September 5, 2015
If you’re like me, every time you see somebody who’s accomplished something that you’d like to do, you immediately start wondering: “How did they do this? What do they have that I don’t have? Am I not as talented as I thought I was?” Here is some difficult advice to follow: Don’t worry about them. (I suppose the real audience for this post is me.) You shouldn’t be ashamed of feeling this way — I think everyone does.
Read more...August 25, 2015
A few weeks ago, Google shut down a project called Google Here that would have used Google Maps as a way to get around local retailers’ difficulties in sending notifications to their users. (As reported by The Verge and Fortune.) For Google, the ability to tie their online advertising to in-store sales, which after all still represent more than 90% of all retail, is a big deal. So this makes sense.
Read more...August 18, 2015
marketing, marketing automation, technology
In the marketing ops world, you hear a lot about “progressive profiling” as a way to increase lead generation and quality. The basic idea is, if you want to collect 10 pieces of data about a lead, you do it in subsequent visits: First conversion: [Email] [First Name] [Last Name] [Company Name] Second conversion: [Email] [Job Title] [Company Size] Third conversion: [Email] [Phone Number] [Interest in buying] And so on.
Read more...August 10, 2015
Are you a marketing analyst or technologist? Your job can be more than creating reports on how the latest campaign went or making sure the website is up. (I view that as extremely important work, by the way, but your job could be even more). Marketing is increasingly about technology, analytics, and data. Every major business intelligence vendor has a section on their site about big data for marketing. “Marketing technology” is a thing.
Read more...August 3, 2015
From Rob Enderle’s take on this: Marketing in a broad sense is about manipulation and this is why engineers, by and large, don’t understand it. It’s not that it isn’t based in solid science, it is, but that it is based more on psychology than it is on thermodynamics. Or put a different way, it is more like sales than it is like design or manufacturing. In effect it is sales at scale and the ultimate goal of a marketing effort would be to convince people that otherwise wouldn’t buy a product to instead buy it in mass [sic].
Read more...August 1, 2015
I’ve noticed a couple different models for IT, both as someone who’s helped run it, and as an employee who’s been, er, subjected to it. Both have the overall goal of controlling costs and ensuring security, but they’re done in two different ways. Command and control The basic premise of this model is that most users aren’t to be trusted, and that IT needs to exert careful control over what technologies are used, and how they are used.
Read more...July 28, 2015
What is the objective for this page? How is the page you’re currently writing different from all the other pages on your site? This will make decisions about what to write much easier for any given page. It’ll also give you focused points along your visitor’s journey, which will help with decisions about where to send them, and focus your efforts when doing optimization. What questions are we trying to answer?
Read more...July 27, 2015
I see a psychotherapist every week for 45 minutes, to talk about how things are going and how I feel about my life. It’s quite possibly the most valuable meeting I have all week. I can’t overstate how useful it is to honestly explore my beliefs, feelings, and behavior with the goal of making my life happier. And without judgment. After each session, I’m struck by how much old experiences - especially ones that I had when growing up - lead me to behave in very specific ways, today.
Read more...June 3, 2015
I’ve written before about strategies for avoiding A/B tests. The most important one is just to do your homework, and take advantage of the huge number of documented usability and conversion rate optimization studies that are already out there. I’ll update this post with more sites that I find matching this description. Nielsen Norman Group. A lot of their content is paid, but much of it is free, too. Their blog, which is under the “Articles” section of the site, is great weekly reading, and of course, extremely easy to understand.
Read more...June 1, 2015
I think marketing should be far more data-driven than it currently is. But I’m still really surprised that Twitter appointed its CFO, Anthony Noto, to run marketing. (And, by the way, that “CMO” hasn’t been officially added to his title). I think that a lot of the business world, especially in tech, suffers from the idea that just anyone can do marketing, that it isn’t a separate discipline and craft of its own, requiring expertise to do well.
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