Conversion rate optimization (CRO) has developed into its own specialty field in digital marketing that is growing rapidly. The field of CRO deals with increasing the amount of web traffic a site gets into buying customers. As you can imagine, this field is of critical interest to retail website owners and its influence on marketing programs continues to grow.

Talking To An Audience

Website owners are constantly looking for more effective ways to convert web traffic into buying customers because this cuts down on the cost of selling. A CRO expert understands what makes users go from browsing to buying, and this means that more CRO experts are working with digital marketing experts to improve the overall customer experience. With the data generated by CRO experts, marketing professionals can determine more effective ways to find new target audiences, communicate with those audiences, and develop more powerful marketing messages.

Simplifying The Process

A CRO expert considers everything that attracts and repels potential buyers when developing their ideas. It has been proven over and over again that a streamlined purchasing process is one thing that keeps consumers coming back to a website. But before the emergence of CRO experts, digital marketing professionals were never really sure what buyers wanted. With the help of CRO, marketers now have a better understanding of how buyers want the purchasing process simplified.

Don't Forget The Desktop

Since CRO is relatively new, most people assume it only deals with the emerging industry of mobile computing. But any good CRO expert will tell you that consumers want a unified experience with desktop and mobile websites, and consumers want both kinds of websites to be as easy as possible to use. The idea that the desktop is going away is not accurate, and CRO experts are constantly reminding marketers to keep an eye on desktop development.

Maximize Mobile Options

One of the aspects of mobile computing that CRO experts constantly talk about is the lack of modern tools being used in developing mobile websites. Geolocation and the click-to-call marketing tactics are not used as widely as they could be, and that is not making users happy. There are some forms of marketing that users want to see on mobile websites, and CRO experts are trying to educate marketers on what those new tools may be.

The Regional Framework

When a portion of digital marketing spins off into its own field, such as CRO, the detailed manner in which that field is analyzed becomes more intense. Lately, CRO experts have discovered that regional limitations such as laws regarding online retail sales, international shipping issues, and maintaining inventory for customers all over the world is hurting CRO as much as anything else. Websites need to be aware of where their target audiences are located and develop strategies that address regional challenges.

The field of CRO will only grow in 2019, which is good news for digital marketing experts. The more information marketers have regarding consumer trends, the easier it gets for those marketers to develop effective marketing programs.

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For any business, word-of-mouth advertising is extremely powerful for bringing in new clients. There are plenty of ways to pay for word-of-mouth advertising and paying for it is just as effective as growing your own network. But an organically grown network is going to give you a more hands-on approach to growing your business through the power of referrals.

Creating a Business Network

A business network is simply a collection of people you meet in your daily travels that are interested in growing their business and helping you to grow yours. Your business network will consist of anyone you meet because you never want to limit your range of influence to just one industry. To create a business network, you carry business cards wherever you go and swap cards with people as you meet them. You keep their contact information and use that contact information when the opportunity is right.

Using Your Business Network

As you are talking to someone you just met, they might mention to you that they need a plumber to fix a problem they have in their home. You give them the contact information of one of the plumbers you have in your business network and strongly recommend that your new contact call your plumber. You should also make sure that your new contact mentions to your plumber that you said to call. Over time, these referrals create a constantly-growing network of business contacts that will help grow your business.

Online Business Networks

Creating business networks online is just as powerful as the networks made up of contacts you meet face-to-face. Social media is an excellent place to start building your networks because of all of the groups and communities each network has available. You should also look into professional organizations that have online message boards and other ways to network with people online. As you grow your online network, you would utilize it the same way you would use your business card network.

Mixing Networks

At some point, you will want to find the social media profiles of your business card contacts so you can connect with them online. But it is important to keep your business card and online networks separate to prevent you from making incorrect referrals. For example, a local small business owner you meet would probably benefit better from the local accountant you know instead of the one you know several states over.

Business networks are essential to any growing organization. It is important to constantly connect with people you can refer to others to help enhance your credibility and, eventually, grow your own business as well. The larger your networks and the more active you are with them, the more you will consistently add to your customer base and improve your overall revenue.

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Online marketing has become very popular around the world and many companies wonder if they even need to do offline print advertising anymore. The comparison between online and offline marketing has several facets to it with cost being only one. In order to get the full benefit of your marketing dollar, you must be prepared to spend a few extra dollars on targeted print advertising. A robust digital marketing plan should, in all instances, also include offline advertising programs.

Costs

No matter how you try to compare them, digital marketing costs are always going to be less than print. One of the big advantages of digital marketing is that there are so many ways to track the effectiveness of your results that calculating return on investment becomes much easier. But before you bury offline advertising for good, remember that print collateral often lingers for months longer than digital. A full-page ad in a magazine could still be getting read on an airplane or a doctor's office months after it was printed, where most digital content has a solid deadline where it no longer exists.

Exposure

Offline print advertising is accessible to almost anyone. A billboard can be seen by thousands of people who might not own a computer, while an online banner is only seen by computer users. There are millions of computer and smartphone users all over the world who are capable of seeing digital advertising, but there is not a lot of room for the kind of random exposure print offers. A digital ad is usually placed on a user's computer or smartphone based on their past purchases. But a newspaper or magazine can still put that random ad in front of a consumer that could spark an interest that was never there before.

Working Hand-In-Hand

The truth is that offline and online marketing need to work hand-in-hand if you are going to have a successful campaign. In some demographic groups, such as people over the age of 40, print advertising is a way to add an air of legitimacy to online advertising. Contrary to popular belief, younger audiences also read print advertising and when done properly, print can add a great deal of power to digital marketing.

The key to a successful marketing campaign is to understand your audience and use the right mixture of online and offline advertising. Every demographic group has its own preference when it comes to offline marketing, and you need to exploit those preferences if you want to get your message out to the widest possible audience.

When it comes to brand building, the goal with your marketing is to find the largest audience possible. Offline advertising fills in gaps online advertising leaves behind and creates a more comprehensive marketing plan. If you want your marketing to be a success, then it constantly needs to be some mix of online and offline marketing.

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Quantitative marketing (quant marketing) has been around for a very long time. Most people have been approached by a marketing associate holding a clipboard looking to ask questions about a company or product. This is quant marketing, but it had almost vanished when big data was introduced to the marketing world. It was thought that big data, which includes social media information, would be all companies would need for market research.

Recently, marketing experts have realized that big data gives a lot of good information, but it does not give a complete picture. It is still necessary to go out and talk to the customers, which means that quant marketing is going to get pushed back into the mainstream as marketing companies strive to learn everything they can about consumer tendencies.

What Is Big Data Lacking?

Big data can use social media and other consumer indicators to tell trends from the past, but it cannot predict how consumers will react in the future to any accuracy. For example, if a customer had a very good experience at a store recently, then the customer might decide to visit that store more frequently. The only way to get that information is to ask consumers directly. Quant marketing uses a lot of closed-end questions (questions with definite answers) to get important marketing data.

How Will Quant Marketing Be Done?

While technology continues to march forward, quant marketing is going to be done the same way it has always been done. There are three methods to collecting quant marketing data:

• Face-to-Face - This is where marketing associates talk to consumers and gather data.
• Online - Consumers can fill out questionnaires on their own and the marketing companies collect data digitally.
• Phone - While new telemarketing laws will make it difficult to collect quant data over the phone, this is still a method that will be used to get the data marketers need.

Big Data And Quant Marketing

Digital marketing is constantly evolving, so it is almost impossible to say if there will ever be the definitive way for collecting data. But now that quant marketing is making its way back into mainstream marketing tactics, it is safe to say that most complete marketing campaigns in the future will include a combination of the two. Big data is excellent for collecting data that tracks past consumer trends and quant marketing is a more accurate way to forecast future consumer trends.

Many digital marketing experts felt that the emergence of big data meant that marketing associates with clipboards talking to consumers in department stores would be a thing of the past. But as we are finding out, the tried and true tactics of quant marketing are proving to be an effective compliment to anything that is being done with big data.

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Data visualization has been around for a long time, but it was usually something reserved for marketing executives, IT directors, or accountants. It was expensive to create reports that helped put data into a context that each person could understand. As the era of big data continues to grow, the need for more people to access that data increases. This growing need to distribute data has helped to spearhead a data visualization movement that is creating an increasing number of tools that anyone can use.

What Is Data Visualization?

Data visualization is getting data put into a form that allows anyone to understand its effects. When data users start asking questions pertaining to data, the answers can be represented in the form of a pie chart, infographic, or anything that would make it easier to understand the real effects the data is predicting. It is also easier to compare data side-by-side when using visualization.

How Do You Visualize Data?

There are thousands of computer programs available that allow data collectors, such as IT directors, to present data in a form that marketing associates can understand. Instead of complex data comparison reports, this data is presented in a visual form that makes it easier to understand and utilize.

Why Do We Need Data Visualization?

In digital marketing, large portions of marketing plans are dedicated to solving problems and creating a larger market share. For example, a marketing professional working on a marketing plan might wonder how the sales projections would change if the product were presented in red instead of blue.

Thanks to big data, there is plenty of market research data available that can easily answer that question. The problem is that presenting that data as a comparison that would alter a marketing plan can be complicated. Visualization puts the data comparisons into bar graphs or pie charts that are easy to read and allow the marketing associate to immediately quantify the information.

Other Uses For Visualization

Visualization is also a very powerful tool when it comes to present milestone data for marketing plans that are in effect. Instead of pouring over spreadsheets of data, a room of marketing professionals can compare visualized data and immediately determine how a program needs to be altered to be effective.

Data visualization also makes it easier to compare historical data to future data projections. Since visualization helps to speed up the analysis portion of a marketing project, it can save a company money and allow changes to be made at a faster pace.

The more that marketing companies rely on big data, the more they will need data visualization. The act of presenting data on spreadsheets with multiple columns to a room full of people with varying levels of statistical abilities can often lead to confusion and frustration. But with data visualization, the ever-expanding amount of data that is available can now be put into formats that everyone will be able to understand.

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