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"The successful marketing mix includes a variety of strategies which are complicated and constantly changing. With the continuing improvement of technology on the web, new marketing skills have become just as integral to a solid marketing mix.\r\n\r\nLet's talk about four growing skills in marketing that really count.\r\nConversion Rate Optimization\r\nWhen you can potentially double your revenue without doubling your costs, marketers would all ask, \u201CHow?\u201D With conversion rate optimization, you\u2019re optimizing your sales funnel to push more people through to customers. There\u2019s less worry about increasing ad budgets and finding better audiences.\r\n\r\nInstead, you spend more energy making sure more people that interact with your business have a positive experience and convert. Plus, you can easily do it yourself. When you can become a profit-making machine, without having to call on resources other than yourself, you\u2019ll become a marketing asset that\u2019ll have the recruiters all over your back. There are tons of case studies out there about businesses seeing dramatic results from optimizing a single call to action.\r\nSocial Media Management and Community Management\r\nSocial media was all the rage amongst marketers after it first came out, and beating the better judgment of some harsh critics, it\u2019s really evolved and become an important part of the current day\u2019s marketing industry. It\u2019s about customer service, new distribution and even advertising, content strategy, and proactive listening.\r\n\r\nYour customers have concerns and you want to hear them. Plus, you want to be able to positively react to those concerned voices and reiterate your business. You also have evangelists and listeners, who\u2019d love to hear what you have to say, if you make it interesting, and if it\u2019s exciting enough, they\u2019ll tell a friend, or ten thousand friends.\r\n\r\nShapeways is a great example of a business doing social media and community management right. With a blog, forum, even live webcasts and attendance to some of the hottest events, they show they know how to communicate and connect with their audience of tens of thousands of co-creators, designers, and engineers.\r\nSearch Engine Optimization\r\nThe multi-billion dollar search industry led by Google spawned the incredibly complicated industry of search engine optimization. Outside of paid search, where businesses work to increase visibility through ads shown on search results for targeted keywords and where service providers help businesses to increase traffic and sales through strategic bidding, there\u2019s organic search. Google effectively makes no revenue from organic search, but businesses are pouring sizable amounts of their marketing budget into managing search engine optimization.\r\n\r\nSearch engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of keyword research, link building, content strategy, and relevance. Effectively, it\u2019s about being relevant AND useful; usefulness always having been an important aspect of great business strategy, but only recently has it been more important in SEO after the Panda update.\r\n\r\nSEO got sexy when marketers realized how much consistent traffic they could get from top positions for targeted keywords, and how great those conversions were because of users\u2019 firm trust in Google. It seemed like the formula for success was getting your business ranked in the top results in Google. While this is far easier said than done, and while SEO\u00A0isn't\u00A0really the end-all for a business\u2019 marketing strategy, it\u2019s certainly a valuable channel for marketers to explore and very useful if they can effectively capitalize on the opportunity available.\r\n\r\nAnalytics\r\nGood marketing is nothing without proper analytics. Some marketing strategies may seem good without analytics, but they\u2019re probably just lucky, and won\u2019t be lucky for long. Analytics gives you a calculated assessment of what you\u2019ve done, and how that has affected the bottom line.\r\n\r\nThis way, you can see what efforts are helping or hurting your business, so you can cut out the things that aren\u2019t working and double down on what is. Month after month, you\u2019ll see great results when you continue cutting the fat and working the meat. You\u2019ll be leaner and more profitable. There are great free tools like Google Analytics, and many more sophisticated tools like Crazy Egg to help you figure out what you\u2019re doing wrong so you don\u2019t do it again, and what you\u2019re doing right, so you can do more of it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/05/17/how-to-grow-modern-marketing-skills-that-work/>