Why is it that some companies are able to scale to International and financial acclaim, while others get mired in competition and struggle to stay alive? There are many obvious explanations of course such as finding good Product/Market fit (creating something people will pay for), and being competitive in terms of cost and value. But [...] →
It is no secret that the iPhone does not support Flash. Steve Jobs went as far as to explicitly rule out support of Flash by name, in his famous 2011 speech. And now, Adobe has responded by announcing they will no longer support or further develop the Flash platform. Instead, Adobe is quietly releasing a [...] →
The product manager is the person inside the organization who is responsible for the definition, development, maintenance, optimization, and ultimately the success of a product. They are the glue between the product development team (engineering) and the marketing team. Many companies are still organized around the management of people, but in recent years there has [...] →
Marketing technology is becoming increasingly important in organizations as online marketing becomes a larger part of the overall marketing strategy. Yet getting anything done for marketers in many of these organizations is becoming increasingly difficult. Marketers typically do not have insight into the technical underpinnings of the systems they rely upon and the IT department [...] →
Tonight I attended an event for Startups at CalTech. The event began with presentations given by several founders and wrapped up with a key note speech by Bill Gross. For anyone who does not know, Bill Gross is a legend in the startup community. He founded IdeaLab in Pasadena, which has incubated over 100 companies, [...] →
By now, most marketers are familiar with how online advertising works. First, you place an ad to connect with your audience. Second, bring them back to your site. And third, try to push them through your sales funnel to a transaction. But why do so many marketers stop with step one? Perhaps if they knew [...] →
In the first post, I discussed the high-level tenants for driving sales online, which should drive a landing page optimization campaign. This post is going to get more specific now about design, marketing copy, and implementation. The goal is to provide an actionable 4-step framework for evaluating and improving your landing pages: RESEARCH When [...] →
This is now the third in a series of three blog posts, providing a comprehensive overview of landing page optimization. The first post discussed laid out the 5 tenants for effective online selling. The second applied those concepts to design, marketing and implementation best practices. We are now ready to discuss how testing analysis form [...] →
Perhaps we’ve all heard that you’re suppose to avoid using tables and Flash when designing your website, but do you know why? For a good answer, you really need to look deeper than tactical benefits, and consider more fundamental questions of accessibility. A lot of times the end-consumers of our content are not consuming the [...] →
This week I had the opportunity to attend the Web Analytics Association (WAA) Symposium in Santa Monica. Overall it was a well put together event, and while there weren’t a lot of actionable tactics to take away, there was an abundant amount of strategy level discussion. Here’s some of what I took away: Attribution [...] →