Since we update our Growth Spurts blog several times a week, our readers know they can find a lot of actionable marketing & technology advice in it. And in case you’ve missed them, we offer a monthly, summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts of the month where we extract the most useful information into tips you can use, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.

Here, then, are our 6 favorite posts for the month:

Marketing Strategy

• Don’t Let Silos Destroy the Customer Experience – Integrated marketing is critical for a good customer experience. It means breaking down silos not only between individual marketing tactics, but across product lines, between marketing and sales, and with upper management, too.
• A Better Way to Calculate the ROI of Your Marketing Investment – Today, marketers have access to data that allows them to track an individual’s various interactions with a brand before their purchase and better understand what role each interaction played in the eventual sale. This approach is called “attribution modeling, ” and allows companies to attribute appropriate credit to each online and offline contact and touch point in a customer’s purchase cycle so that they can improve their marketing ROI. Read more about this approach here.

SEO

• Google’s Natural Language Search Gets Smarter – If natural search traffic is important to you and you have not yet reevaluated your SEO strategy, this story makes it abundantly clear that now is the time to do so! Why? Because you are shooting yourself in the foot if you’re still focusing on traditional keywords instead of semantics.
• 9 Ways Small Businesses Can Be Big on Google – With smart planning, small businesses can have a strong presence even with a limited budget. Taking advantage of online opportunities is key. Here are 9 ways to make sure your SEO efforts pay off, including adding customer reviews and ratings to each product you sell; using a variety of images and/or videos for each product; and building links to specific product pages instead of just your homepage or other high-level pages (a.k.a. deep-linking)

Content Marketing

• How to Market to Goldfish – Did you know that the average attention span has gone from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds in 2015? And that is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish, at 9 seconds. But all is not lost, as we are humans, not goldfish. Find out some of the keys for holding people’s attention in this article from Hubspot.

Social Media Marketing

• How Airlines are Using Social Media for Seat Selection – They call it “social seating.” By using your social media profiles, airlines will select who you sit next to on your next flight. The claim is that it will provide you with a better in-flight experience. What do you think?

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