Over the past year, a third generation of landing pages has emerged—let’s call it Landing Pages 3.0—that incorporates ideas from content marketing, social media marketing, HTML5 interfaces, marketing automation, and the explosion of mobile marketing.

Scott Brinker, ion’s President and CTO, explains what’s defining the wave of new innovations in landing pages and the must-have elements for your pages.

Landing page optimization is not an easy topic to discuss, especially with reluctant colleagues. You can explain custom landing pages, A/B tests and increased conversion rates, and many will reply with a stifled yawn.

Anna Talerico, ion interactive Executive Vice President, and two other optimization experts share seven tactics for building support for your landing page testing programs. 

…While many people include social sharing buttons on their pages, few of them track their usage. But to optimize something, you need to measure it.

Scott Brinker, ion’s President and CTO, explains how to track social conversions step by step. 

“We want to give you the right page to make you happy. When you’re comfortable, you buy things,” said Justin Talerico, ion’s chief executive officer.

Justin Talerico, ion’s CEO, talks about landing pages, crafting persuasive, online web experiences, and how to run a business.

He [Justin Talerico] said he also advises companies to be open to change and to listen to their customers. “We let them have a voice in everything we do, and it strategically guides the business,” he said. “Listening is how we got here in the first place, and we continue to do it. They won’t tell you everything, but if you listen hard, they’ll tell you enough to put you on the right track.”

ion’s CEO, Justin Talerico, being interviewed by Julia Patel of the Sun Sentinel about being listed in the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies list.

But the world is changing fast. Marketing is now inundated with new software applications that are suddenly critical to its mission: web analytics, e-mail marketing, bid management, search engine optimization, social media monitoring, marketing automation, conversion optimization, behavioral targeting, and more. How these solutions are selected, configured, operated and connected to each other has a big impact on marketing’s performance.

A new breed of ‘marketing technologist’ is emerging. Here are 3 reasons IT should give them control, by Scott Brinker for InformationWeek.

Your online traffic is like a mixed fruit basket, similar in many ways, but also very different.

Marketing to a mixed basket is difficult—how can you possibly know the right image, message, tone and offer that will appeal to anyone & everyone? This task becomes much more manageable when you group similar people together into segments.

Anna Talerico offers advice on how segmenting visitors can increase your conversion rates. 

While presenting Tuesday at Pivot Conference, Scott Brinker, president and CTO of ion interactive, explained why he believes organizations should take the next step toward digital proficiency by fostering a new breed of executives — the chief marketing technologist.

Erica Swallow reviews Scott’s presentation at Pivot Con. 

We have entered a Golden Age of marketing technology. There are now thousands of software applications built for nearly every aspect of marketing. We have more choices, with more capabilities, at more attractive economics, than ever before.

Here are three reasons why marketing executives should reconsider such a laissez-faire approach to technology.

ion’s President and CTO makes the case for why your company needs a Chief Marketing Technologist.

Five Palm Beach County companies made Inc. magazine’s Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing companies.

ion interactive is listed as the #202 overall fastest growing private company, the 19th fastest growing software company, and the 8th fastest growing company in south Florida.

A dozen South Florida firms made Inc. magazine’s annual list of the 500 fastest growing small companies in the United States.

ion interactive is listed as the 8th fastest growing private company in south Florida, the 19th fastest growing software company and the 202nd fast growing company overall on the Inc. 500 list. 

In part one of this article, which appeared in the August 5 editon of eM+C Weekly, I dicussed how optimizing your landing pages for conversions through testing and analysis can skyrocket your marketing return on investment, and offered five tips to help you get the budget you need for these tasks from upper management.

This week in part two, I discuss five key conversion optimization players in your organization who — when working together — will help your conversion rates soar, as well as best practices around conversion optimization testing.

Anna Talerico provides helpful advice on how to put together a conversion optimization team.

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, takes online marketing ROI to a whole new level. CRO is the process of real-time testing of your website and landing pages in order to improve your conversion rates. With CRO you no longer are focused on meaningless data like click-through rates, but actionable data that shows you how to generate more of what you want: new leads, qualified opportunities and more sales.

Anna Talerico provides actionable advice for improving your conversions rates, and also details the essential people you need on your conversion team.

There’s no doubt that conversion optimization can help your marketing department achieve a better ROI, but securing additional funds for your marketing budget may not be easy. The following are five tips for getting the budget you need.

Check out part one of this two part series where Anna Talerico provides advice on how to improve online conversion rates.

Design or technology? Which is more important? Why? Design. Because regardless of the tool, the ultimate success or failure of online marketing is still in its messaging and visualization. Everything speaks a language and the definition and articulation of that language forms a seductive bond with users. As creators of these bonds, we need tools that free us from “how” and focuses us on “what.” The mantra of our tool, LiveBall, is to let non-technical people focus on what they create. That’s all that’s important. Of course, without a tool to take care of “how,” what gets created is irrelevant because it can’t get to work. 

Read more of Justin’s interview with CommArts to learn how he overcomes a creative block and what gadget he cannot live without.

The definition of social proof says that people are more likely to do something if they see other people doing it. For example, in one social proof experiment, a control group was placed outside and told to look up at the sky. Passersby who saw the group looking up at the sky also stopped to look up. At one point so many people had congregated into the area to stare up at the sky that they stopped traffic. The passersby had no idea why they were looking up at the sky (in fact, there was no reason), they just knew everyone else was doing it!

This is great news for online marketers because it translates easily into a usable tidbit of data: If potential customers know that other people are using a product, they will want to use it too.

A 2009 Omniture Conversion Survey showed that 78.5 percent of companies don’t offer personalized content even though eight out of 10 sites collect the kind of visitor data that could be used for creating personalized experiences. Hyper-targeted messages can skyrocket content relevancy and increase conversions, so it’s a shame more companies aren’t taking advantage of it.

There is a simple, effective way to start offering a more personalized content experience, without a lot of bells and whistles. Offer segmented pages for your campaign traffic. While offering personalized messaging for organic traffic is virtually impossible, when it comes to campaign traffic it is not only possible, it should be priority.

Turning e-mail clicks into conversions isn’t difficult; you just need to tightly match your e-mail and your landing page experiences.

A landing page is the first page a visitor views after clicking an ad or e-mail link. In order to turn e-mail readers into paying customers, make your landing pages a direct reflection of your e-mail. A landing page is a continuation of the e-mail; think of the e-mail itself as step 1 and the landing page as step 2.

Old strategies should be tossed out the window like failed resolutions, and the focus should shift to creating a solid plan for moving users past the initial click toward conversion.

You built your website and are driving traffic to it. You wrote compelling copy and set up an analytics program to monitor traffic trends. Now it’s time to sit back and reap the rewards of all your hard work, right?

Wrong.

Now it’s time to analyze all those charts and graphs within your analytics program, and optimize your site for lifting conversion rates.

For purchases of any significance, a number of people will weigh in on the decision, often from several departments. Internally, there can be a mix of collaboration and competition in this process - everyone wants the business to succeed, but everyone wants to look good in their particular job too.

B2B marketers must strive to subtly shape the composition of these groups and make sure that the interests of each participant - as well as the overall interests of the group - are well served.

Business-to-business marketing may be one of the least understood disciplines in business.

It’s ironic, because consumer-centric marketing has been widely popularized - just check out the marketing section at any bookstore or peruse the curriculum of most MBA marketing programs. But while a number of consumer marketing concepts have analogs in marketing to businesses, it’s not a simple translation from targeting “Joe” to targeting “Joe’s Discount Auto Parts” with 28 stores in five states.

Applications are usually optimized for general appeal—you want them to work well for everyone. You’re looking for the common denominators of your entire customer population. They also tend to be deeper in the conversion funnel, so you want them to be compatible with a wide range of messages earlier in a user’s experience.

From blogs and landing pages, to official outlets on social media sites, marketers now manage a large extended web that thrives beyond the borders of the traditional web site. Great conversion optimization must leverage the dynamics of each layer—and coordinate the interaction between them.

Conversion optimization extends beyond a single page. SEO usually avoids breaking up content into multiple steps. However, you may find that multi-step landing pages convert better, because they engage respondents in a mutually productive dialogue and facilitate segmentation (they’re also called “conversion paths” for a reason).

SEO has been and will continue to be important, but there’s a new, big player on the field vying for your attention: conversion optimization. What is the ultimate goal for new this player? To take the traffic that’s coming to your landing page, and move users beyond the initial click. Scott Brinker’s Search Engine Land article, “Conversion Optimization is the New SEO” explains the similarities and differences between SEO and conversion optimization, and shows you why both are important.

“One measure we feel really good about is that we’re now running two to three times better than the average industry conversion rate of 1% to 3%,” said Brandt. “We’re killing the industry average.”

When Scott Brandt came on board as VP Marketing at Surepayroll to take their sales to the next level, he decided to dramatically re-tool their search efforts. He took a close look at their keywords and ads, and knew they needed to create very targeted, keyword-specific landing pages. But their old process of creating landing pages by hand wasn’t cutting it, so he turned to LiveBall, our enterprise landing page management solution, to streamline SurePayroll’s landing page production & boost conversions. BtoB Magazine got word of their dramatic improvement in results, and recounted their success story in this BtoB Magazine article.