Michael Grover

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That moment, argues Krug, can be enough to derail the purpose of their visit. “When we’re using the web, every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand,” he writes. Behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this work, goes further: The easier it is for people to understand any information being presented to them, the more they will trust it and believe it’s true.

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The first thing to know about Pivot Tables is that there is nothing a Pivot Table does that an advanced user can’t also do through writing formulas. The value of the Pivot Table is that the data can be sliced and diced quickly and the drag-and-drop interface means that there is no need to wrestle with sometimes-unwieldy formulas. Instead, Pivot Tables help you explore the data and visualize the important bits in a very friendly way.

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Marketers in the attention economy need to pull out all the stops when it comes to converting complete strangers into paying customers. While sources differ on the number of touchpoints it takes to convert a customer, Hubspot and others estimate that it takes 8 touchpoints to generate a conversion.

Modern marketers look almost universally at digital methodologies for reaching prospects. But they might be ignoring an easy win – direct mail – that could help short-circuit that estimate by a few steps. And short-circuiting the touchpoints translates into more customers and more revenue acquired more quickly.

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Modern marketers are facing more and more responsibility to make sure leads come in and close. It’s enough to scare the bejeebers out of anybody. Some are eyeballing direct mail as one more solution to help move prospects along. However, a recent report from PFL and Forrester Consulting, “Hybrid Experiences Bring Direct Mail Into The Digital Age,” shows that marketers have some serious, and legitimate, questions about the age-old practice of direct mail.

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That was a huge factor in the internet’s acceptance so early, so quickly, and by so many. It was cheap to produce and cheap to deliver. And while physical marketing (particularly direct mail) had good trackability, it was scant compared with the data digital marketing could deliver. But the ensuing years have shown that many of the cost-savings of digital have been offset by increased expenses elsewhere. Many modern marketers are beginning to realize that it’s about time to revisit physical marketing as a channel. Not as a replacement for digital efforts, but rather as a supplement.

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Consumer goods companies measure their plastic output in big numbers. A single international beverage manufacturer, for example, can produce several million tons of plastic packaging in just one year. Now imagine how much plastic must be out there when considering the multitude of other organizations across the globe—and their collective plastic output over the course of several decades.

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Just north of 20 years ago, a book about how the internet impacts marketing was written. “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, was centered on one big idea: “Markets are conversations.” By arguing that “markets are conversations,” The Cluetrain Manifesto was pointing at a fundamental change that the internet—which was just becoming a commercial force at the time—wrought on the way companies communicated with their markets.

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Days Payable Outstanding or DPO is the average number of days between the time the company receives an invoice and when the invoice is paid. DPO is typically calculated on a quarterly or annual basis. If a company has a DPO of 23 for its most recent quarter, that means it took 23 days on average to pay its suppliers during that time. DPO is a key cash-flow metric that indicates how well a company manages its cash outflows. A high DPO is often desirable because if a company takes longer to pay creditors, it has more cash available in the short term to use for other purposes.

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To get more search engine visibility, I created a FAQ section covering the questions more frequently asked by the client's market. The result: #1 positioning in Google for targeted questions reaching high- value clients.

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In 2019, the United States released around 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels alone. This is less than half the amount released by China, the world’s biggest offender at nearly 10 billion metric tons. These two countries alone account for over 40% of global emissions of CO2.

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A key step on a product’s long march from inventor’s brainchild to customer’s favorite gadget is manufacturing. Technically, manufacturing is the process of assembling raw materials into products on a large scale using machinery. But manufacturing is no brief stop on the journey and it must be planned for and nurtured just like any other phase in a product’s birth. An optimized manufacturing process can mean the difference between success and failure for nearly any mass-produced product. Like every step on a product’s journey, manufacturing takes input and produces output. Input comes from the designs of the product being created and output is the actual, tangible product, ready to go into distribution.

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Take, for instance, the complex but necessary issues of globalization. Growing companies that have international markets in their sights will need their accounting software to seamlessly integrate multiple currencies, multiple tax jurisdictions, and multiple languages. But the key to the difference between ERP and simple accounting software goes well beyond features which can come and go. The true value of ERP over simple accounting software lies in the comprehensive nature of ERP: resource planning for the entire enterprise.

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Content marketers rally behind the banner of producing ever more excellent content marketing. Without a doubt, excellence has rightly become the baseline. But excellence, in and of itself, doesn’t guarantee a first-page ranking in Google. Nor a viral share in social media.

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The way tax write-offs work is that they reduce your gross revenue or income by the total amount of allowable expenses. The result is called Adjusted Gross Revenue or income and becomes the basis on which a tax bill is calculated. Depending on the overall value of the deductions, tax write-offs can potentially save thousands or millions per year off a tax bill.

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...structured data can be defined as a controlled and hierarchically organized vocabulary used to describe and classify entities, be they news articles or a business’s products and services. In organizations, structured data helps make information more accessible and easier to analyze, leading to deeper insights. On the internet, it helps make information and web pages become more discoverable. Structured data can be used to aid in content analysis, speed up on-site searching, improve search engine optimization (SEO) and generate new ways to display content.

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Metadata is frequently described as “data about other data.” Whether describing the contents of a web page, providing the technical details of the kind of camera used to capture an image, or the administrative information of usage rights, among many examples, metadata provides additional information that helps assets get found and used more efficiently. In fact, metadata is mainly designed to be machine-readable and isn’t visible to the casual site visitor. For example, metadata for a web page is designed to help search engines understand and categorize pages. Likewise, the metadata in a photograph can be used by a digital asset management (DAM) system for proper categorization to promote discovery and use. Metadata also has major implications in the universes of information-sharing, usage rights and content reuse.

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...The confluence of internet infrastructure, truly useful web-based publishing applications, and web search enabled the company to popularize a shift in the marketing eco-system paradigm. It makes perfect sense: instead of carpet-bombing your market with interruptive messaging, create the content that will attract the people you want to reach. Create good content, the argument goes, and the people will find it...

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...In the world of accounts payable (AP), one of the most challenging jobs is managing the onslaught of supplier invoices that arrive each month. This includes verifying that the invoices are real — small businesses experience billing fraud twice as often as their larger counterparts, according to an Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) report — and then paying the ones that are....

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HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language, is the simple language at the heart of the World Wide Web. Created in 1989 by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, HTML was originally considered to be a solution to help scientists at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The first website went live in August 1991. It was a page written by Berners-Lee explaining how to write HTML. To say it caught on rapidly is an understatement. Within just a few years of that first HTML document being published, there were already millions of sites, each of them written in HTML. HTML’s simplicity is not all it has going for it. Where many languages crash when they hit an unrecognized tag, HTML simply ignores anything it can’t understand. Beyond that, HTML has been able to evolve over time to embrace the design values of CSS and morph into a Semantic language designed to be read and understood by machines and humans alike.

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Imagine if a warehouse wasn’t a place to store inventory but just another stop along the distribution path to a customer. This is the idea behind an inventory management strategy known as rolling inventory. Using this strategy, the delivery truck augments the warehouse space. Instead of going through the time and expense of offloading and storing an entire truck’s worth of goods, the rolling inventory strategy enables companies the flexibility and cost-savings of keeping some or all of the goods on the truck. The truck remains stationed outside of the warehouse. When delivery to the final destination is scheduled, the truck leaves with a full order. At least some of the product on the truck never entered the warehouse.

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A financial controller’s list of priorities reflects the wide-ranging and complex responsibilities associated with the role – from overseeing day-to-day accounting and finance tasks to managing staff and technology. Depending on the organization, a controller may have to create new policies and processes from scratch, as well as ensuring that existing processes run as efficiently as possible.

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The history of pie charts is more fascinating than you might think. A secret agent who plotted the collapse of the French economy with counterfeit money and the founder of modern nursing are but two of the intriguing historical characters who used pie charts to explain and advocate. The first known pie chart was published in 1801 by Scottish engineer, political economist, and secret agent William Playfair. It showed proportions of the Turkish Empire located in Asia, Europe, and Africa prior to 1789. Playfair was no stranger to using graphics to interpret data, having invented the bar chart, area chart and line graph years before. Playfair’s pie chart merely communicated data. It was not until half a century later that famed social reformer, statistician, and founder of modern nursing Florence Nightingale used the pie chart to advocate change. Her “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East” wove many layers of data into a complex pair of pie charts — really what, today, we would call polar area diagrams — to show that improvements in sanitation in camps and hospitals during the Crimean War dramatically reduced the in-hospital death rate from disease. She used this diagram for the most modern of reasons: to argue before members of Parliament, who she knew would not read the data. The consequences of her chart and efforts over the next ten years led to sewage systems being installed in all English homes. This reduced the death rate so much that life expectancy in England climbed from 40 to 60 years-old.

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If you want insights into how a company’s business is performing, operating income is a key metric to understand. Operating income measures the profitability of a company’s core business operations after deducting all operating expenses. It shows how efficiently the company can generate cash from its business operations. By excluding the effect of taxes, interest and one-time events such as acquisitions and write-offs, operating income helps managers, investors and lenders hone in on the fundamentals of the company’s core business.

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As the head of the organization’s accounting team, the financial controller plays an increasingly strategic role in ensuring the company runs smoothly. There are many opportunities for controllers to improve the efficiency of day-to-day financial operations and enhance the business overall. New technologies help companies streamline or eliminate manual tasks and create more accurate financial forecasts, for example. At the same time, controllers face the challenge of hiring and retaining talent that can help the company take advantage of these technologies to transform the business. Here are 6 top goals for financial controllers in 2022.

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Companies looking for a win from investors, customers, employees, and the community at large are well-served to get the ball rolling on implementing robust and sound Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) elements into the way they do business. Taking action on your ESG practices is a smart way to not only do good but also do well as ESG provides businesses with benefits across the spectrum of stakeholders.

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The shift to remote and hybrid work over the past year and a more mobile workforce has made the matter worse, as attacks rose and workers became more susceptible. More than half (51%) of respondents to The State of Email Security 2021 report (SOES) reported an increase in BEC attacks that exploited brand impersonation, and 63% reported an increase in phishing attacks that targeted their employees. SOES research also discovered that employees were clicking on unsafe URLs in emails three times more often than they were before the onset of the COVID pandemic. This is significant because it means that cybercriminals are getting more opportunities to worm their way into company systems.

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How is your martech stack working for you? For the uninitiated, a martech stack (or marketing technology stack) is the set of technologies that marketers use to perform various marketing activities. How you collect leads and nurture them along the path to becoming a customer are just some of the activities that are handled by a martech stack. For many growing companies, the martech stack can be a frustrating conglomeration of different tools brought in as needs emerge, sometimes with overlapping and competing jobs and almost always disconnected from each other.

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When the first bits were dropped on the first hard-disk drive, it’s not likely that computer scientists imagined the onslaught of data just 50 years would bring. But those pioneers probably recognized that data management was going to become a challenge. Part of meeting that challenge is data modeling: the practice of developing data storage and retrieval solutions that fit the requirements of a particular business.

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In one experiment into the value of randomness, Ellevate showed three groups of consumers the same movie trailer. One group was told it was randomly selected from a set of 100 trailers. Another group was told the trailer came randomly selected from only 10 options. A third group was shown the trailer and told that a marketer had selected the trailer. Who reported more satisfaction? Consumers preferred the trailer when it was one of 100 choices vs one of ten. Lowest satisfaction? You guessed it, the one that was chosen by a marketer.

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Depending on the industry, marketers are projected to spend between $31 and $208 per lead in 2021, according to the latest research.[1] And with business-to-business (B2B) leads requiring up to 13 or more touches before they convert, it’s critical that lead-gathering be as frictionless as possible. The last thing a company needs is to do all the work prepping prospects, only to have a cybercriminal swoop in for the “close” by impersonating its brand in a phishing email or spoofed website. But leads are being hijacked regularly by cybercriminals and sometimes by sneaky competitors. In fact, Mimecast’s recent The State of Brand Protection 2021 (SOBP) report found a 381% spike in brand impersonation attacks against the world’s top 100 most-valuable brands during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic last year — and a subsequent new normal of much higher attack levels. To stop such lead stealing before it does too much damage requires proactive monitoring, awareness — and action.

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The customer service confirmation scam, whether by phone or phishing email, is just one example of how bad actors are hijacking hard-earned brand equity and using common marketing tactics to make their con. In fact, cybercriminals are deploying a complete range of marketing tactics to try and separate people from their money, as described in Mimecast’s The State of Brand Protection 2021 (SOBP) report. To cybercriminals, the brands they impersonate are just bodies they step over to get their way.

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In the data mart model, marketing, sales, finance and each operational business unit has access to the segment of the data warehouse and the information that is most relevant to them. Instead of live queries run against mammoth tables, queries run through a data mart are tight and targeted — and fast. Just as important, data marts provide frameworks to deliver actionable reports more rapidly. The result: groups within a business can make more efficient use of the data that helps them run.

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If it was trending in #marketing, which Linkedin claims to have more than 19 million followers, would it be unreasonable for me to expect viewership of the post to head upwards and fast? Even a tiny fraction of those 19 million+ #marketing followers ought to give me a huge bump in viewership of my post. For, certainly the Linkedin algorithm must use trending as a component for display. I mean, why wouldn't it? If trending in #marketing means that people who follow that hashtag engaged, why wouldn't the algorithm push that post to more #marketing followers. Isn't that actually the whole point of an algorithm?

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In the Google Universe, there is a position referred to as Position Zero. It appears at the top of the organic results. Sometimes it displays as a list, sometimes a table, sometimes a snippet. It's an enviable spot which boosts click-through anywhere from 114% to 516%, according to Hubspot and SearchEngineLand. It's a smart bit of programming on Google's part. For SEO, though, it has some complexities that take some work to untangle. Here's an example that I found when I searched for "How do I buy a computer?" The first result (Position Zero) was an informative and compelling list from Komando.com listing everything you need to consider when buying a computer.

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With so many B2B products being consideration-heavy purchases, requiring the buy-in of a range of people within an organization, B2B marketers could be making better use of Influencer partnerships to get their products on the awareness, engagement, and purchase path. B2B influencer marketing is as different from B2C influencer marketing as B2B marketing is from B2C marketing. They might be the same genus but they are different species. To oversimplify, sort a list by number of followers and you pretty much have a target list of B2C influencers. Not so with B2B.

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