We operate in a cross-platform world. This is a concept we’ve discussed throughout this guide, but we feel that it deserves a standalone chapter because too many marketers and business owners procrastinate on mobile.

And you know what? Every moment that you wait is a wasted opportunity.

The numbers alone should convince you.

• Is your business ready for mobile demand?58% of people who own smartphones have used them for store-related shopping.
• An estimated 63% of people expect to do more shopping on their mobile devices over the next couple of years.
• There are 1.2 billion people accessing the web from mobile devices.
• Almost 25% of black Friday shopping in 2012 was done on mobile and tablet devices.
• Spontaneity plays a major role in 81% of all smartphone purchases.
• 88% of people agree that having a mobile device with real-time information makes them more spontaneous with shopping and more open to discovering new things.

You might be less ready than you think. As of January 2013, the Interactive Advertising Bureau reported that only 57% of the top 100 brands are well-prepared with a mobile friendly site.

Use this fact to your advantage. Outsmart the crowd with a stellar mobile marketing strategy.

A social media strategy is more than just a Facebook page or Twitter feed. When executed correctly, social media is a powerful customer engagement engine and web traffic driver.

The social media landscape has evolved in the last few years, so if you’re jumping in now, you might be late. That’s the harsh reality.

But don’t worry. Everyone needs to start somewhere and you can still gain significant momentum through the social web.

As with any marketing strategy, the approach is straightforward:

1. Identify the social channels where your target audience hangs out
2. Solidify your brand messaging — what information will resonate with an audience with social media?
3. Understand with social channels best complement your website’s conversion optimization process. Ultimately, your goal is to create a steady stream of buyers.

You’ve launched an amazing product or service. Now what? Now, you need to get the word out.

But you’re on a budget and can’t afford the $10K a month to hire a fancy agency and put out press releases. That’s fine. You’re better off executing you’re on strategy or hiring a really awesome consultant.

When done well, good PR can be much more effective and less expensive than advertising. For cost-conscious businesses, ROI is crucial. Every penny spent on marketing should generate revenue. PR is no different. Here are the steps you should take to form a successful strategy for your business:

1. LET GO OF THE AGENCY ALLURE

   The sad truth about PR is that existing process are broken. They’re outdated, costly, and inefficient.

   • Many agencies are still buying very expensive ‘media lists’ and blasting our press releases and pitches to hundreds of journalists at a time.
   • It’s hard for the PR industry to track and measure the value of what they do.
   • Press release blasts entirely miss the mark on target audiences.

   At Lean Startup Machine Weekend, part of my team’s exercise was to interview journalists about their experience with PR pitches. They all said that 90 percent of the sometimes hundreds of pitches they get a day are spam; totally irrelevant to what they write about.

   JANE BOLAND, PR consultant via American Express OPEN Forum

   To succeed with PR, you need to focus less on the appeal of an agency and focus more heavily to focus on results. Prioritize what you want to achieve, not outdated ‘best practices.’ If you want to get in front of journalists, for instance, you are likely better off forming 1:1 relationships than bombarding them with irrelevant pitches.

2. KNOW WHEN PRESS RELEASES ARE WORTH IT

   A press release is worthwhile if your announcement is over-the-top catchy and newsworthy. But here’s the thing — most press releases read like giant sales pitches. If you think that journalists and publishers are going to be attracted to lukewarm content, guess again. They’re not. They don’t care. Their email inboxes fill up with 100s of spam messages again.

   We hate to say it but marketers — get your head out of the clouds. The world does not revolve around your business, and journalists could care less about what you have to say.

   If your goal is to get targeted placements for your brand, you will be better off cultivating a unique and thoughtful pitch in your area of specialty. A press release won’t cut it. Position your organization as a valuable, reliable, and trustworthy source of information instead.

3. FOCUS ON BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS AND MAKING CONNECTIONS

   The problem with PR is ‘spray and prey’ or ‘broadcast’ mentality. If you shout at journalists with a megaphone, they’re not going to listen.

   Above all, journalists care about compelling stories. They want to hear about your founders’ emotional journeys. They want to know what problem your company is solving and what motivates your team to wake up and come to work in the mornings.

   Treat journalists like trusted business partners, not eyeballs. Develop a conversation. Let them ask questions.

   Know your 2-4 stories in and out. Hustle hard for the small, one-off mentions. These usually come as a result of work done on the business development and partnerships side of things.

   HEATHER ANNE CARSON, PR expert & co-founder at Onboardly

SEO is less complex than marketers make it sound. We promise. The field has been around since the earliest days of the internet, and the goal has always been the same — to rank as high on search engine results pages (SERPs) as possible.

As you could imagine, the competition in this space became very cutthroat, as more and more companies realized how important it was to rank for certain keywords.

In February 2011, Google reached their breaking point, and released Panda — the first of a series of user experience-driven search engine updates.

Almost overnight, “thin” or “shady” sites folded. Chaos ensued as multi-million dollar web businesses lost a large proportion of their web traffic.

And the sites that came out on top?

These were the Wikipedias of the world that focused on building a genuine and healthy user experience. Tricks and tactics lost, while relevancy and quality won.

Which brings us to the most important lesson of SEO:

User experience is everything.

If you’re not focused on building a genuinely great product, your SEO will suffer. So here we are in a day and age where Google and Bing have put total power in the hands of consumers. User experience dominates the search engine market. SEO and strong marketing go hand in hand.

Search engines are constantly monitoring your website for key user experience cues. As much as your website, marketing, products, and services need to support a strong user experience, you need to make sure that your strengths translate into a language that search engines can fully understand.

And this pressure pushed people to do some real shady marketing — buying links, keyword stuffing, link farms, arbitrage, and who knows what else.

Connections are the heart of online marketing. Affiliate programs take that concept to the next level.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could finalize the deal?

With affiliate marketing, you can.

Company A > Directs Customer to Company B > Transaction Occurs

Company A will earn a commission from the transaction on company B

Let’s say that you’re running a company that specializes in shoes. Your customer base knows that you’re a shoe expert but also values your input on other high quality products — like handbags. Maybe your customers have asked you about handbags, and you find yourself recommending the same options over and over again. As a shoe vendor, you’re acting as a marketer for the handbag company.

Think about it. When you send an email, you reach your audience in one of the most personalized ways possible. Our email inboxes are literally in the palms of our hands. We’re glued to email at work, after work, first thing in the morning, and right before bed. It’s an understatement to say that email is a powerful marketing channel.

Even with all the junk out there, email marketing still has ROI. According to an Econsultancy study, two-thirds of marketers rate the ROI from email marketing as ‘excellent’ or ‘good.’ Harvard Business Review did an analysiswith one detailer and discovered that the dollars earned per email sent was around $15.79 for sales generated in store and online.

It’s hard to believe that email marketing is so effective when there is so much spam out there. The marketers who come out on top will focus on three core concepts:

Content. Relevancy. Value.

The problem is, we’re also bombarded with spam. Take a look at your email inbox right now. Does it make you want to tear your hair out? Finding a great brand email can feel like a diamond in the rough. You’re literally looking for a unicorn. But they’re there.

FIND CUSTOMERS THROUGH
PAID CHANNEL ADVERTISING

You might be surprised to learn that the paid channel advertising landscape is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2011, the ad-supported Internetcontributed more than $500 billion to the United States economy.

Holy smokes. That’s a lot of spend. But what is the exact ROI?

The numbers alone tell us that this marketing channel far too robust to ignore, but more often than not, marketers are scared to take the plunge for two reasons:

1. It costs money to get up and running and
2. There’s a big chance you’ll lose money if you aren’t smart about your strategy.

Paid channel advertising is a powerful marketing medium because it is measurable. It’s possible to calculate both a long-term and short-term value for how much revenue resulted from even one incoming website visit. You can also deploy targeting features to ensure that you’re reaching the right audiences.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google all offer products for marketers looking to reach customers.

Which network should you use?

The answer to that question goes back to user psychology. Understand what people are doing when they’re using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google products. These details will help you determine which channels are the right fit for your brand and advertising message.

Paid channel marketing is something you’ve probably come across in some form or another. Other names for this topic include Search Engine Marketing (SEM), online advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC)marketing. Very often, marketers use these terms interchangeably to describe the same concept — traffic purchased through online ads.

You’ve heard the term tossed around a million times. Content marketing. The phrase seems simple enough, but what exactly is it?

Content marketing is just what it sounds like. It’s the process of engaging and growing your customer base through high quality content.

Content marketing is an investment.

It’s part of a larger marketing framework.

It requires strategic insight.

It targets users across the entire conversion funnel.

It should be held accountable to a standard set of success metrics.

Content marketing is NOT social media, an intern’s job, or limited to a company blog. Like any other marketing practice, it requires commitment to systems and standards. It should be held accountable to measurable results.

Traffic acquisition is only half the marketing equation.

In addition to bringing visitors to your website, you need to keep them there. Not only that, you need to transform them from interested prospects into customers. Your website needs to move the relationship forward (and seal the deal).

And once they complete their first transactions?

Conversion optimization is the process of transforming new website visitors into paying customers — and first-time customers into repeat buyers.

This is a concept that every online marketer needs to thoroughly understand. If you don’t have a website (or marketing strategy)that’s optimized for conversions, you’ll end up wasting your web traffic.

Conversion optimization isn’t rocket science. In many ways, it’s common sense. But you need to actively think about what you’re doing. Know your best practices.

You need to convert your first-time visitors into repeat buyers.

You’ve built an amazing website, mobile app, or online storefront. Your brick-and-mortar customers love you, and you have the Yelp reviews to promote.

Now what comes next?

If you build it, they will come.

Just kidding. If it were that easy, the multi-billion dollar internet industry would be totally useless.

Your website could be amazing, but it’s probably hiding in a digital dark corner where web traffic is like the lochness monster. As much as you want it to exist, it doesn’t.

So what should you do?

You need to actively think about how you’re going to bring new visitors to your website. You need to build your traffic acquisition strategy. From paid channel advertising to content marketing, you have a range of options. We’ll get to these topics but before we do, we want to explain a key concept:

Audience connections.

You need to leverage your traffic acquisition strategy to connect with the right audiences — people who are most likely to become paying customers.

If you’re new to online marketing, you’ll probably read a lot about blogging, paid channel advertising, and social media marketing. This guide is going to take a different approach — we’re going to give you the holistic education you need to build a powerful marketing framework. Traffic acquisition is so much more than your SEM strategy on Google AdWords. It’s the single-most important marketing strategy for reaching your target audiences.

So let’s get to it. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the traffic acquisition landscape.