Starting in 2020, China will require videos created using AI or VR to be clearly marked

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Chinese regulators have announced new rules governing video and audio content online, including a ban on "fake news” created with AI and VR.Read More

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Bluehost ‘WordPress Pro’ – Managed WordPress Hosting Reviewed: Worth the Extra Money?

Bluehost are well known for their affordable shared hosting but now they also offer premium managed WordPress hosting plans alongside their low-cost options. If you’re wondering if the new WP Pro managed WordPress hosting plans from Bluehost are worth the extra money, this article will help you decide. In this review of the new Bluehost... View Article

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Nines Radiology Aims to Upend Radiology Using AI, Scores $16.5 Million In Funding

Nines Radiology has raised $16.5 million in Series A funding, according to a company press release.

Nines Radiology was founded in 2017 by self-driving-car pioneer David Stavens and NYC radiologist Dr. Alexander Kagen. The unlikely partnership aims to use technology, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), to revolutionize how radiologists interact with patients. In the company’s press release detailing a successful round of funding, the company also unveiled their mission.

“We have a fundamental belief that radiology reimagined with modern data science can significantly improve the lives of patients and clinicians alike,” said co-founder and CEO David Stavens. “We’re working to pioneer new approaches and innovations from clinical care, engineering and data science. Radiologists at Nines are care providers, innovators, builders, and thought leaders. Our radiologists provide the best patient care, while also working with our engineers to build the future.”

The company is betting on the ability of technology and AI to help cut through the complexity modern radiologists face on a day-to-day basis.

“Radiology exams are becoming ever more detailed and complex with advancements in imaging technology, which in turn increases the workload on radiologists,” said Dr. Kagen, who will serve as Chief Medical Officer for Nines in addition to his role at Mount Sinai. “Radiologists need to be at the forefront of reimagining the future of medicine. Nines is a place where radiologists are empowered to build technology that unlocks the next level of patient care.

“The right solution for radiologists is the one that results in the right interpretation. We are combining technology and clinical expertise to help radiologists intelligently prioritize their ever-growing imaging worklists. Nines is designed to help radiologists adapt and build toward a near-term future where technology plays an increasingly larger role in improving patient outcomes.”

Nines Radiology is yet another example of AI and machine learning being used to improve and revolutionize industries.

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EU Regulators Investigating Google’s Data Practices

Reuters is reporting that European Union (EU) antitrust regulators are asking to look at documents detailing Google’s data collection practices.

The EU has already levied hefty fines against Google in past cases, amounting to $8.8 billion in the last two years. The judgements were the result of investigations proving Google had violated antitrust rules by using its dominance unfairly. If the current set of questions are any indication, Google may be facing yet more punishment.

According to Reuters, the regulators sent questionnaires to a number of different companies. The companies were given a month to reply and provide information on Google’s data collection policies. Regulators were interested specifically in online advertising, local search, web browsers, online ad targeting, login services and more.

“Companies were asked about agreements providing data to Google or allowing it to collect data via their services in recent years, and whether they were compensated for this.

“Regulators also wanted to know the kind of data sought by Google, how it uses it and how valuable the companies consider such data. Another question asked whether Google and the companies were subjected to contractual terms that prohibit or limit the use of the data.

“Regulators also wanted to know if Google had refused to provide data and how this affected the companies.”

Whether anything will come of this new inquiry remains to be seen. Given the current climate, however, Google would do well to try to allay any concerns the EU has.

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Gamblers Betting on F-150/Tesla Cybertruck Tug-of-War Rematch

Tesla made headlines with its debut of the Cybertruck, a futuristic-looking electric pickup truck. Tesla is obviously taking aim at Ford and the rest of the pickup truck industry.

The Cybertruck starts at $39,900 for a single RWD motor and 7,500 lbs towing capacity. The middle option offers dual-motor AWD and 10,000 lbs of towing starting at $49,900. The highest trim level starts at $69,900 and provides 14,000 lbs towing.

As part of Tesla’s demonstration, they showed a video of the Cybertruck beating a Porsche 911 off the line and beating an F-150 in a tug-of-war. As Business Insider (BI) points out, four days later a Ford executive suggested in a tweet that the contest may not have been an apples-to-apples comparison. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson got in on the action, questioning the physics of the comparison.

Elon Musk took the challenges to heart and promised to film a new test between the two trucks. It would appear that gambling site MyBookie is getting in on the action. At the time that BI wrote their article, odds were in favor of the F-150 winning the match at -120 vs the Cybertruck at +100. The odds have since shifted back in favor of the Cybertruck, now at -140 vs +120 for the F-150.

With betting remaining open till December 4, it will be interesting to see if the Cybertruck remains the favorite, not to mention who will win the final contest.

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Cards Against Humanity Writers Take on AI Challenge

As artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized industries and taken over jobs, writers the world over (including yours truly) have taken solace in the fact that writing is about more than raw science. Writing is a skill that takes a more nuanced understanding of communication and human thought. As a result, many writers have felt their jobs were relatively safe.

It appears that the writers at Cards Against Humanity (CAH) are putting that theory to the test. CAH is a tongue-in-cheek card game where players fill-in-the-blank with politically incorrect, risqué or offensive statements to complete the sentence. As its latest Black Friday stunt, CAH has pitted its writers against a true, neural network AI borrowed from OpenAI.

According to the CAH website, “over the next 16 hours, our writers will battle this powerful card-writing algorithm to see who can write the most popular new pack of cards. If the writers win, they’ll get a $5,000 holiday bonus. If the A.I. wins, we’ll fire the writers.”

No one really believes CAH will fire its writers if they lose. Nonetheless, it’s probably a good thing that at the time of writing the human writers were winning by roughly $1,100 indicating that, perhaps, AI taking over writing jobs is still a long way off. Although, to be fair, CAH believes the shift is inevitable.

One of the questions in their FAQ is: “Do I need to worry about AI taking my job?”

Their answer: “Basically if you do anything other than hoard capital, you’re going to end up plugged into the Matrix and the robots will harvest your body’s electricity.”

Guess it’s time for this writer to start looking for cool Neo-inspired sunglasses and trench coat.

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Deutsche Telekom Continuing With Multi-Vendor Equipment Approach

According to Reuters, Deutsche Telekom is not wavering in its approach to purchasing telecom equipment, continuing to a favor a multi-vendor approach.

This is in direct contradiction to a report in magazine Wirtschaftswoche, whereby the publication claimed that Deutsche Telekom would be gradually phasing out equipment made by Huawei. While the company refused to directly comment on the Wirtschaftswoche article, a spokesman did say in an email to Reuters that “fundamentally, we are pursuing a multi-vendor strategy and source network components from several vendors. Security comes first.”

Germany has proven to be a hotly contested battleground for Huawei, as the U.S. has increasingly put pressure on the German government to ban the telecom equipment provider. Even members of Merkel’s own party have joined the calls for ban. Merkel herself, however, has ruled out a ban, believing security can be achieved without singling out any one vendor.

Deutsche Telekom’s decision is another win for Huawei as it struggles to maintain its dominance in the 5G arena.

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Intel Supports FTC in Qualcomm Antitrust Appeal

Intel filed a brief supporting the Federal Trade Commission and in opposition to Qualcomm’s appeal of a judgement finding it violated antitrust laws.

In a blog post on the company’s site, Intel’s general counsel Steven Rodgers outlined the Intel’s position:

“Qualcomm would have you believe that its position in the market today — as the last surviving U.S. supplier of premium modem chips — is due to its ‘ingenuity and business acumen,’ and that its rivals in the market failed simply because ‘they did not offer good enough chips at low enough prices.’ This is simply not true.

“Instead, as detailed in the District Court’s opinion and in our brief, Qualcomm maintained its monopoly through a brazen scheme carefully crafted and implemented over many years. This scheme consists of a web of anticompetitive conduct designed to allow Qualcomm to coerce customers, tilt the competitive playing field and exclude competitors, all the while shielding itself from legal scrutiny and capturing billions in unlawful gains.”

Mr. Rodgers then goes on to describe the amount of effort Intel put behind their efforts to break into the modem business.

“We invested billions, hired thousands, acquired two companies and built innovative world-class products that eventually made their way into Apple’s industry-leading iPhones, including the most recently released iPhone 11. But when all was said and done, Intel could not overcome the artificial and insurmountable barriers to fair competition created by Qualcomm’s scheme and was forced to exit the market this year.”

This is not the first time Qualcomm has been accused of antitrust behavior, having “been fined nearly $1 billion in China, $850 million in Korea, $1.2 billion by the European Commission and $773 million in Taiwan (later reduced in settlement).”

Qualcomm’s practices have managed to make bitter enemies of the very companies it does business with, including Apple and Intel. Apple and Qualcomm were involved in multiple legal actions over a two-year period, with Apple repeatedly making the claim that Qualcomm was abusing its position in the industry. Although the two companies arrived at a settlement, Apple ultimately purchased Intel’s modem business, with experts believing they intend to use their own modems by 2022.

With so much evidence against Qualcomm, not to mention such powerful companies standing against it, it seems unlikely the company will be able to get the judgement reversed.

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Need Power When Traveling? Beware of USB Charging Stations

The Los Angeles Times is reporting on the dangers of “juice jacking,” a method where hackers hijack a USB port to steal information from a phone or tablet.

As the LA Times reports, this is not a new problem and has been around for some time. It’s recently regained national attention, however, in the wake of a warning by the LA District Attorney’s office about “criminals [who] load malware onto charging stations or cables they leave plugged in at the stations so they may infect the phones and other electronic devices of unsuspecting users.”

The issue is especially a concern when so many people are traveling for the holidays, putting a strain on their device’s battery life. With people relying on their phones for navigation, flight information, hotel reservations, not to mention entertainment while traveling, it can be extremely tempting to plug in to the nearest USB charging station.

In an email to the LA Times, however, Paul Bischoff, a privacy advocate with Comparitech warned of the danger:

“Just as you wouldn’t plug an unfamiliar USB drive into your laptop, you shouldn’t plug your phone into an unfamiliar USB charger. Our devices have fewer defenses against attacks from physically connected devices than (from) attacks from the internet. The malware can also be much more severe with physical access to hardware.”

A much better option for travelers is to use a standard outlet, in conjunction with their own charging cable. Another option is a battery pack, many of which have enough power to charge a smartphone several times over. These devices can be had for as little as $12, a small price to pay compared to identify theft.

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All Good Things: Jony Ive Officially Leaves Apple, Closing Out An Era

He made a name for himself as THE Apple design guru, bringing to life such iconic designs as the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad yet, as with all good things, Jony Ive’s time at Apple has drawn to a close.

Ive had been with Apple since 1992 and began leading the design team in 1996. Upon Steve Jobs’ return to the company in 1997, the two began what would be one of the most creative partnerships in tech history.

Jobs described the nature of their relationship to his biographer, Walter Isaacson:

“If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull others in and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ He gets the picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company. He’s not just a designer. That’s why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me.”

After Jobs died in 2011, Ive continued to be the dominant force behind Apple’s designs for several years. In June 2019, however, it was announced that Ive would be leaving the company to start his own design firm, LoveForm. The firm would continue to work with Apple, with Ive’s former employer being his new company’s primary client.

In an indication that his departure is now complete, Ive has been removed from Apple’s leadership page, marking an end to an incredible era at Apple. Here’s to hoping the company continues to build on Ive’s brilliance long after he’s gone.

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Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s 2.0 update gives it big social media boost

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Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is catching on, with its U.S. YouTube channel earning over 76 million cross-platform (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube) views in October 2019.Read More

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5G Safety Concerns Overblown According to Australian Telcos

ZDNet is reporting that Australia’s two largest telcos, Optus and Telstra, are downplaying the danger of 5G, indicating it is generally safer than common household items.

Australia has an electromagnetic energy (EME) safety limit that devices must fall under in order to be used. Household items are usually far below that limit, with microwaves coming in 100 times below the maximum. Responding to concerned citizens and various groups, Australia’s House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts launched an inquiry into 5G deployment.

The two telco giants have cooperated with the inquiry, attempting to ease the committee’s concerns about the new technology.

“EME in the home from mobile networks is typically below those emitted by standard household devices such as a microwave oven or baby monitor,” Optus wrote in a statement to the committee.

“Some of these concerns are being fuelled by false and alarmist claims from unreliable sources. Both industry and government need to work harder to counter any misinformation and ensure that the community is armed with the facts to enable it to embrace the technology that will bring so many benefits to people’s lives.”

In testimony before the committee, Telstra principal of 5G EME strategy Mike Wood echoed those sentiments:

“Leading up to the public launch of 5G with the 3.5GHz network…. What we found again was that they were getting a much faster response time, because the network was quicker and you could deliver the signal quicker. That meant that the signal was lower and the EME levels were lower — in fact, they were very similar to 3G, 4G and WiFi.

“What we find is that because 5G’s very efficient, it typically runs at a lower level than an everyday device in your house like a baby monitor or a microwave oven.

“When we’ve done our tests on our 5G network, they’re typically 1,000 to 10,000 times less than what we get from other devices. So when you add all of that up together, it’s all very low in terms of total emission. But you’re finding that 5G is in fact a lot lower than many other devices we use in our everyday lives.”

If the two companies’ findings are correct, they should go a long way toward easing people’s minds. One of the biggest challenges to 5G deployment has been the belief that it would expose people to far more radiation and EME than earlier wireless technology.

One such example is Switzerland, where a number of the cantons have called for a halt on 5G deployment until further studies can be done, in what has been one of the biggest backlashes to the fledgling technology.

While further studies—especially independent studies by non-telco entities—will need to be done, it’s still reassuring that both Optus and Telstra found no basis for concern.

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Amazon Readies Second-Generation Arm Chip For Data Centers

Reuters is reporting that Amazon’s cloud computing unit has designed a more powerful, second-generation chip for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers.

The new chip is based on designs by Arm Holdings. Arm does not manufacture processors like Intel or AMD. Instead, the company designs chips and licenses their intellectual property (IP) to companies that want to use them. Client companies can even customize them, much as Apple has done, to meet specific needs or increase performance even more.

Sources told Reuters the new chip “will be at least 20% faster than Amazon’s first Arm-based chip, named Graviton, which was released last year as a low-cost option for easier computing tasks.

“The forthcoming Amazon chip is expected to use newer Arm technology, most likely Arm’s Neoverse N1 technology, one of the sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Another source familiar with the matter said the chip is expected to have at least 32 cores versus the Graviton’s 16.

“The new chip will also use a technology called a ‘fabric’ that will allow it to connect with other chips to speed up tasks like image recognition, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

“To take advantage of the new chip, cloud customers likely will need to use software written for Arm-based chips, which is less common than software for Intel and AMD chips.”

While it may be a challenge for Amazon to get cloud customers to switch software, if successful the move could improve Amazon’s bottom line. While Arm processors are generally not as fast as traditional chips, such as Intel’s or AMD’s, they provide much better power consumption and run cooler. These qualities are especially important in a data center, where tens of thousands of servers are housed. An Arm-based server can also be several times cheaper than a single Intel chip.

As Amazon continues developing their own custom chips, based on Arm’s IP, they will likely be able to customize them even more to meet their needs, much as Apple as down with iPhones and iPads.

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What Is Marketing Automation: Definition, Benefits & Uses

Marketing automation is extremely important to improve the overall success ratio of your marketing campaigns because it manages every activity related to marketing. Automation software helps marketers understand the customer journey, automate repetitive tasks, generate qualified leads, nurture leads and finally convert them into sales.

The marketing automation software market is set to grow from $3.3 billion in 2019 to $6.4 billion by 2024 by 2024 and, moreover:

• 75% of business owners have said that they currently use marketing automation to run their marketing campaigns:

• 91% of users think that marketing automation is of “vital importance” for the general marketing campaign success in every communication channel.
• Marketing automation is one of the four most popular methods to create personalized customer experiences.
• Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity – and companies using automation enjoyed an average 12.2% reduction in marketing overheads.

Let’s discuss the definition of marketing automation and understand the different advantages of it.

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What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to the use of software to automate your marketing efforts across multiple channels such as websites, social media, email and others. The software automatically manages repetitive tasks which improves efficiency and reduces the chances of human errors:

Marketing automation is the perfect technology that helps plan your strategy, create different content, segment customers, generate leads, nurture the leads and convert them into sales.

Dive Deeper: 5 Trends that Will Define the New Vision of Marketing Automation

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Let’s understand how marketing automation works with an example.

Suppose 10 visitors land on your e-commerce store and register themselves. The automation software triggers a set of emails to confirm the email IDs of the customers and welcome them. Five out of those ten customers visit the e-commerce store again after a day or two and add products to their cart. However, two of them leave without purchasing anything.

The automation software keeps an eye on the customers' behavior and sends a different set of emails to the different customers, such as:

• An email containing special offers are sent to the five customers who never visited the site after registering.
• An abandoned cart email is sent to the two customers who have left part way through checkout.
• An order confirmation and product tracking ID email is sent to the three customers who have purchased products from the site.

This is how marketing automation software works. It identifies the lead, nurtures it and closes the sale all by itself without the need for any manual interference.

Dive Deeper: 4 Ways to Use Automation with Account-Based Marketing for Better Lead Nurturing

The 3 Elements of Marketing Automation

Here are the top three elements of marketing automation:

1) Creation of Behavior-Based Market Segments

Marketing automation is powered by artificial intelligence and it uses  different tracking codes to monitor the online behavior of users. Nowadays, most e-commerce sites present personalized product recommendations to their customers after gathering data via marketing automation software. Amazon, of course, has this down to an art:

2) Business Development Automation

The biggest use of marketing automation is for lead generation and conversion, eventually generating more revenue for your business. The automation software automatically identifies, nurtures and converts the leads based on their priority – called lead scoring, which is usually a scale of 1-100, with 100 being “ready to make a purchase” and 0 being “no way José”.

The software can understand the position of your potential customers in your sales funnel and use the information to push them further towards the sale by sending out automated prompts (such as reminders, discounts, informative emails, etc.). 

These software use a variety of channels like SEO, content marketing, social media and email to reach the buyers at every stage of their buying journey.

3) Workflow Automation

Every marketing department has a multi-step process that consumes a lot of work hours from their employees. Consider, for example, a prospect who has subscribed to your wealth management advice newsletter. You'd ideally want to:

• Personalize the content of the newsletter
• Pitch relevant products in the newsletter
• Follow up on the pitches based on buyer's “interest” signals (like email opened, clicked, but not responded to)
• Propose a discount offer

Marketing automation simplifies the entire workflow, be it budgeting, email marketing or digital asset management.

Dive Deeper: What Is Post-Click Automation & Why Should Agencies Offer It as a Service?

Key Benefits of Marketing Automation

For businesses looking to improve the flow of qualified leads, marketing automation offers several key advantages. Let’s discuss them one by one.

1) Reduce Marketing Costs

Marketing automation helps cut down on the resources needed to manage different marketing tasks. For example, you don’t need separate software or expertise to create a landing page for your PPC ads and there is no email software needed to send different emails to prospects at different times of the day. All such tasks are performed by one software.

Marketing automation also helps declutter your database by deleting duplicate records, helping you host your files and distributing content based on predefined rules.

The need to buy different software for designing marketing materials, distributing content via email or social media, and managing the database is avoided. This helps to drastically reduce the overall marketing costs.

2) Identify Bottlenecks in Your Sales Pipeline

The marketing lifecycle revolves around generating leads, nurturing them and turning them into sales. However, there are large bottlenecks that might choke your sales funnel if you do not solve the issue ASAP:

The different bottlenecks that can affect your sales pipeline include the following:

• Manual management of leads by examining emails, spreadsheets, paper, etc. takes time. Moreover, identifying “warm” and “cold” leads by following a manual process takes additional time, making it easy to drop several leads before they reach the final (or next) stage of the funnel.
• Easy access to buyer personas and customer conversations isn’t available:

• Sales executives spend a lot of their time in meetings in order to discuss the available leads, get access to the data, sales KPIs, etc.
• Sending final proposal and quotes to the customer takes time because the sales executives have to go through the past conversations they had with the client and match it with the latest pricing. The entire process is complex.
• Manual forecasting of sales takes up a lot of time that can be used to nurture leads.
• People on the marketing team and sales team work differently and often find it difficult to collaborate with each other in real time.

Marketing automation is the solution to each of the above bottlenecks that affects your sales pipeline. With automatic lead management, the platform scores the lead on the basis of behavior, geography and demographics. The dashboard presents all the key metrics in real time so the sales team has a single view of the customer dashboard at any point of time in the purchase cycle, which means that sales forecasting is done with greater accuracy.

Dive Deeper: Here’s How Targeting Cold, Warm & Hot Traffic Builds Successful Customer Relationships

3) Automate Your Marketing Activity

Marketing automation offers a single platform to automate many tasks and workflows at every stage of the buying cycle, such as:

• Sending emails to a list of qualified prospects.
• Measuring customer behavior and scoring leads on the basis of that behavior.
• Sending qualified leads to the CRM for lead nurturing.
• Presenting the leads on a single dashboard so that the sales team can work on the qualified leads and push them to the next stage of the buying cycle.
• Nurturing the leads via email, content and social media to pull them towards the sale.

All the sales team performance data/customer behavior data/overall campaign performance is stored in a single CRM and important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like revenue and customer retention rate are given preference.

Marketing automation is a smart way to collect, process and convert qualified leads. You can fully automate and segment all the important activities of your marketing campaigns.

Dive Deeper: The Only 4 Marketing/Content Marketing KPIs That Really Matter

4) Nurture Leads by Reaching Them Across Multiple Channels

Automated lead nurturing can make a big difference to your overall marketing strategy. It has been estimated that 50% of leads need nurturing to take them to the next stage of the buying funnel. They aren’t ready to buy immediately. And the sales cycles are getting longer because people research, read reviews, compare the prices and then shortlist the products more than ever before.

The buyer’s journey generally comprises of three stages of the funnel, namely:

• TOFU / Awareness – At this stage, prospects are actively looking to find a solution to their problem. They aren’t yet aware of your products or services, so you need to use smart content marketing strategies to display your products or services to them via SEO, blog posts, email marketing or ads.
• MOFU / Consideration – At this stage, prospects know about a possible solution to their problem and they dig deeper into it by looking at case studies and guides to see if anything is a fit.
• BOFU / Decision – Prospects have now shortlisted possible vendors and are comparing the pros and cons of each, including price, guarantees and other detailed specs. They ultimately make the final purchase decision at this stage.

Automated marketing lets you present your brand to the customer in a positive manner on the channels where they are present during their entire buying journey.

Dive Deeper: How to Optimize Your Content Strategy with the Buyer’s Journey

5) Build Long-Lasting Relationships with Customers

Marketers who use more than three or more channels (omni-channel) to reach prospects have a 90% higher customer retention rate, and 250% higher engagement and purchase rates.

Marketing automation helps you not only understand your customers by identifying their exact pain points, but personalize the communication with them, too. Automation offers a one-to-one strategy that reaches the customer on a variety of channels where they are present at different points of time.

When you add value to the life of your customers by solving their pain points, they start trusting your brand. And when you have a lot of happy and satisfied customers, they get involved in word-of-mouth marketing, which turns into a two-way customer relationship:

Dive Deeper: Omnichannel Marketing: Using the Content Sprout Method to Overcome Info Overload

6) Measure the Performance of Your Marketing Campaigns

Both the marketing and sales teams are involved in generating a sale, and there are several people responsible for performing different tasks in an overall marketing campaign.

Measuring the performance of different marketing activities can be a challenge. With the use of marketing automation, it becomes easier to track the performance of a particular team or even a particular individual.

Measurement leads to proper management and proper management leads to better optimization of the entire process. Optimized workflows help generate better results in the longer run.

7) Save Time

The core job of a marketing automation platform is to automate repetitive tasks, such as sending emails, sharing social media updates, conducting competitor analysis, preparing reports, etc. Once you identify the set of tasks that are repetitive, you simply feed them into your automation software and let the platform manage the tasks automatically.

74% of marketers say that automation helps them save time spent on preparing reports and doing analysis. Moreover, just by automating the scheduling of social media posts, marketers are able to save 6 hours a week.

No marketer, entrepreneur or small business owner wants to spend time on repetitive tasks when they have bigger and more important things to do to grow their business. Automation helps personalize communication at scale, automate the triggering of marketing messages based on customer behavior and present all the customer related data in a single dashboard.

8) Maintain a Central Hub for all Your Marketing Activities

Marketing automation keeps all the data and information from various customer touch points in one place, thereby acting as a central hub for all your marketing activities.

When all your customers’ data is stored in one place, it saves you a lot of time that you would otherwise have to spend in analyzing the performance of your marketing efforts across different channels. It also allows different people across multiple departments to remain synced up with the ever-changing customer behavior. It keeps all the customer data up to date and ensures consistency in contacting prospects.

Therefore, your marketing and sales team can easily coordinate, resulting in higher sales.

9) Lets You Innovative More

Marketing automation lets you automate repetitive tasks and allows you to focus on innovating marketing strategies based on customer behavior. You get a detailed report containing buyer personas, the result of past marketing campaigns and the entire journey that prospects follow from awareness to sale.

Automation uses split testing to understand what’s working best for your business, like:

• How long you should wait before sending each message
• The number of times you should reach out to a prospect in order to convert them
• Which channels the prospects are most likely to convert on
• Which email template triggers the maximum actions

When you get a clearer picture of what your prospects expect from your business, you can implement new strategies to keep them engaged.

We’ve helped Fortune 500 companies, venture backed startups and companies like yours grow revenues faster. Get A Free Consultation

What Are Some Uses of Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a powerful tool for any business. It allows sales teams to work with qualified leads, which keeps sales people motivated and, thus, more leads get converted to sales.

Some of the various uses of marketing automation are:

1) Identify “Hot Leads”

Hot leads are prospects who are ready to convert. They are identified on the basis of their past behavior, such as:

• Visitors who add some items to the cart and visit the payment page but, for whatever reason, didn’t complete the purchase.
• Visitors who have given you their details to contact them at a suitable time.
• Visitors who have visited your site twice in the past two days after clicking on the discount link sent via an email.

Your automation software automatically identifies such leads and scores them on the basis of how likely they will convert. Such hot leads are then presented to the sales team for further processing.

2) Reduce Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is one of the biggest worries for e-commerce brands.

The global average cart abandonment rate stands close to 78%, and those abandonments using mobile devices hit a whopping 85.65%. Have a look at this graph to get a better idea:

Thankfully, marketing automation helps reduce the chances of cart abandonment and pushes the customer towards a sale. The software identifies all such visitors who have added items to their cart but haven't pulled out their credit card yet. It sends a personalized email reminding them to complete the purchase – and the average conversion rate for shopping cart abandonment emails is about 18%.

Dive Deeper: Build Backlinks – and Website Traffic – with Blogger Outreach

3) Target Customers Across Different Channels

By combining all data and campaign details in one place, marketing automation makes capturing users’ attention easier.

Marketers can use automation software such as Ontraport or Optimove to target customers across multiple channels, such as on-site messaging, retargeting ads, SMS, direct mail and postcards.

In order to target customers across different channels via marketing automation, marketers can:

• Customize the message for customers or prospects based on where they are in the sales funnel and reach them across multiple channels like email, postcard, text message, tweet or phone.
• Send automated messages to prospects across multiple channels (both online and offline) after specific actions, triggers or periods of time.
• Identify your customers’ most preferred channels of communication and reach out to them to improve targeting.
• Automate the delivery of emails and contextualized messages across different channels based on customers’ analyzed behavioral data and usage pattern.
• Remind them about upcoming events or announce your latest feature across multiple channels to ensure that they complete the set of actions you want them to.

4) Boost Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

To grow your business, you must keep an optimal balance between customer acquisition and customer retention.

Marketing automation is used to create personalized campaigns for both new and existing customers. You can recommend products, send them offers or answer their queries to keep them engaged with your brand.

When the customers remain engaged with your business for a longer period of time, they remain loyal to your brand. This helps generate repeat orders and increase the customer lifetime value.

5) Upsell and Cross Sell to Customers

Marketing automation keeps all the customer data in one place enabling you to trigger products based on recent or past purchase behavior.

• Upselling means selling products of a higher price to customers.
• Cross selling means selling related products to customers.

Marketing automation tools do the job of cross selling and upselling automatically without any manual interference. Here is an example from Amazon (of course) in which they use automation software to personalize recommendations in order to cross sell and upsell their products:

Amazon also leverages the power of email to cross sell products. Since transactional emails contain important information (i.e. confirmation of the order along with track package link), people are more likely to open them. This is a great way to increase the number of sales from the same customer:

Dive Deeper: What Amazon’s Marketing Strategy Can Teach SMB Owners

6) Improve Blogger Outreach

Blogger outreach is one such task that requires you to send several emails every day.

Marketing automation lets you send emails to bloggers automatically and also tests the engagement rate of every email. The system then automatically chooses the best email template based on the subscriber engagement rate.

Here is an example of an email template from the marketing automation platform Sales Fusion:

The platform automatically replaces the value between the square brackets by personalizing it for every prospect, thereby improving the response rate of blogger outreach campaigns.

Dive Deeper: Build Backlinks – and Website Traffic – with Blogger Outreach

7) Generate Leads from Thank You Pages

Marketers would agree that generating leads is their biggest challenge – and marketing automation enables marketers to generate leads even from thank you pages.

Here is an example of a great thank you page from Smart Bribe that directs visitors to take the next action. When people start tweeting about your brand, you drive more engagement, which results in a higher number of leads.

Dive Deeper: 5 Ways You Can Use Your Thank You Pages to Boost Conversions

8) Use Artificial Intelligence to Automatically Suggest Content to Visitors

Marketing elements that are leveraged by artificial intelligence include consumer content consumption patterns, past purchasing behavior and customer demographics.

Unlike other personalization techniques, marketing automation uses AI for one-on-one personalization at scale. This helps improve both the customer experience and your customer retention rate.

As a marketer, you can analyze millions of data points to help predict the best times, messages and environment for increasing conversions. Marketing automation can then use the data to trigger the right content for the customer at the right time.

Netflix, one of the biggest online streaming platforms, uses customers’ watch history to recommend new content:

One-on-one personalized recommendations help improve the overall customer experience, guarantee repeat visits, increase conversions and improve audience engagement rate.

Dive Deeper: 10 Easy Ways to Get Started with Marketing AI (Artificial Intelligence)

We’ve helped Fortune 500 companies, venture backed startups and companies like yours grow revenues faster. Get A Free Consultation

Is Marketing Automation Necessary for Your Business?

If you want to improve your lead generation and nurture those leads to produce paying customers, then marketing automation is, indeed, necessary for your business. If you answer yes to at least half of these points, then you should invest in marketing automation:

• You do too many repetitive tasks, such as email marketing or manually posting to social media.
• Your website is not able to generate enough high-quality leads because of poor content marketing.
• You are unable to convert leads into customers because you don’t have time to nurture the leads or you simply don’t know how to do it.
• You want to provide personalized and useful content to your visitors.
• You would like to re-engage with your customers and increase campaign efficiency.
• You want to get rich insights into the current industry trends.
• You want to maintain consistency in reaching the customer at every point in the customer journey like emails, search or social media.
• You want to reduce points of customer friction and follow up with leads as soon as they send inquiries.
• You would like to combine all your marketing activities (SEO, email marketing, PPC, social media, etc.) from multiple channels in one place.
• You would like to maintain productive and long-term relationships with your customers.

Final Thoughts

Competition levels are increasing day by day and you need an effective solution to defeat your competitors. Marketing automation is that solution because it lets you automate your marketing, generate relevant leads and close them all at an affordable cost.

Automation saves time, improves customer engagement, raises the quality of leads, boosts conversions and increases overall sales. Start using marketing automation and notice the difference it can bring to your overall marketing strategy!

The post What Is Marketing Automation: Definition, Benefits & Uses appeared first on Single Grain.

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The finite era of “actionable insights”

For years, “actionable insights” have been the Holy Grail for data analytics companies. Actionable insights, the thinking goes, are the end product of data collection, aggregation, analysis, and judgment. They enable a decision-maker to modify behavior and achieve desired outcomes.

The process begins with data collection, which can take many forms. There’s a big difference between collecting data and aggregating it in a meaningful way that can provide a picture of reality. That’s the “insights” part of the puzzle. First, you need high-quality data, then you need the technological prowess to clean and organize it.

With high-quality data that’s been cleaned and organized, the next step is to provide context. This is the realm of companies like Tableau, which provide tools that translate machine-friendly data points into human-friendly visualizations that strive to depict an objective picture of current conditions.

But whereas a snapshot of current conditions may, in fact, yield new and meaningful insights (for example, if I look ‘sales numbers’ across an organization I can see which channels are over- or under-performing), human judgment has always been paramount in choosing a particular action. A perfect picture of static conditions doesn’t by itself offer any suggestions as to how to achieve particular outcomes. We still rely on management to tweak sales incentives or redistribute resources.

Or at least we did, up until recently. Machine learning is now shifting the balance of institutional decision-making. Advances in processing and algorithmic self-improvement mean that computers can now anticipate future outcomes and take steps to maximize particular ones. Intelligent systems can now see the world in shades of gray and evaluate likelihoods from multitudes of variables far beyond human comprehension.

That’s the world we currently live in, and the evidence is all around us. Machine learning algorithms have swayed elections by stoking targeted outrage. Our clothes, food, and consumer products are designed according to data-driven analytics. Every design feature in your favorite app is being constantly optimized according to how computers anticipate your future behavior. It’s why YouTube is actually pretty good at showing you videos that keep you engaged.

The day is coming when we will no longer require “actionable insights,” because the action will have already been taken. Nobody at YouTube is looking at your viewing history to determine what to recommend next. Computers do that. The value of the stock market is now largely driven by automated trading algorithms, and as a consequence, there are fewer stock analysts than there used to be. Not only can computers process information far better than humans, but they’ve also demonstrated better financial judgment.

The day will soon arrive when “actionable insights” will seem like a quaint notion from a simpler time. Computers will be smart enough to act on insights by themselves. In doing so, they may, in fact, diminish the need for human oversight.

Until then, however, human enterprise is still structured around hierarchies of decision-making and judgment. The CEO of a company still needs to delegate day-to-day responsibilities to human actors whose knowledge and judgment have proven sound.

And so, for now, we still need actionable insights. Data analytics companies will continue to build better mousetraps, until the day when there are no longer mice.

Gil Rachlin, SVP of Products and Partnerships at Synup.

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10 Last-minute Strategies to Capture Holiday Revenue

Gearing up for the post-Thanksgiving holiday selling season is never easy. It takes time and planning. Here are some last-minute strategies that may help.

The post 10 Last-minute Strategies to Capture Holiday Revenue appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.

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10 years in, WhatsApp still needs true multi-device support

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WhatsApp launched out of beta 10 years ago this month. The app has gained a slew of features in that time, but multi-device support is still MIA.Read More

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Favorite Interviews, Rare Good News, and More To Be Thankful For [The Weekly Wrap]

This week, Robert Rose promotes viewing the world (and work) through a lens of gratitude. He rounds up the best news you might have missed, shares highlights from his favorite interviews, and points to inspiring content marketing examples. Continue reading →

The post Favorite Interviews, Rare Good News, and More To Be Thankful For [The Weekly Wrap] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

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Merkel Resists Calls to Ban Huawei, But Advocates For Higher 5G Security

Huawei dodged another bullet in its efforts to become the dominant 5G equipment provider, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel refusing to call for an outright ban on the company.

Reuters reports that Merkel did call for a higher threshold of security for 5G, as opposed to previous wireless technologies, but believes it can be achieved without singling out any one company.

“I tend to trust ourselves to define high security standards, higher than with 4G, 3G and 2G, but not to shut out vendors from the beginning….We have always stood for fair and free competition, and also fact-based competition, and not simply qualified it based on differing political systems,” Merkel said.

The news follows a similar stand by the French government. According to Reuters, Junior Economy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher told BFM Business television: “We do not target one equipment maker. There is no exclusion.”

The French government will, however, reserve the right to vet all 5G equipment providers and make sure they pass national security checks.

The two countries are taking a much different stand than the U.S., where the Trump administration has already implemented a ban on Huawei. U.S. officials have been trying to pressure European allies to follow suit although, obviously, they are not meeting with much success.

The post Merkel Resists Calls to Ban Huawei, But Advocates For Higher 5G Security appeared first on WebProNews.

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Nuvoton Purchasing Panasonic Semiconductor Business For $250 Million

Nuvoton Technology Corporation announced in a press release that it was purchasing Panasonic Semiconductor Solutions’ (PSCS) semiconductor business to the tune of $250 million.

Panasonic has been aggressively trying to cut $920 million by the year ending March 2022. Its semiconductor business was a loss-making endeavor, according to Reuters, and the company had already divested itself of much of its chip-making business in previous deals. What was left was a joint venture with Israel’s Tower Semiconductor, and “currently focuses on designing power-management chips and sensors for smartphones, cars and security cameras.”

According to Nuvoton, the deal is an all-cash deal “which is expected to close by June 2020, is subject to certain closing conditions including obtaining required regulatory and certain other approvals and consents in the relevant jurisdictions.”

The company hopes the acquisition will give it a stronger position in the global semiconductor industry.

“The acquisition of the semiconductor business mainly operated by PSCS will generate greater value for customers and shareholders of both companies, and will:

• Increase Nuvoton’s presence in the global semiconductor industry through greater scale and volume of semiconductor solutions;
• Position Nuvoton well to capture secular growth trends in the electrification and automation of automotive and industrial fields;
• Broaden Nuvoton’s distribution channels and customer base to explore cross-selling opportunities; and
• Strengthen Nuvoton’s technology platform via deeper R&D resources and a broader intellectual property portfolio.”

The post Nuvoton Purchasing Panasonic Semiconductor Business For $250 Million appeared first on WebProNews.

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Apple Expects to Sell 100 Million 5G iPhones in 2020

According to a report in DigiTimes, Apple expects to sell over 100 million 5G iPhones in 2020.

Earlier reports said Apple was expecting to sell 80 million 5G iPhones, but DigiTimes quotes sources within the Taiwanese supply line who say Apple expects to ship 100 million. Of course, as AppleInsider highlights, DigiTimes’ track record for accurately predicting Apple’s hardware moves is decidedly mixed.

AppleInsider also points out that Apple has not yet confirmed whether the 2020 iPhone will even have 5G, although there have been multiple rumors and peripheral data points to indicate that it likely will.

If the rumors are true and the 2020 iPhone does include 5G, it will likely be one of the biggest upgrades of any iPhone model in years. 5G promises to be such a transformative, revolutionary step in wireless technology that customers will no doubt want to experience it on their favorite iOS device.

The post Apple Expects to Sell 100 Million 5G iPhones in 2020 appeared first on WebProNews.

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LG Shakes Up Leadership, Appoints Mobile Head to CEO

LG has announced another shakeup of its leadership, appointing Brian Kwon to the post of CEO.

Brian Kwon headed LG’s TV division until he was put in charge of the company’s ailing mobile business in 2018, where he succeeded in stemming losses. Thanks to his performance, he has been tapped to run the entire company as CEO.

“LG Electronics (LG) today announced that Brian Kwon, currently head of LG’s Mobile Communications and Home Entertainment companies, has been named to take the helm as Chief Executive Officer effective December 1. Other changes announced for 2020 include: Park Hyoung-sei as president of the Home Entertainment Company, new Mobile Communications Company president Morris Lee, William Cho in the newly created position of Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Financial Officer Bae Doo-yong.

“Brian Kwon has played an important role at LG in his more than three decades at the company. Mr. Kwon (56), joined Goldstar in 1987 and has held a variety of positions including business planning at LG Wales and head of the monitor division before being promoted to oversee the Home Entertainment Company in 2014. Mr. Kwon is a native of Busan, receiving his bachelor’s degree from Seoul National University and MBA from Aalto University in Finland.”

The company made it clear that it will focus on businesses with strong potential.

“Going forward, LG will expand its focus on future core and common technologies with the establishment of the Future Technology Center to support the existing Artificial Intelligence Lab, Advanced Robotics Lab and Software Business Project Management Office under the CTO division. Future businesses with strong potential, such as smart home, content partnerships and beauty care will be bolstered and broadened. Other organizational changes to speed up decision-making in critical areas will be implemented with some overseas responsibilities for research and development, production, purchasing and design transferred to headquarters.”

The post LG Shakes Up Leadership, Appoints Mobile Head to CEO appeared first on WebProNews.

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Twitter Backtracks on Plans to Purge Inactive Accounts

Twitter made headlines with plans to purge inactive accounts in an effort to free up usernames. Now, according to a report in Time, Twitter is backpedaling following an outcry from users.

As the social media platform has grown, more recent users have had to choose longer, sometimes convoluted usernames. Meanwhile, some short, lucrative usernames have gone unused for years. Understandably, Twitter wanted to free some of those up.

Almost immediately after announcing their plans, Twitter started receiving pushback. In some cases, people who had lucrative, but inactive, usernames immediately logged in to make sure their accounts remained active. In other cases, people pointed out that many inactive usernames belonged to accounts of individuals who had passed away and served as memorials to them. Unlike other social platforms, Twitter doesn’t offer any other way to memorize deceased individuals.

Twitter heard the response loud and clear, admitting they had not considered all possibilities.

“We’ve heard you on the impact that this would have on the accounts of the deceased. This was a miss on our part. We will not be removing any inactive accounts until we create a new way for people to memorialize accounts.”

— Twitter Support (@Twitter Support) November 27, 2019

It’s safe to say Twitter will try to come up with a solution that allows deceased users to be memorized, without tying up valuable usernames indefinitely.

The post Twitter Backtracks on Plans to Purge Inactive Accounts appeared first on WebProNews.

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Seattle Seahawks Choose AWS For Cloud, AI and Machine Learning Needs

While football may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the Seattle Seahawks are the latest team to invest heavily in it, according to an Amazon press release.

The Seahawks have chosen Amazon to be their cloud, AI and machine learning provider, moving the vast majority of their infrastructure to AWS.

In addition, “the National Football League (NFL) team will use the breadth and depth of AWS’s services, including compute, storage, database, analytics, and ML to drive deep analysis of game footage to inform game strategy, improve operational efficiencies, and accelerate decision-making to advance team performance game-to-game. The Seahawks will combine the weekly NFL Next Gen Stats player tracking data, which tracks the position of the ball and every player 10 times per second, with its own player and club data to develop custom analytics and proprietary statistics.

“The Seattle Seahawks are relying on AWS’s unmatched portfolio of services to discover actionable outcomes from its vast amount of player, team, and business data, enabling them to continue to compete at a championship caliber level. The Seahawks are building a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that will combine team stats and NFL data, such as Next Gen Stats player tracking, player health and wellness data, and scouting information to provide deeper visibility into player capabilities, as well as give the coaching staff a single, real-time view of player and team performance. By applying AWS analytics services to the data, the Seahawks will be able to quickly uncover insights to better evaluate talent and develop game plans that take advantage of the team’s strengths.”

The Seahawks are just another example of how AI and machine learning are revolutionizing countless industries, giving organizations the ability to process data and gain insights that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.

The post Seattle Seahawks Choose AWS For Cloud, AI and Machine Learning Needs appeared first on WebProNews.

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Black Friday: Biggest discount ever!

We’re not kidding. It’s time for Black Friday, the one time a year we clean up the attic at Yoast. With our whopping 30% discount on everything, we top every sale we ever had.

Get your SEO package TODAY

Yes, when we say everything, we mean everything. Our subscriptions are cheaper than ever. With 30% extra on our already low prices we live up to our mission SEO for everyone. This is your chance to get all Yoast products, plugins and courses, for under $35 (first month, annual plan). That’s basically below cost price. Period. So get your package now, because this just isn’t sustainable.

Yes, I want all Yoast products with an extra 30% off!

Don’t miss out: Yoast SEO Premium for just over $60 a year

You can get a year of our premium flagship product Yoast SEO Premium for only 89 US dollars $62… That means you get all the great extra features:

• Word forms, synonyms and related keywords
• Redirect manager
• Internal link optimization
• Social previews and more

For less than you’d typically pay for a Shawn Mendes ticket, our plugin can help you rank better & get more traffic so you can go to as many concerts you’d like. A no-brainer? We think so.

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Raise your SEO game

Cover your own SEO bases today with our Yoast SEO academy courses. Don’t just use our plugin and write your content, but get a deeper understanding of why you should write that text for your audience and why & how you should use that feature in our plugin. Our recommendation: Don’t just focus on the content side of things, or frustrate over technical SEO, but get a better understanding of everything:

Get all our Premium Yoast SEO academy courses!

So yes, if you ever wondered if you should buy our products, or have been postponing real optimization and better rankings for your website, now would be the time to fire things up with our Black Friday deals!

Happy Black Friday.

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Top five SEO tools to generate more leads in 2020

Lead generation via SEO is one of the best ways to improve the overall conversion rate of your website. There are several go-to SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and Google Keyword Planner that most marketers use for keyword research, competitor tracking, and SERP movements. However, this is only one side of the equation.

Once people’s organic searches have pointed them to your web pages, what’s the best way to ensure they take the next step and opt into your email list? 

Let’s take a look at the top five SEO lead generation tools and how you can use them to convert more of your site’s visitors in 2020 and ahead.

1. Hello Bar

With Hello Bar, you can convert your existing visitors into customers. You can design custom messages for your visitors and display them just at the right time.

Hello Bar sits at the top of your site, and it can be used to display irresistible offers to your visitors. You can even collect email addresses from your visitors to increase your subscriber database. Here is an example of Hello Bar in action:

Source

Besides, you can use Hello Bar to create pop-ups that collect the name and email id of your visitors. 

Pop-ups help to drive 1375% more subscribers.

An example of a Hello Bar pop-up is provided below:

Source

You can easily customize your headline, CTA and the overall design of the bar and the pop-up. The platform automatically chooses the best color combination for the CTAs so you don’t need to spend hours testing that. 

With Hello Bar, you can customize your message targeting by:

• Sending holiday-related messages to visitors during the holidays. 
• Customize your pop-up for the mobile audience as the screen size is less.
• Customize your message based on the location of your customer. 
• Display the pop-up during the exit-intent, just when the visitors are planning to leave your website.

2. ClickMeeting

Webinars are one of the best ways to generate leads. 

Webinars offer a dual advantage. Firstly, you can generate leads right when you run a webinar, and secondly, you can repurpose your webinar into a blog post. 

Generate leads directly via webinars

With ClickMeeting, you can run custom webinars to share product demos, conduct training sessions or run online courses. You can customize your webinar with a few clicks, and run them without worrying about the type of device and operating system. You can even stream your webinar live to Facebook or YouTube, allowing you to acquire even more leads.

But the true SEO-based lead capture power of webinars is to be found in evergreen topics that will continue to attract relevant audience members over time.

Source

On-demand webinars are one of the fastest and easiest ways to expand your lead base. 

Repurpose your webinar

Repurposing your webinar into a lengthy blog post, consisting of more than 2000 words, helps it to rank for new search queries. When your site achieves higher rankings for new keywords, it automatically maximizes your organic traffic, leading to more conversions. 

Here are some great ways to repurpose webinars to generate leads:

• You can divide your webinar recordings into short videos of three to five minutes each and post the video on channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Add a compelling call to action, and people who watch the video are likely to reach out.
• Turn the entire webinar into a blog post and promote it on your social networks for added visibility. Try to present the blog post in a series of steps. This helps your site to get ranked as a featured snippet.
• Turn your webinar Q&A into a support resource page. FAQ pages offer an excellent opportunity to rank as a featured snippet. When people find answers to questions related to your business niche, they will be all the more likely to connect with your business.
• Create a transcript of your webinar and include long-tail (especially question keywords) in it. 

3. VideoBoost

It is difficult to succeed in your lead generation efforts in 2020 without videos. 

VideoBoost is an app that lets you create trendy videos easily. It has an impressive collection of ready to use video templates and marketing copy. You can easily brand it and start generating leads for your business.

Next time when you are planning to optimize your website for the festive occasion, head over to VideoBoost and create a video for your audience using video templates for Black Friday, Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.

 

4. vCita

vCita offers a dynamic widget that you can add to your site to convert your visitors into leads or customers. 

With vCita’s lead generation widget, you can capture leads from all the pages on your website with a floating CTA that follows the users from page to page.

The tool also lets your audience to book appointments without leaving the site. All the contact details of the visitors get stored in a built-in CRM that can be used later to trigger follow-up nurture messages via email or SMS.

The best place to start with this kind of strategy might be to identify the pages on your site with the most traffic from high-intent organic search terms rates and add the vCita widget to them. I am sure you’ll be able to notice the difference in the number of conversions happening on your site.

5. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most powerful conversion optimization tool in the world. It easily integrates with all the major email marketing and CRM platforms. 

One of the tricks that OptinMonster uses to generate leads is via content upgrades. With the help of content upgrade, you offer users bonus content for performing an action on your site. This action can be – joining your email list or filling out a form. 

SnackNation was able to generate 1200 new leads each month by using OptinMonster for content upgrades. 

 

With features like MonsterLinks, you can convert any image or link into a two-step opt-in process. It works on the Zeigarnik effect which states that people are more likely to complete a task if they start it. 

 

Final thoughts

SEO is all about generating relevant, and quality leads for a business. Moreover, your SEO strategy should also focus on converting the acquired leads. Both lead generation and CRO forms an integral part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. 

Start making the most with the power of the above five SEO tools to generate quality leads in 2020 and ahead. Happy marketing! 

Joydeep Bhattacharya is a digital marketing evangelist and author of the SEO Sandwitch blog.

The post Top five SEO tools to generate more leads in 2020 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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