boost-roi-assemble-high-performing-teams-exceed-expectations.

Struggling to see ROI from your martech? Eager to assemble a frictionless organization? Want to deliver user experiences that exceed customer expectations?

Attend The MarTech Conference April 15-17 in San Jose for creative, vendor-agnostic solutions to these and many more complex marketing challenges.

The agenda is live and ready for you to explore! Join a community of nearly 2,000 senior-level marketers for tactical, practical sessions and return to the office ready to…

Deliver measurable results with limited budget and resources


√ Get data quality, integration, and governance right


√ Successfully incorporate agile methods for increased efficiency


√ Infuse martech best practices into your organization


√ Create customer experiences that are personalized, relevant, and effective


√ Evaluate and invest in the technologies that deliver on all of these goals

You’ll soak up inspiration during exclusive keynotes and game-changing insights from experts, including:

  • I will address both practical and reasonable strategies for marketing operations and technology management — while embracing the promise of exciting, new innovations in my opening keynote, Leading The Next Decade Of Martech.
  • Digital analyst Brian Solis, SalesForce Principal of Marketing Insights, Mathew Sweezey, and communications expert Nancy Duarte will empower you to leverage AI to improve customer experiences, motivate buyers in an age of infinite media, and use data to tell compelling, humanizing narratives.

See the agenda!

Ready to register? Choose the pass that’s right for your goals and budget and book now to enjoy up to $900 off on-site rates:

  • All Access: Complete access to all conference sessions, keynotes, networking events, exhibitors, sponsor presentations, amenities, and more.
  • All Access Workshop Combo (best value!): Dive deeper and learn more by adding a half-day, pre-conference workshop to your itinerary.
  • Expo : Searching for martech tools and services? Focused on growing your network? Pick up a FREE Expo pass to enjoy unlimited Expo Hall access, full-length Solution Track sessions, sponsor presentations in the Discover MarTech Theater, downloadable speaker presentations, refreshments, free WiFi, and more.
  • Team Rates: MarTech is a fabulous option for your 2020 company outing. Attend as a group for a unique team-building experience and lock in extra savings while you’re at it.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn practical advice and insights from marketing leaders who have been where you are and are ready to share what it takes to succeed.

I hope to see you there 🙂

Psst… How many marketing technology tools does your organization use? Do you know how they’re organized? Are they organized? Discover the scope and structure of your martech stack and earn the recognition of your peers: Enter the 2020 Stackie Awards!


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author

Scott Brinker is the conference chair of the MarTech® Conference, a vendor-agnostic marketing technology conference and trade show series produced by MarTech Today’s parent company, Third Door Media. The MarTech event grew out of Brinker’s blog, chiefmartec.com, which has chronicled the rise of marketing technology and its changing marketing strategy, management and culture since 2008. In addition to his work on MarTech, Scott serves as the VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive.



good-enough-design:-how-to-boost-your-efficiency

Zbigniew Gecis

How to make your work on time and budget? How to boost your efficiency? How to use your time to reach the most impressive or valuable results?

My video about “Good enough design”

Understanding when to put your pencil down is a real challenge for designers. As a designer, you have to ensure you are paying attention to the right details and when a design is, well, good enough.

Sometimes designers are trapped in the limbo of pixel pushing. I remember myself spending hours and hours refining every pixel of my design without any Breakthru. I was burning my time without any results or with very small progress. I was trying not only to feed my ego, and high aesthetic needs but also, it will sound funny, to impress other designers. I needed something that would be visually appealing, that would look amazing in my portfolio, that would be just perfect.

Leonardo da Vinci once told:

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

The same goes for design. You can improve stuff for ages. But… Achieving absolute perfection may be impossible and so, as increasing effort results in diminishing returns, the further activity becomes increasingly inefficient. You just burn your time.

Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, a pioneer in the development of radar, was instrumental in creating a system to detect airplanes that many say contributed to the Royal Air Force’s 1940 victory at the Battle of Britain.

Explaining the decision to employ the far-from-perfect radar to protect the British shores, Watson-Watt said,

“Always strive to give the military the third-best because the best is impossible and second best is always too late.”

This attitude of being good enough, not perfect, has been dubbed ‘the cult of the imperfect’.

Voltaire summed the attitude nearly two hundred years earlier when he wrote,

“The best is the enemy of the good.”

So if not perfect? How we should describe the good? Good enough?

Aristotle, Confucius, and other classical philosophers propounded the principle of the golden mean, which counsels against extremism in general.

The Pareto principle or 80–20 rule explains this numerically. For example, it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort.

So how we could use the Pareto principle in our work?

While the 80/20 principle is not about “doing the bare minimum,” it is about focusing energy on what needs to be done. If 80% of your positive results flow from only 20% of your overall effort, that precious time needs to be treasured. The 20% is what we should focus on.

So here are my 5 tips on how to obtain a superpower of being efficient.

First, establish the items you are prioritizing and write to them. These can be:

  • Projects
  • Ideas
  • Features that you plan to implement
  • Jobs to be done
  • User groups or personas
  • Research activities
  • Tasks

Next, you’ll define the criteria according to which you’ll perform the prioritization. For prioritizing different ideas, the criteria could impact on the user or feasibility. For prioritizing personas, they could be the percentage of user base and ROI.

e.g.

The matrix that I’ve made a while ago:

  • User Frequency of usage (times per week)
  • Importance to users (1 to 10 survey result)
  • Complexity to design (approximate hours that I need to spend)
  • Importance to business (stakeholder evaluation)
  • Frogs (my sympathy to the task, I will explain that in details a bit later)

After feeling this matrix I can see which task/parts of the project are the most important & need to be addressed first.

Which parts will be the most visible, the most important to business, which of them have the biggest value to the user.

Based on those values, I create deadlines, timeframe for myself. How much time I can spend on each task/part of the project.

If you eat a frog at the beginning of every day then you could more or less ensure that it’d be the worst thing you had to do.

Each of us has a battery that drains. Tasks that we hate are requiring more will power and overall energy to do or finish. When we do stuff that we do like, we appear in “flow”, so we use less will power, I think all of you had that feeling while doing some fun job that you are in sort of trans, and even after hours of doing the work — you still had a lot of energy. So first you do the worst stuff, stuff that you hate the most that drain your will power and leave the stuff that you do like to the second part of the day.

Being aware of the details you don’t want to do, and the things you want to do can help guide you to properly prioritizing your work.

I do a safety net of “good-enough” designs, where I reach 80% , the good enough result without trying to reach perfection. For low priority tasks, I can do even the bare minimum.

E.g. when you draw illustration, there is no point to draw every detail with perfection, if you know that nobody will see those details. Sometimes you need to ditch the details to achieve the great result while doing illustration work. The same could be applied to design tasks.

It’s the core stuff that you need to get right. All those corner cases, that are “invisible” to user or business, need to be covered, but there is no need to seek for perfection.

I consider deliverable “good enough” when:

  • It successfully solves the problem, addresses the need
  • The quality of work is consistent with or above the level of previous work, it meets the brand’s quality standards
  • It has been reviewed by other qualified individuals

After finishing all the tasks that need to be done I know that I have fail-safe solutions.

Now I can go deep into those parts that I want to polish, to make them outstanding without blowing the deadlines. Or I can do other project or any other activities.

I use that rule 80/20 also to define my weakness. If I spend on some tasks the majority of time with diminishing results, I try to master them, so net time it would take me less time.

So once again. Use your time and energy wisely. Done is better than perfect

10-best-seo-tools-to-boost-your-organic-traffic-in-2019

10 Best SEO Tools to boost your organic traffic in 2019

The average Joe’s guide to experts Top 10 Best SEO tools that won’t break your back or budget.

You should know that you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting your SEO campaign requires by yourself anymore. Even the top-level SEO experts aren’t getting by on their own. So why not free up your time and get more done through adopting the new wave in productivity that SEO tools sponsor? Here’s what you should consider.

Think of that cramping set-back keeping you from dominating your niche, grabbing more opportunities, or just simply getting by. What if you knew that it requires less effort to fix than you thought?. Even better, how would you feel knowing you don’t need to be an SEO expert to get started on it?. Well, you don’t have to answer that yourself too the experts already have.

The Best SEO tools listed here will show how experts have shamelessly used their help to get past competitors plenty of times and how to do it yourself. Even though there’s ten of them. don’t worry about getting a ton of these gizmos, just one of these SEO tools used properly can help you strike the bull’s eye of your SEO goldmine.

Free vs paid subscriptions.

Most of them are free so don’t worry about breaking your budget. And as for the paid subscriptions: you can take advantage of the free trial offers before you commit to making a purchase.

Best SEO Tools in 2019

Let’s begin with SEO Tools…

1) Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a helpful competitor analysis tool which is backed by a large database of back-links. It is one of the most preferred SEO tools. You can check which websites are linking to your competitors and use this information to jump on opportunities to gain a competitive edge in your industry.

Ahrefs

Its capacity to carry out revealing SEO audits is one of its most favored features. Gaining insight on what keywords your competitors are ranking for, what brand of content is doing well in your industry and who is digesting it, as well as showing which key points you need to improve the efficiency of your website is expected from the Ahrefs keyword explorer tool.

That is not all you’re getting out of this. You can use the Ahrefs dashboard to either monitor your website’s ranking, view your competitors, or monitor projects for your clients.

Here is what you can expect from an Ahrefs SEO Audit

  • Total ranking of your back-link profile strength/Domain Rank
  • Total number of backlinks
  • Referring domains
  • Rank tracking for both organic & targeted keywords

Try Ahrefs!

2) Moz

Moz

An SEO marketing tool like Moz is necessary to give insights on rankings and shifts that affect the SEO landscape, especially with the frequency of Google algorithm update roll-outs. It can also expose you to new opportunities to increase your advantage over your competitors.

Moz is favored in the SEO community for its capability to produce a transparent overview of website performance. You can optimize each of the pages on your website based on the findings you gather from the reports.

Though you can expect to pay for this due diligence, it is also accessible as a free Moz toolbar download.

Moz Tools

Taking advantage of Moz’s page optimization features can help you know about the following:

  • Search traffic
  • Search data
  • Keyword targeting

The Page SEO Checker tool will help optimizers in monitoring rankings and keeping up with the key areas that stand to be improved by offering performance-enhancing recommendations.

Try Moz!

3) Google Search Console

Google Search Console

This is one of the free SEO tools we were talking about. In a nutshell, this Google-sponsored tool reports on what factors most influence your website’s presence in the Google SERP’s.

Factors such as your website’s visibility in Google’s search results, its usability, your contents (especially keywords) usefulness, and its ranking. It also highlights who is visiting your website through Google’s search engine and how they are interacting with the efforts you have set in place to attract them.

This is a boost to your user experience optimization in regards to having an overview of your impact on Google’s audience. This is especially true when monitoring which devices they use, such as the boost in mobile usage (AMP). All you have to do is copy a tracking code from Google Search Console to paste into your websites HTML. Doing this will help you gain knowledge on the important parts of your SEO campaign.

Connect your website with Google Search Console

You can expect to get the following insights from the Search Console reports:

  • Page index
  • CTR
  • Back-links
  • Geographic targeting

The Google Search Console offers to index changes made to your website immediately instead of the usual waiting period. Doing so with Google Index can take weeks and even months to register

Google Console is also said to help with chasing off cyber threats. This should come in handy for a business/establishment which is vulnerable to malware and spam attacks.

Try Google Search Console!

4. KWFinder

KWFinder

As for KWFinder, we’ve found that it caters a powerful keyword research and management tool with a straightforward user interface. The paid subscription starts at $29 per month billed annually. The subscription offers a generous 100 keyword lookups per 24 hours as well as other useful benefits you can find here. This SEO tool does have a free plan available that allow a user three keyword lookups every 24 hours. You can also try the 10-day free trial.

Overall, the tool is great for focusing on all the information that involves a single keyword. It balances this out by catering for long-tail keyword combinations.

As part of its package, the ‘Rank Tracker’ tool provides keyword suggestions. This gives users insight into data that covers a keywords search volume, the average cost per click, competitiveness, the difficulty score or if the keyword is trending or not.

Users get the capacity to find low competition keyword combinations that have a search volume that should boost their rankings. When you find a suggestion that you like, you can add it to your list of keyword suggestions on the tool.

KWFinder Features

The dashboard is easy to navigate and offers convenience to import or export a list of keywords and analysis reports as a CSV or TXT file.

Try KWFinder!

5. SEMRush

SEMRush is always ending up in the top 10 Best SEO tools lists we’ve come across. It earns its authority from being an SEO keyword research tool famous for boasting a large keyword database. It doubles as a marketing tool, making it efficient as both an SEO & SEM tool. Helping to measure and track your campaigns, evaluating your performance as well as your competitor’s to keep you efficient in your market.

SEMRush Keyword Stats

The API integration makes it compatible with Google Docs, Google Analytics & Google Search Console. That’s three times the advantage and convenience. You can use it as a domain comparison tool to match your websites meta information such as search data, traffic insights, back-link monitoring, position tracking, and other ranking factors against another website through an analysis report that can be accessible in PDF format. A competitive edge can be gained from these findings by making your content unique and your user-experience a cut above the leading competitors in your niche.

SEMRush Content Creation Ideas

You can tweak your website’s performance with the On-Page SEO Checker Tool. The dashboard enables users to get a look at the keywords in their content with the Topic Research tool, keep a finger on the pulse on the social media shares they are collecting and also get backlink ideas. The one-click posting feature is good at supporting multimedia posting across many social media channels.

Try SEMRush!

6) BuzzStream

Buzzstream

Buzzstream is a web-based CRM software which has workforce and email management automation capabilities. You can access emails, track, and follow-up on your email outreach as well as your link-building projects all in one place with the ‘Sequence’ feature.

You won’t need to cross-reference tasks on a spreadsheet anymore, Buzzstream has a chrome plugin that can help to manage and track campaigns within your browser. Users can integrate the software with social media and other API supportive platforms.

The Discovery feature helps with your content marketing efforts. You can look for experts, influencers, and bloggers by inserting your query in the search bar. A list of recommendations will appear on the interface. You can filter these results to get your ideal candidate. There is an option to add them to your prospects lists for consideration if you can’t make a decision on the spot.

Here’s a quick look at how you can use it for scheduling tasks, as well as tracking your team’s work-flow through the course of a particular project.

Buzzstream scheduled Tasks

Buzzstream can handle your back-link strategy by monitoring who is linking back to you. If you get stuck, their notoriously efficient customer services can walk you through any of the issues you run into.

Try Buzzstream!

7) ATP(Answer the Public)

Answer The Public

A free keyword research tool like ATP can help with producing informational long tail keywords. ATP is a combination of SEO and marketing capabilities which are useful for the Press Coverage Reporting aspect of your content distribution to the public.

Answer The Public questions

You can generate a lot of content ideas for your audience from such access to consumer insights. A bulk of questions is supplied by ATP when you enter your query in their search-bar and can be accessed in list-form or a circle.

ATP Questions chart

Preparing your content with strong hints of your audience’s motivations can be helpful in making you a leader in efficiency within your market.

ATP’s ability to produce buying intent keywords makes this easier to draw in organic traffic with the content in your topics. This can be useful for targeting your audience with reviews and buying guides.

Try Answer The Public!

8) Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest

SEO guru Neil Patel’s free keyword tool can be used to gain an edge in your market. Ubersuggest is a free hack to use in boosting your website’s ranking. You can get insights into your competitors content marketing strategies on its user-friendly interface.

Peeking into your internet neighbors SEO, content & social media strategy implementation can be a practical way of getting insights on what’s working. Such insight takes you beyond the limitation of relying only on data insights.

If you know that generating keyword ideas to implement in your content strategy is the first step to improving the relevancy of your content, this will keep you from posting content that your audience is not interested in.

This is what you can expect from Ubersuggest:

  • Keyword volume
  • Keyword competition
  • Seasonal trends
  • Social network shares
  • Number of backlink’s

Ubersuggest Backlinks

Building your link profile with the tool provides a view of your competitor’s backlinks. This should help you figure out which links to add to your own. Knowing which websites your audience is linking to can narrow the scope of prospects to approach in your niche/industry by a great deal.

Try Ubersuggest!

9) SpyFu

Spyfu

For search marketing, SpyFu offers a reasonably priced cloud-hosted tool that is structured around increasing efficiency for marketing campaigns. It is believed to be an entry-level to advanced business software solutions. Its enterprise plans start from $33 per month.

When coming up with a marketing strategy, you are going to need a tool that makes it easier to gather information on your competitors. Spying on how they execute paid ads, how they gather profitable keywords and the likes will help chart your course. It gathers this intelligence by zeroing in on your competitors Google SERP’s and Adwords’s activity.

Spyfu Overview

You can track your competitors marketing methods on Google along with their Organic Ranking and Paid Search history on Adwords for the last nine years. Searching any domain active on Google will also present an overview of vital information you can use to get ahead. This information is part of SpyFu’s capacity for showing what keywords they have purchased, the ranking of their organic reach, sales leads, contact details, and the likes.

Try Spyfu!

10) Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO Plugin

You no longer have to worry over whether your article is SEO friendly or not. When producing SEO content, it can be hard to manually evaluate whether you are being effective or not. WordPress users can set up Yoast SEO plugin on their website. It analyses which parts of your articles can be improved to boost its SEO ranking.

These include readability, scannability, writing voice, meta-descriptions, image alt tags and more. It can also keep you from over-optimizing your content by offering suggestions to keep you within the required number of keywords/key-phrases to use.

You can expect a:

  • Readability analysis
  • Insights tool
  • SEO analysis tab

Yoast SEO Plugin Content Analysis

It easy to fall into the trap of creating content that is only focused on ranking in search engines with such a tool. Writing natural content for readers and using the tool along with an LSI keyword tool or a thesaurus can help you appeal to both your audience and search engines.

Try Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress!

Conclusion: Enough tooling around!

We avoided listing some SEO tools that have the same function. Each one of these SEO tools caters for every distinct corner that shapes the structure of an SEO campaign as well as SEO as a whole to make a big difference to the ROI of your efforts.

Bookmark this for further use. Every SEO engineer, marketer, and the regular internet entrepreneur can find a tool best suited for improving their SEO and conquering the World Wide Web by keeping this with them. Feel free to share your experiences as well as this article with your community. You might be getting someone out of their rut by the virtue of doing so.

Note: This List on the Best SEO Tools is contributed by Pollen Lekau. If you have an extra-ordinary article to contribute, then check our Guest Blogging Guidelines.