages.
What kind of improvement in CTR can we get from including review stars in search engine results, if any? What does that mean for application in your business? We attempt to answer these questions with hard data in this CXL Institute study.
Our research was performed in collaboration with Nitin Manhar Dhamelia from Belron® International, a automotive glass replacement and repair group.
![Does the Presenter's Paradox Actually Work in Digital Marketing? [Original Research]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Screen-Shot-2016-10-10-at-9.33.28-AM-320x160.png)
When people weigh choices, the Presenter’s Paradox says they do so by averaging (not adding) the value of each item in a package.
This means if you add more items to a list or more products to a bundle, it could reduce the overall value perception (if the added items are deemed less valuable.
Research on this phenomenon is fairly scarce, though, so we decided to conduct a study through CXL Institute.
We provide 3 perspectives:
![The Effects of Highlighting a "Recommended" Pricing Plan [Original Research]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/7-table-cheapest-first-320x160.jpg)
Previously, CXL Institute published research we did on the order of pricing plans. This study on the effects of highlighting particular pricing plans is a continuation of that study. It has the same experimental design, except here we explicitly test a new variable – highlighting a plan with a different background color.
Similar to the first study, we manipulated the pricing page for a survey tool, SurveyGizmo, to see if there are different patterns of user perception and preference (choice of plan) for various layout designs (price plan order) when one particular plan is highlighted.
How do you order your pricing page: Cheap-to-expensive? Expensive-to-cheap? Randomly?
This study, conducted through CXL Institute, is the first of a multi-part pricing page study providing data on how people consume pricing plans depending on the plan’s layout design.
For this first study, we manipulated the pricing page for a survey tool, SurveyGizmo, to see if there are different patterns of user perception and preference (choice of plan) for various layout designs.
![Which Type of Voice Actor Should You Use for Your Explainer Video? [Original Research]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Capture-320x160.jpg)
When designing the landing page for CXL Institute, we conducted an experiment regarding our explainer video.
We wanted to find out how “trustworthy” and “attractive” different voices were perceived. In this CXL Institute study, we tested four different voices, which differed by gender and whether they were professional voice actors or not.
Question is, did it make a different in how people perceived our video content? Yes, and the results were somewhat surprising.