#with resulted in a bunch of responses ranging from ‘well they’re wrong’ to ‘b-but that’s just the sun sign’
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My controversial opinion about astrology is that it’s a scam that directly preys on vulnerable people who use it to cope with how unpredictable the world is. The same goes for a lot of the new age stuff that markets itself as “spirituality” but is selling you expensive crystals and shit.
It’s all fun and games until you’re paying $150 to get your astrology chart done because the person markets themselves as someone who comes from a long line of spiritualists or whateverthefuck.
“Bat swinging at wasp nest” post but I cannot be nice about astrology people. No you did not find the one good or cute or quirky way to believe the quality of someone’s character is biologically pre-determined. Just because you found a way to not base it on race or ethnicity or gender does not make judging someone’s character on an innate and uncontrolled attribute suddenly teehee fine.
I’m even more baffled by the people going “it’s just fun!” “It’s just a hobby!!” Sure if it was something harmless. It’s not. We are quite literally talking about how you intend to judge, treat, view, respect, and interact with someone entirely differently based on an inherent trait. How are you not aghast? How are you not embarrassed? Why are you so insistent on needing to operate on a hierarchy of pre-determined character judgement?
#misc: psa#astrology#I swore there was another post floating around too#that linked to an article about a study they conducted#that found there was no difference between professionals and amateurs doing astrology readings#and before anyone gets this twisted: if a lot of this stuff is based in real religions and spiritual practices#I am not talking about that. I understand that a lot of quackery leeches off that as to lend credence to what they’re doing#it’s just I personally know someone who’s deep in the sauce on this and having a conversation with her about it#would be tantamount to dismissing her faith because a lot of this crap is actually wrapped up in her identity as a Christian#anyway if there was any indication this stuff was bullshit#it was with that post that was floating around that basically said nasa redid the astrology chart#with resulted in a bunch of responses ranging from ‘well they’re wrong’ to ‘b-but that’s just the sun sign’#literally the people who make the stars their job said ppl are identifying with the wrong sign and folks were like ‘idc they’re wrong’
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Dust, Volume 6, Number 10
The Slugs
September seemed to be the month when all the records on endless delay finally got kicked out the door, COVID or no, ready or not here we come. We’re deluged with music, some recorded before the world changed, some clearly cooked up mid-pandemic. There are a lot of covers EPs, lots of solo material, lots of home-made lo-fi, lots of benefit comps, and who are we to complain? Better, instead, to reach for the headphones, load up the hard drive, pile on the LPs and do some listening. Here’s some of the stuff that caught our attention, as usual ranging all over the continuum, from traditional to edgy and experimental, from silly pop punk to enraged death metal to bookish electro-acoustic improvisation. Contributors this time out included Jonathan Shaw, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Derek Taylor, Ray Garraty, Tim Clarke and Andrew Forell. Happy fall.
Amputation — Slaughtered in the Arms of God (Nuclear War Now!)
Slaughtered in the Arms of God by Amputation
Given the degree of smugness that accompanies utterances of the phrase “Old School Death Metal,” it’s frequently instructive to listen to some. Right on time, the misanthropic bunch at Nuclear War Now! has delivered some seriously Old School sounds to our digital doorstep. This new compilation LP gathers both of the demos of Norwegian knuckle-draggers Amputation, along with a contemporaneous rehearsal recording. Likely the resulting record will be of principal interest to fans of Immortal, the long-running, on-again-off-again Norwegian black metal band that Amputation would morph into in 1991. The songs collected on Slaughtered in the Arms of God have some additional musicological significance, as they document the sounds of 1989 and 1990, transformational years in Norway’s metal scene. Mayhem and Darkthrone tend to get most of the attention, for reasons both good and bad; and like Darkthrone, Amputation made death metal before transitioning to blacker, more brittle sounds. The music on Slaughtered in the Arms of God is muddy, thudding and thick. Perhaps that’s the result of the primitive recording tech the band used, likely of necessity. But through the murk (and to some degree because of it), you can hear the influence of Stockholm’s fecund death metal scene, especially Dismember’s earliest stuff. Scandinavia’s metal currents run deep and dark. Whether that means that Old School Death Metal is intrinsically a good thing is a different matter.
Jonathan Shaw
Anz — Loose in Twos (NRG) 12” (Hessle Audio)
Loos In Twos (NRG) by Anz
I love the idea of listening to DJ mixes of original or all-new material; it’s probably why I still value, say, Ricardo Villalobos’ Fabric 36 so much. Manchester’s Anna Marie-Odubote, aka Anz, has been doing just such a thing annually since 2015 and really went wild with spring/summer dubs 2020, which compiled 74 tracks into nearly an hour and a half of new music. That would’ve been more than enough amid all of this (imagine me gesturing around vaguely), but “Loos in Twos (NRG)” on the venerable Hessle Audio imprint is an equally formidable, decidedly tighter release I played a lot at the start of September. Three club-ready tracks here break down acid, jungle and footwork, and while all three are heady breaks, the looped vocals and bongo of “Stepper” make it the one for me. Get those feet moving digitally now so they’re comfortable once the vinyl arrives in early October.
Patrick Masterson
Ashes and Afterglow — Everybody Wants a Revolution (Postlude Paradox)
Ashes and Afterglow drops pop punk melodies into deep buckets of fuzz, lets them bubble and bob to the surface before shoving them under again. The band is mainly the output of one Luke Daniel, who appears to have been in other band called Sea of Orchids, but neither outfit has left much of an internet trail. And sure, this is the kind of thing that could easily get shuffled under; it breaks no moulds. And yet shuffling “To Take a Look at the World,” has a heart-worn resonance, Daniel’s voice echoing in reverbed hollow-ness against surging tides of guitar noise. “My Yesterday Girl” churns a little harder, with a bright, pop-leaning sort of hopefulness hedged in by seething feedback. It’s not bad, but it never hits a melodic vein the way that similarly inclined artists like Ted Leo or Ovlov or Tony Molina do, and it never pushes the noise over the top, either. Neither pop nor punk but somewhere in middle.
Jennifer Kelly
Ballister — Znachki Stilyag (Aerophonic)
Znachki Stilyag by Ballister
A cake is still a cake, whether you put chocolate frosting and strawberries or white icing and a fondant roses on top. And while they don’t all taste or look exactly the same, a Ballister album is still a Ballister album, and the first Ballister album in three years does not mess with the recipe. Dave Rempis (alto and tenor saxophones), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello and electronics), and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums and percussion) still trade in a particularly hard-hitting form of total improvisation. The changes are ones of emphasis — Lonberg-Holm sounds like he’s using a wah-wah pedal and deploys some especially slashing feedback tones, there’s a bit more space in Nilssen-Love’s intricate beat configurations, and Rempis left his baritone sax at home — and of location. Znachki Stilyag was recorded during the fall of 2019 in Moscow, Russia, which may explain why the big horn stayed at home. But the ones you hear still cut and thrust with broadsword force and rapier precision. This is a cake you can trust.
Bill Meyer
Vincent Chancey — The Spell: The Vincent Chancey Trio Live, 1987 (No Business)
Vincent Chancey likely isn’t alone amongst his peers in feeling exasperated by folks singling out his instrument as uncommon or unusual to jazz. It’s a form of damning through faint praise and one that feel
s even more lackadaisical with any time spent with his music. Chancey plays the French horn and he’s plied it in settings as diverse as Sun Ra Arkestra, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra as well as gigs supporting Aretha Franklin and Elvis Costello. It’s unclear whether the trio documented on The Spell was a working concern, but that hardly matters given how well bassist Wilbur Morris and percussionist Warren Smith gel with their convener. Spread across two sides of an LP, the concert recorded at a New York City art gallery covers four pieces, two by Morris bookending one apiece from Smith and the leader that stitch together very much like cohesive suite. An unadvertised surprise comes with Smith’s ample application of marimba alongside a regular drum kit. Recording quality isn’t optimal, but Chancey’s rich, rounded, phrases gain extra gravitas through the sometimes-grainy acoustics. Woefully underrepresented in the driver’s seat discographically, his acumen as both improviser and composer is easily vindicated by this limited edition (300 copies) release.
Derek Taylor
Che Chen — Tokyo 17.II.2012 (self-released)
Tokyo 17.II.2012 by Che Chen
Nowadays Che Chen has earned a measure renown as the guitar-playing half of 75 Dollar Bill, and all the praise is earned. But before that, he played a roomful of instruments in the True Primes, Heresy of the Free Spirit and duos with Robbie Lee, Tetuzi Akiyama and Chie Mukai. The through-lines to all these efforts is a willingness not to play things the way their supposed to be played, and a gift for supplying the right resonance in any setting. Since 75 Dollar Bill is a New York-based band made for social occasions, the COVID-19 lay-off has been especially hard — so there’s no better time to see what’s in those hard drives in the closet, right? Chen has released this solo concert from 2012 via Bandcamp. In Tokyo for a brief layover, he played amplified violin at a party held in the basement of someone’s apartment building. The amplified part is important; dips and swells of feedback count as much as in this 25-minute performance as the fiddle’s bright, plucked notes and rough, bowed tones. Chen moves purposefully from one mode to next, taking time along the way to savor the room’s lively acoustics.
Bill Meyer
Jeff Cosgrove/ John Medeski/ Jeff Lederer — History Gets Ahead of the Story (Grizzley Music)
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Odds are that even the estimable William Parker would be surprised by the prospect of a William Parker cover album. But that’s essentially what History Gets Ahead of the Story is as organized and realized by drummer Jeff Cosgrove. That the project is the province of an organ trio only adds to the potential consternation quotient. John Medeski officiates the Hammond B-3 console and saxophonist Jeff Lederer, doubling on flute, completes the combo convened by Cosgrove. The latter’s connections to Parker stem from a trio he was part of with the bassist/composer and pianist Matthew Shipp that disbanded in 2015 after fruitful collaboration. Parker’s personage and music left an indelible mark and the seeds for the present album were sown. Collective creative license doesn’t get in the way of soulful, energizing renderings of such staples as “O’Neal’s Porch,” “Corn Meal Dance” and “Wood Flute Songs,” but troika also cedes time for a triptych of strong originals that align aurally with their dedicatee’s inclusive tone world sensibilities.
Derek Taylor
Derelenismo Occulere — Inexorable Revelación (Le Legione Projets)
Inexorable Revelacion (FULL LENGHT 2020) by Derelenismo Occulere
This sounds like a rehearsal gone wrong. In the time of the COVID pandemic, Neo Apolion, a guy responsible for the music in this Ecuadorean duo, recorded a demo and sent it to the band’s vocalist Malduchryst with a message to do with it whatever he wants. Malduchryst took his band partner’s words all too literally. With complete disregard to the music he began vomiting a noisy, messy mass of screams to a microphone (has he never heard of a black metal with no vocals?). If it sounds totally batshit, you can rest assured that it is. This is what makes Inexorable Revelación actually great black metal. When a lot of metal bands these days are just Backstreet Boys with leather jackets on and with guitars, Derelenismo Occulere care about only fury and mayhem. Their Argentinean mix man Ignacio only adds more chaos to the album. The only flaw this tape has is that it is 15 minutes too long.
Ray Garraty
Whit Dickey — Morph (ESP-Disk)
Morph by Whit Dickey
Drummer Whit Dickey and pianist Matthew Shipp have been recurrent partners since the early 1990s, when they were both members of the David S. Ware Quartet. It’s fair to say that each man is a known quantity to the other, and that one of the things they know about each other is that they might still be surprised by the other’s playing. Dickey’s retreated from time to time in order to revise his approach, and while Shipp has often threatened to quit recording over the years, he has never stopped working or evolving. This double disc combines one duo CD and another that adds trumpeter Nate Wooley to the pair. Wooley’s done a number of dates with Shipp in recent times, but he and Dickey were musical strangers before they entered Park West Studios in March 2019. Without Wooley, Shipp and Dickey seem very free and trusting of each other, transitioning with dreamlike ease from abstracted gospel to sideways swing to restless co-rumination this the ease. The trio seems more considered. The trumpeter dips quite sparingly into his extended technique bag, favoring instead linear statements that instigate fleet perambulations from the pianist and more supportive, less overtly dialogic contributions from the drummer. Both sessions work, and their differences complement each other quite handily.
Bill Meyer
Dropdead — S/T (Armageddon)
Dropdead 2020 by Dropdead
Yep, it’s that Dropdead, the Providence-based powerviolence band that hasn’t released a proper LP since 1998 and was on a long hiatus through much of the 21st century. Since 2011, Dropdead has put out a string of splits, with heavyweights like Converge and Brainoil. But a whole record? Maybe the unrelentingly shitty condition of our political and economic conjuncture motivated the four guys in the band (three of whom have been affiliated with Dropdead since 1991) to write the 23 burners, rants and breakdown-heavy hardcore tunes you’ll hear across Dropdead’s 25 minutes. It’s a welcome addition. Bob Otis’s voice doesn’t have the shredding quality of days of yore — but that ends up being useful. You can hear the lyrics, and they’re drenched in venom and righteousness. The rest of the band hasn’t lost a step. Pretty impressive for a bunch of guys with that much grey in their beards. That said, they don’t pull any intergenerational, “we’re-older-and-wiser” moves. This is still music that wants to collapse boundaries, between stage and mosh pit, between races and genders, between species, even. Not so much class positions: “Warfare State,” “United States of Corruption,” “Will You Fight?” Late capitalism’s depredations still bear the principal brunt of the band’s anger. Things have gotten worse, and Dropdead respond in kind. They may be a lot older, but they’re even more pissed off.
Jonathan Shaw
Fake Laugh — Waltz (State 51 Conspiracy)
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Earlier this year, Kamran Khan released his second Fake Laugh album, the charming, playful Dining Alone, which made its way into Dusted’s mid-year round-up of favorites released in the first half of 2020. Khan’s third album, Waltz, is a very different beast, featuring just piano, vocals and the odd keyboard texture, casting his songwriting in sharp relief. Undoubtedly created in this stripped-down way out of lockdown necessity, it’s hard to listen to these wistful, melancholic songs without imagining where Khan’s knack for colorful arrangements might take them, given the chance. (As a tease, closing song “Amhurst” offers up a shimmering electronic melody and some sighing synth chords.) There’s no doubting Khan’s way with a tune, and his naked vocal, though occasionally showing strain, suits the mood. It’s understated and undeniably lovely, yet Waltz feels like a minor release for this talented artist.
Tim Clarke
David Grubbs / Taku Unami — Comet Meta (Blue Chopsticks)
Comet Meta by David Grubbs & Taku Unami
In the 23 years since Gastr Del Sol fell apart, David Grubbs has done many things that don’t sound much like his old band with Jim O’Rourke. And Taku Unami has worked in such varied settings and ways that the most persistent quality of his engagement with sound is its ability to induce question marks and ellipses in any train of thought intending to decode it. So, it’s both remarkable and delightful that this record, the duo’s second collaboration, sounds rather like parts of Gastr Del Sol’s Upgrade & Afterlife. The foundation rests upon the way two guys who can and do play intricate guitar duets make subtle use of other elements — creeping acoustic piano, humming synthesizer, urban field recordings — to make music that thickens atmosphere and accumulates mystery with such subtlety that you don’t notice it until you’re in it.
Bill Meyer
Guided by Voices — Mirrored Aztec (Guided by Voices Inc.)
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I know, I know, it’s another Guided by Voices record, the fifth since 2019, but hear me out. Pollard is still tapped into the fuzzy, rackety, melodic sap of the rock and roll universe, and he has only to knock his hammer a few times against the gnarled tree of life to extract more of what sustains us. Shorter version: he can do this all day, every day, without any noticeable let-up in quality. So, let us celebrate another batch of Who-like power chords, of rumbling drums and monumental bass thuds, of melodies that curve out delicately like spring’s first vines, then thicken into thundering climaxes and triumphant refrains. Let us give thanks again for inscrutable lyrics that drift off into poetry then pull back in the most ordinary artifacts of the spoken word. “I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It,” crows Pollard in a voice that has been blasted by time but come out more or less intact, and yes, Bob, you still do.
Jennifer Kelly
Edu Haubensak & Tomas Korber — Works for Guitar & Percussion (Ezz-thetics)
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The celebrated Wandelweiser aesthetic serves as a loose overarching impetus for the four interpretations of compositions by Edu Haubensak and Tomas Korber that comprise Works for Guitar & Percussion. Classical guitarist Christian Buck and improvising percussionist Christian Wolfarth ply their instruments through pairing and isolation. Essayist Andy Hamilton describes context by delineating a distinction between music (based in the language of tones) and soundart (which is non-tonal) and placing the duo’s interpretations in the opaque border between these realms. Repetition and timbral disparity frame Haubensak’s “On” while Korber’s “Aufhebung” applies scrutiny to microtonal diversity and temporal impermanence. Wolfarth fields Korber’s “Weniger Weiss” from behind snare drum, trading recurring stick rolls with varying segments of silence that compel ears accustomed to Western musical structures to consciously fill in the blanks. Haubensak’s solo “Refugium” finds Buck bending two closely tuned strings in an extrapolation of an Arabic maqam that feels tenuously connected to the form, at best.
Derek Taylor
Inseclude — Inseclude (Inseclude)
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Brad MacAllister of CTRL and Blue Images and Benjamin Londa of Exit have been working in the darkwave and chillwave scenes for several years and their first album as Inseclude is a long distance collaboration that mines the darker side of 1980s alternative and electronic rock. From Pennsylvania, MacAllister sent musical ideas to Londa in Texas who added guitars, lyrics and vocals to produce a set of songs that are well made and enjoyable if largely unmemorable. There are a number of contemporary bands doing similar things — Hamilton’s Capitol and Manchester’s Ist spring immediately to mind — taking the Cure, New Order, Sisters of Mercy template and why not? Unfortunately, the passage of time and the law of diminishing returns have led to overfamiliarity with this style of music that makes for easy and perhaps unfair comparisons. When they stretch themselves, Inseclude’s songs do hit. “Sondera” and “Failing To The Pulse” carry some real menace with the juxtaposition of wide-angle synths and paranoid vocals but elsewhere the pair seem held back by a restraint and lack of bottom end that diminish the impact of some pretty decent songs.
Andrew Forell
Kvalia — Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines (Old Boring Russia)
Схоластические Грёзы Силовых Машин by Квалиа
Krasnoyarsk sits on the banks of the Yenisei river in southern Siberia and is known both for the natural beauty of its surrounding landscape and for its primacy as an aluminum producer. Local musicians Aleksander Maznichenko and Aleksey Danilenko reflect the latter on their new five track EP Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines, an icy, metallic collection of post-industrial clang pitched somewhere between Einstürzende Neubauten and early Clock DVA. Their machines are forceful but cranky, rusted, near obsolete. Maznichenko keeps the thrum of turbines is steady but the drum machines lurch and thump, the keyboards whine and scream, the Russian vocals protest their obstreperous charges. Danilenko’s bass is post-punk elastic skipping amongst the raining sparks hinting at a will to dance with his mutant riffs. They sound like they mean it and the result is a terrific EP full of fire, fumes, steam and sweat.
Andrew Forell
Mezzanine Swimmers — Kneelin’ on a Knife (Already Dead)
Kneelin' on a Knife by Mezzanine Swimmers
These songs circle around noise-crusted, repetitive beats, the drumming stiff and mechanical, the riffs chopped to short bursts, the vocals woozy and distended. “Sexy Apology” reiterates a three-note keyboard lick ad infinitum, as main Swimmer Mike Smith drawls the title phrase, similarly on repeat. Yet within this unchanging structure, chaos erupts in detuned keyboards, miasmic feedback and corrosive noise. It’s hard to say whether these songs are too tightly organized or too loose, a bit of both really, and yet, get past the headachy thud and there’s an unhinged psychotropic transport. No one ever said that kneeling on knives would be comfortable.
Jennifer Kelly
Mosca — The Optics (Rent)
Mosca · The Optics [RENT001]
Part of the initial wave of neon-infused dubstep hedonism surrounding the Night Slugs camp at the turn of the last decade, Mosca’s Tom Reid has since survived on the strength of a regular slot behind the decks at NTS and sparingly deployed releases on such renowned labels as Numbers, Rinse, Hypercolour and Livity Sound. “The Optics” debuts his new Rent imprint, conceived as a way to get out music that doesn’t fit in elsewhere. (Originally, this was to be an a-side for a coming AD93 release, but as he says, “There's only so long you can keep a track with a baby crying in it back from the masses.”) Supposedly inspired by the Under the Skin beach scene, the five-minute track immediately throws you off with a dub-heavy shuffle and metallic, alien sounds that zoom around the mix. The main thrust of the melody arrives around a minute in, and gradually the sounds close in on you. There’s bells, birds, a baby crying and then, just when you’re feeling completely stressed out, it all falls away; a driving jungle rhythm carries you the rest of the way. Deeply satisfying dance from a head who hasn’t lost his way.
Patrick Masterson
Prana Crafter/ragenap — No Ear to Hear (Centripetal Force Studio/Cardinal Fuzz)
No Ear to Hear by Prana Crafter / ragenap
When Robert Hunter, the poet who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star,” “Ripple,” “Truckin’,” “Terrapin Station” and many other songs, died in late 2019, long form psych musicians Prana Crafter (William Sol) and ragenap (Joel Berk) mourned separately but simultaneously. The night he died, both took solace in improvised music, which didn’t so much evoke or represent Hunter, but captured some of their feelings about his work and their loss. When they talked, soon after, they found that both had made lengthy open-ended meditations on the same person. Those two extended pieces make up No Ear to Hear. Prana Crafter’s entry, “Beggar’s Tomb,” is weighted and slow moving, building gradually from simmering drones into towering edifices of feedback and dissonance. Although performed largely on guitar, the sound is filtered through gleaming effects and layers into astral strangeness, a mystic’s trip through mental interiors. ragenap’s “Nightfall” also takes shape slowly out of looming sustained notes and black velvet quiet and sounds that scratch and vibrate at the edges. A solitary acoustic guitar takes up space at the forefront finally, carving a hesitant melody across the hum. The tune turns fuller and more agitated as it progresses, adding layers of feedback and distortion. Neither of these pieces sounds much like the Grateful Dead, and of course, neither has any sort of lyrics. I doubt that anyone, hearing this album for the first time would say, “Oh yeah, Robert Hunter.” And yet inspiration works in strange and, in this case, fruitful ways. You can enjoy this even if you don’t like the Dead.
Jennifer Kelly
Raven Throne — Viartannie (Chroniki Źmiainaj Ciemry) (self-released)
Viartannie (Chroniki Źmiainaj Ciemry) /The Return (The Chronicles of the Serpent Darkness) by RAVEN THRONE
These Belorussian black metal veterans are true materialists. On their seventh album, they show that nature is a social construct, not something given. And boy, their nature is not a loving mother. Unlike many metal bands convey nature via field recordings, Raven Throne craft their ferocious sounds with guitars and drums. Aren’t these as natural instruments as stone and wooden sticks? The atmospheric black metal subgenre has been contaminated by pop and folksy metal so that it’s hard to maintain a truly evil sound, while still bringing the atmospheric elements into it. Raven Throne pull it off. This is how darkness should sound.
Ray Garraty
The Slugs — Don’t Touch Me I’m Too Slimy (2214099 Records DK)
Don't Touch Me, I'm Too Slimy by The Slugs
The Slugs are an exuberantly lo-fi punk pop duo out of London who bash and thump and shout short, acidic ditties about being female, in a band, under assault and under the weather. Liberty Hodes, who is also one half of the comedy duo A Comedy Night that Passes the Bechdel Test, plays a jangling, forceful electric guitar, while her Phoebe Dighton-Brown bangs away in brutal simplicity on the drums. Both sing, sometimes in unison, sometimes in rough harmonies, occasionally in slashing counterparts. (One chants “Feel sick/can’t be sick” while the other rolls out mellifluous “ah-ah-ah-ahs” in “Feel Sick.”) There is a charming, unstudied quality to their music, which is a bit too smart and biting to be primitive, but nonetheless eschews frills. It’s hard to pick favorites—the whole EP is over in five tracks and 11 minutes—but “Pest” is giddy fun, with its slouching, battering guitar-drum motif and slacker choruses. The shout along chorus of “Don’t touch me! I’m too slimy!” is the best thing on the record, hitting a rebellious, unwashed spot of resonance in the work-from-home era. Second best, the gleeful tirade about sleazy male promoters in “Girly Gang” (“Give you all the gigs if you touch my wang”), which builds in round-singing euphorias until it ends suddenly and a la Jane Austen in matrimony (“Married in a dress by Vera Wang”). People are comparing the Slugs to the Shaggs, but that’s just short-hand for banging away anyway without all the training. The Slugs are smarter, slyer and more autonomous, and if they sound a little rough, that’s exactly how they meant to sound.
Jennifer Kelly
Tobin Sprout — Empty Horses (Fire)
Empty Horses by Tobin Sprout
Blessed with one of the finest names in music (alongside dEUS’s Klaas Janzoons), Tobin Sprout is best known for being part of the Guided by Voices line-up that created classic albums such as Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes in the 1990s. Though Sprout’s subsequent solo output has been a steady stream compared to Robert Pollard’s deluge, Empty Horses is his eighth solo album. In it, the now-65-year-old ruminates faith, mortality and American history atop a spare, country-tinged backing. There’s a deep ache to many of these songs, the kind of emotional weight that manifests in pointedly low tempos, sparse drum parts that hang behind the beat and vocal performances that are almost uncomfortably intimate. Running to a succinct half-hour, with many of the songs clocking in at just a couple of minutes each, Empty Horses confronts demons seemingly too pernicious to overcome. Yet, when the music becomes more expansive — such as the graceful pedal steel of “Breaking Down,” the woozy modulation of “Antietam,” or the biting fuzztone of “All In My Sleep” — Sprout sounds like he may be on the verge of making a much-needed breakthrough.
Tim Clarke
Son Lux — Tomorrows I (City Slang)
Tomorrows I by Son Lux
Son Lux’s songs embed unsettling sounds in deep wells of silence, finding disturbing textures in string sounds, electronics, percussion and the fluttering soul falsetto of founder Ryan Lott. Tomorrows I, reportedly the first of three related albums, has a quietly dystopian vibe and a moist, echoing unease that might remind of you Burial’s classic Untrue. A brief, looped, keening violin motif punctures the opening cut, “Plans We Made” with all the threat of Bernhard Hermann’s shower music for the film Psycho, while Lott trills haunted phrases about being afraid to let go. “Undertow,” near the end, brings in a whole string quartet to swoon dissonantly, as a knocking beat (drummer Ian Chang) sounds like a body being dragged across the floor. “Just waiting for the undertow,” sings Lott in the dread empty spaces between, in arias of muted desolation. Minimalist and menacing and mesmerizing.
Jennifer Kelly
Ulaan Janthina — Ulaan Janthina (Part 1) (Worstward)
Ulaan Janthina (Part I) by Ulaan Janthina
Steven R. Smith contains multitudes, and Ulaan Janthina is the latest manifestation of his mutating musical self. This release exemplifies three aspects of Smith’s practice. First, he likes to make beautiful things. Hard copies of this tape come in a custom-oriented box that contains tinted photos, shells and printed communications as well as the cassette. And he’s project-oriented. While other iterations have been devoted to an Eastern European vibe, or guitar noise or a virtual ensemble sound, Ulaan Janthina results from a decision to work primarily with the keyboards in his house. It’s a winning strategy, since his synthesizers, organ and harmonium all benefit from the grittiness of Smith’s recording methodology, and his spare playing style makes his melodies stand out quite starkly from the background atmosphere. Like the name says, this is part one of the Janthina (named for a genus of sea snail that makes its own floating platform — not a bad metaphor for the survival-oriented independent musician) venture; a second, similarly packaged cassette is pending from Smith’s Worstward imprint soon, and a future release is already planned by Soft Abuse records.
Bill Meyer
Various Artists — Spr Blk: Liberation Jazz and Soul From the '70s and Beyond (Paxico)
Liberation Jazz and Soul by Marcus J. Moore
Author Marcus J. Moore (late of The Nation but also found everywhere from Pitchfork to WaPo) has a book on the way in October, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America. In advance of its release via cassette devotees Paxico, Moore cobbled together “rare and somewhat familiar” Black music from his own crates. “These are the kinds of songs I play when walking through New York City or driving through Maryland,” he says in the release. What that means for you is a two-sided mix that burns slower on the A and gets more percussion-heavy on the B. Leading off with Doug Carn’s fittingly titled “Swell Like a Ghost” and featuring jams from Willie Dale, Milton Wright, Ronald Snijders and other lesser jazz, soul and funk lights, it’s a revealing mix that will no doubt pair well with that fall reading you’re about to get going on.
Patrick Masterson
Vatican Shadow — Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era (20 Buck Spin)
Persian Pillars Of The Gasoline Era by Vatican Shadow
Dominick Fernow is hugely prolific, and most folks with ears tuned to the densely churning worlds of noise and industrial music will be familiar with his abrasive, unsettling output under the Prurient moniker. Fernow’s releases as Vatican Shadow are fewer in number, and more attuned to ambient, even melodic movements and textures. That’s sort of odd, given that the Vatican Shadow records thematize and explore Fernow’s obsession with the history of the Middle East, especially post-9/11 collisions of Western military force, Islamic traditions of resistance and the tactics of terror used by both sides. Relaxing stuff, that ain’t. Consistent with the larger project’s tendencies, Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era claims an interest in the CIA-coordinated Iranian coup (MI6 helped out, too, those imperial scamps) that deposed Mohammed Mossadeq, installed the Shah Reza Pahlavi and inaugurated some of the principal tensions that have shaped the last half-century of world history. It’s unclear how Fernow’s pulsing, shimmering, sometimes juddering synth sounds are meant to represent or otherwise engage that history. For sure, record art and song titles summon all the right semiotics, sometimes with an interesting edge. But “Taxi Journey through the Teeming Slums of Tehran” sounds more like a malfunctioning MP3 player than a taxi or a “teeming slum” (can we all be done with that phrase now?), and “Moving Secret Money” is pleasantly trance-inducing, rather than insidiously evil. Musically, it’s quite good. The packaging seems to want strike other notes. Maybe that’s the point — too many folks are too busy consuming quietist pop to bother with the grind of the political. But is this the intervention we need?
Jonathan Shaw
#dusted magazine#dust#amputation#jonathan shaw#anz#patrick masterson#ashes and afterglow#jennifer kelly#ballister#bill meyer#vincent chancey#derek taylor#chen chen#jeff cosgrove#john medeski#jeff lederer#Derelenismo Occulere#ray garraty#whit dickey#dropdead#fake laugh#tim clarke#david grubbs#taku unami#guided by voices#inseclude#andrew forell#kvalia#mezzanine swimmers#mosca
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... do you have an avengers/marvel au?
I sadly cannot reply that I don’t. will the AU’s ever stop? my intuition says no.
So I made this AU a while back, and only ever spoke to mypartner about it, but well-
Y’all are asking, so here we go.
Now I know you’re all expecting my to name each of the kidsoff as already canon characters in the Marvel universe, but what would thefun be in that?
Basically, I made a whole new branch of origins for thekids, relating to the weapon-X program. The four boys + April were made/raisedas subjects there until they were about thirteen, and April grew powerfulenough to bust them out. The five of them are all artificially created mutants,designed to be future super soldiers. The specific designs of the boys weremore so aimed at becoming black-ops/assassins, while April was designed formass destruction.
Of course, what sort of plan like that doesn’t goawry? Especially when you load up a bunch of severely abused kids with superpowers, and think you can keep them locked up forever.
I lost my notes I made for this AU, but essentially each kidwas given a specialty power, in addition to their base abilities of enhancedstrength/speed/endurance/etc.
And, because I love all my followers, I spent a bunch of time typing up everything I could remember, and then expanded on it to make a semi-coherent response to this ask.
(read more below, because this gets long.)
Leo had something akin to super speed, but itsince he was the prototype of the batch, so to speak, the speed came at aprice. His whole body speeds up when he uses the ability, (mind, heart, lungs,etc), and it’s really taxing to use for long periods of time.Using it too long results in him passing out, and he has the weakest immunesystem out of the five since he burns through calories/energy so quickly.
If he pushed himself to hard, there’s a good chance he’dcrash from heart failure. Which is why they created more subjects, since thefirst one was a success only in some areas.
Raph was the next one, and he was givensomething close to super strength. He’s crazy strong, and pretty much nearindestructible to most attacks. Of course, draw back to messing so much withhis body chemistry to mesh the foreign DNA of some mutant, is that he’s got anuncontrollable rage mode.
A super strong, nearly unstoppable ball of rage is nogood if you can’t control him; and once Raph gets past a certain point, noteven the shock collar/ingrained command codes from their handlers can getthrough to him, and he’ll keep going until he burns out. He’s nearindestructible, but not completely. Without the ability to control hisemotions, he’s an easy target if you know how to get past his defenses in afight. Another failure in a number of ways.
Donnie came into the project third, and wasgiven electrical powers. In this story, it’s not really testable to see if hisgenius is innate, or a side effect of his specialty powers, but it’s there andthe scientists use it to their advantage. Donnie has the most implants in himtoo, in his brain and body both, so he can mentally/physically hook himselfinto power grids and computers through his internally generated electricalfield. (He also has the ability to shoot ranged electricity attacks at people,but it has drawbacks that are listed below.)
It’s handy, but tricky to use, since it leaves his bodyunguarded while he goes into the system. Another trick to his powers is thatDonnie both generates his own electricity and draws in ambient energy, and whenhe doesn’t have an outlet to discharge at… well, there’s a lot of boom involved.When an overcharge happens, it knocks Donnie flat on his back until his bodyrecharges to the right levels, and leaves him completely useless until then. Itdoesn’t help either that the way they’ve messed with his brain futzes hischemical balances, plus the added abuse and all that, and has resulted in himbeing a sparky, highly anxious snarl of paranoia. He’s too unstable to beproperly used in the field, and thus, another failure.
Mikey is unfortunately the only one they gotright, out of the specific designs for him and his brothers. Instead of goingfor hyper specialisation, the scientists decided to give Mikey an even mix ofeverything they’d tried (and failed) to create in the other boys. Thus, he isthe perfect super soldier, created from trial and error. Strong, fast, andsmart.
Best yet, he’s the only one with complete programming. Theysay jump, and he’ll already know exactly how high. It’s quite fucked up, andaround the time they escaped, Mikey was slated for a final procedure that wouldremove his access to his full personality; which would have left him thesoulless killer he’d been designed to be. Had Mikey’s procedure been completed,he would have likely become the most efficient, and terrifying, assassin thatmoney could buy. Very few people or heroes would have stood a chance ofstopping him. That world is very, very lucky they busted out when they did.
April was a different branch of experimentation,seeing as she was designed for widespread destruction and not killing specifictargets. Her abilities are basically of those in TMNT 2012, though with theaddition of telepathic abilities closer in nature to Jean Grey (Gray??) becauseshe may or may not be where they got the DNA from.
April is by far the most powerful mutant the programcreated, and thus the one with the most suppressants put on her. Not enoughsuppressants, it seems, or isolation from the other subjects; since she bondswith the four boys, plus another subject, and plots to escape with them. Whenthey do, it’s because April knocks out every guard and scientist in thefacility, and the boys plus the much older subject named Leatherhead bust outof their containment, and retrieve April as they go.
Now, Leatherheadin this AU was a grown man when he entered the program, following promises thatwere similar to what Deadpool was given. He’s former military too. He ends up asa crocodile mutant too in this AU; basically an advancement of the minormutation he had prior to the program, which had only made his skin tougher andhis teeth a little snaggly.
He’s hecka durable, and can take/deal more than a littledamage, and was basically used as a test dummy for how the five kids wouldreact to social-ish situations. Leatherhead is a kind soul, despite being avery violent person, and essentially tried to act as much of a parental figureas he could for these heavily damaged kids. In turn, Leatherhead is the onlyadult the five of them have ever trusted, and love him quite dearly. (I shouldwrite something for this AU, if only for papadile snuggles with his five kids.)
And from here on out Iproceed to babble a lot about my AU’s plotline, because I can and I feel likesharing it. Prepare for info dumping.
So following them attempting/succeeding to escape, shit goeswrong, and April + Leatherhead get separated from the boys. Since none of themcan risk hanging around, what with military crawling everywhere, they have tocut their losses and hope that they all make it out safely. Around that time,two individual plot lines form for the two groups. The boys end up strugglingto make their way to- somewhere, they don’t know where but anywhere but here- while Leatherhead and April do the same. April’spowers aren’t used to being unsuppressed, and she’s struggling to hold ittogether, and Leatherhead is a highly visible mutant. They go into hiding, andtry to lay low until they can figure things out.
Around that time, they end up picking a hiding place thathappens to be close to a certain plucky puck-head’s home, and because April can’tstay inside all day, she ends upmeeting Casey at a playground. April doesn’t look like a normal kid; dirty,pale, and has a shaved head, but Casey takes to her anyways, because she’s totally metal, and can levitate stuffall around the playground.
He convinces her to let him meet her ‘dad’ (which isbasically what Leatherhead is to her at this point) and it goes… interestingly.After a lot of headache on LH’s part, Casey is accepted into their small groupand makes himself as home. Better to be hanging in April’s sewer home than hisown, since the Jones’ household isn’t exactly a happy one in this AU.
It takes a bit, but once Leatherhead and April figure outwhy Casey has so many bruises all the time, they’re not exactly okay aboutletting him go home. In the end, when LH is anxious to move them again, sinceauthority in the area is getting suspicious of the grocery store break-ins,they offer to take Casey with them. Leatherhead knows he won’t be able toprovide exactly the best for Casey, but he doesn’t want to leave the kid withhis dad anymore.
(Casey’s little sister was born just before the divorce hisparents went through, and he lives alone with his dad. His mom doesn’t know howthings have degraded in the Jones home, and LH isn’t even sure how he’d tellher. He’s a giant crocodile, wanted by the government. There isn’t much he cando other than offer this.)
Casey is very close with LH and April by this point, andwith a choice between staying in an unloving, abusive home, or going with hisawesome mutant friends- it’s not even a hard decision. Casey joins their merryband, and because April has recovered/learned to control her abilities better, theystart heading towards the United States. Following the feeling that April has,saying that that’s where the boys are.
Back to the other half of the story line, the four boys wentthrough a long series of tumultuous adventures before they ended up in America.The smartest move they could make was to get out of the jurisdiction of the Canadiangovernment, and so off they went. It was hard, since they were A) completelynew to being outside, B) hyper paranoid, and rightly so, about someone findingthem as they hitchhiked along train lines, and C) really, really scared aboutwhat they were supposed to do now.
Also, because they have no immune system at all, and no cluehow to feed themselves properly, they got sick on and off as they went. EspeciallyLeo. By the time they reached New York City, Leo was pretty much incoherent andunresponsive; burning up and delirious as anything. It’s basically the scariestthing any of them have ever had to deal with, and none of them know what to do. Medical training wasn’t exactly apriority during their programming, and they can’t exactly go to a hospital; someonewill find them if they do, and they are nevergoing back to the program. It’s a unanimous decision that no matter whathappens, they’d rather die than go back to that.
Thankfully, as they’re fumbling their way through thestreets of New York with a very sick kid, a passing telepath hears the franticdesperation of their thoughts, and decides they should check things out. RachelSummers is with a group of older students from the Jean Grey School for higherlearning, and she and some of the other chaperones break off from the group tofollow the distressed thoughts of the young mutants she’s sensing.
It’s a big mess, trying to corral and convince the fourboys, but after a brief fight and some telepathic communicating, the X-men talkthe boys down, and get them to come back to the school with them. Leo is inneed of some serious medical attention, and it’s either let him possibly die ortrust these adults who have powers like them. (They liken the X-men toLeatherhead, who they miss very deeply, and figure if LH was safe… maybe thesepeople are too?)
After that, it’s a lot of them healing and trying to figureout how to function outside a lab. And, the adults of the school trying to helpthem do that, as bumpy as that journey ends up being. The boys have a lot oftriggers, a lot of trauma, and very little trust in anyone other than eachother. It’s a long, long time before they’re comfortable with anyone at theschool, but they get there slowly.
Sometime later, after trekking across a whole continent tofind them, Leatherhead and his two rambunctious kids (Casey helped draw out April’shumor and mischievousness) manage to arrive at the school, and it’s a verytouching reunion as the groups come together again. The boys were fairlycertain Leatherhead and April were dead, and it’s pretty much the most amazing revelationever to find out that they aren’t. Casey is treated with suspicion for a bit-and with jealousy, because April and Leatherhead were theirs first not Casey’s-but that’s resolved fairly quickly, and the group settles together again.
Somewhere in here, we have Yoshi, a martial arts instructorat the school, (yes he is a giant rat mutant), and Karai, his daughter, who isa bit older than the six kids. (She is a snake mutant, and stubbornly proud ofher early mutation.) As the boys + April become accustomed to the school, Karaibefriends them through steady effort and teasing, and joins their tightly knitsocial group. Somewhere in here as well is Shinigami, probably with the abilityto hypnotise people as well as shapeshift, and she is best friends with Karai.(This is one big found family/friends as family AU, if I’m honest.)
And then they all grow up, adjust to life outside of alaboratory, face all the fuckos who come looking to take them back there, andsomehow figure out how to live as people and not objects. The end and stuff.
….and that’s about it.
I should write one-shots on and off for this thing. I have alot more details to it, like the kids’ individual friendships with staff at theschool, and what their futures as X-men are like. But that is a lot of writingand I won’t do it here.
If anyone’s wondering why I went with the X-men instead ofthe Avengers- basically? While I love the Avengers to pieces, I love the X-menso, so much more. The amount of diversity in that part of the Marvel universeis stunning, and there’s a characterfor everyone. Man? Woman? Neither? Black? White? Asian? Bi-racial/multiracial? Physicallydisabled? Mentally disabled? Gay? Lesbian? Bi? Pan? Asexual? Trans? Religious? Atheist?PSTD? Traumatic background of any kind? Literally all of these things and moreare a part of the X-men comics, and the struggle they face as an unwanted, verysmall race is something I relate deeply with. Not to mention that the defactoleader in any disaster situation is the strongest woman in the room and I don’tmind admitting that I adore that partof things.
The whole of the X-men universe is amazing and so, so amazing,and the series of comics specifically about Wolverine’s school are definitelymy favorite ones. (I have the whole collection, organized and well cared for
Ask me more about this AU if you guys want, I’ve neveractually shared it before, and this was fun!
#my writing#ask the writer#Marvel/TMNT AU#holy shit i talked a lot here#TMNT 2012#April O'neil#Donatello#leonardo#raphael#michelangelo#Casey Jones#Karai#Shinigami#Leatherhead#Splinter#tmnt au#aha ha ha ha#i have too many au's#please stop me#team as family#papadile is my favorite thing ever#even more than ratdad if i'm honest here
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Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020
As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.
We wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?
Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true.
Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. I thought I’d share some of the results with you today.
Takeaway #1: The most popular digital marketing strategy is a diverse one.
When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business.
No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:
The “Other” category also yields some varied answers, from paper mailers to podcasts to push notifications.
In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)
These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)
Which brings us to another question…
How often are marketers including landing pages as part of their campaigns in 2020?
Very often, it turns out.
36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.
We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.
New to landing pages? One reason they appeal to so many marketers is that they help you squeeze more conversions out of your existing ad budget. If we’ve piqued your interest, take a look at our guide to creating your first Unbounce landing page to learn more about how you can get started.
Takeaway #2: Marketers are doing a whole lot with their landing pages.
So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often.
When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:
Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.
This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.
For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow. As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.
Takeaway #3: When it comes to reaching their conversion potential, marketers are an ambitious bunch.
In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving.
As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:
Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)
But here’s where you told us you’d like to be:
Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!
Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.
So…
How do landing pages in your industry actually perform?
Drumroll, please…
According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).
That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.
And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)
This graph from the Conversion Benchmark Report shows the median (rather than average) conversion rates for four subcategories in the home improvement industry.
These are just a few generalities. In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.
Why’d we create the report? More than just benchmarks, the data-derived insights from the Conversion Benchmark Report will help you pair your savvy with AI to create the highest-converting campaigns of your career. It’s part of the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence mission to bring marketers new ways to optimize and level up their skills.
Takeaway #4: Delivering the right landing page for the right audience remains a challenge.
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned so far. Marketers have big ambitions for their landing pages, and they’re looking to do even more with them in 2020. We also saw that the best-performing landing pages routinely hit double-digit conversion rates. (Yowza.)
So, what’s holding the rest of ’em back? We wanted to know where our respondents saw room to improve their landing pages, and here’s what they told us:
It wasn’t deliberate, but it seems to me that the answers here fall into four broad categories:
First, there are issues with optimization. Marketers feel they don’t have time to optimize their pages using A/B testing. Sometimes they may not have the data or expertise to make meaningful choices when it comes to improving their conversion rates.
Second, matching the right page to the right audience can be tricky. Fixing it can involve traffic optimizations further up the funnel. But how do you also make sure that each visitor hits the landing page that’s right for them?
Third, whether it’s a matter of talent or time, sometimes marketers don’t feel like the copy and design on their pages are effective. (Testing could help, yes. But see #1 on this list.) For small businesses, marketers may have to play too many roles. And they may not have access to learning material that helps them improve.
And fourth are technical hurdles, like slow loading times or ensuring pages look perfect on different devices. (These made up the “Other” category above.) In this case, marketers have risen to the challenge of building lighter, more mobile-friendly experiences.
Today’s marketers have a lot on their plate—you could say they’re young, scrappy, and hungry—but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking for easy ways to step up their game.
How’d we get these numbers? We fielded the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Survey between December 2019 and February 2020. To ensure a healthy sample size, we surveyed 439 people. After a few qualifying questions, we paired it down 400 respondents who identified as marketers.
How can marketers overcome these challenges?
When it comes to getting the most conversions from your landing pages, we’ve been talking a lot about a shift in mindset we’re calling Conversion Intelligence. Again and again, we’ve seen evidence that better performance isn’t an accident. It’s the result of continuously fine-tuning each element of your campaigns.
But when marketers often do this optimization work on their own, they quickly run up against limits—of time and money, of expertise, of insight. By pairing your expertise with Artificial Intelligence, you can overcome these limits. You can create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible.
Our teams are working to share opportunities you couldn’t spot without the processing power of a machine. For now, you can check out the Conversion Benchmark Report. Starting with the benchmarks, dig into your industry. Use the machine-derived insights about reading ease, word count, and sentiment to create higher-converting pages.
Better yet, build a low-commitment (as in, quick and easy) variant or two based on the insights in the CBR, then flip on Smart Traffic and see how they perform. This feature uses machine learning to automatically match each and every visitor to the landing page most likely to convert. There’s no need to babysit it or declare a champion variant, and it never stops learning.
Using Smart Traffic is a quick win, especially if you don’t have the time or traffic for the traditional A/B testing. It needs just a little bit of attention to get it up and running on your most important pages. All you need to do is build a few variants, and turn it on. We see an average lift in conversions of 20% for customers who use it, so it’s very much worth the small effort.
Finding a New Normal
The Conversion Benchmark Report Survey was a bit of informal market research before starting on an intimidating project. But your responses also helped us enrich the quantitative data (generated with the help of AI) with some good old-fashioned human intuition.
It continues to be a challenging year, and we’ll run a follow-up survey to see how things have changed for you in 2021. But, for now, I’m curious: how have your plans changed? Have you adjusted? Have you pivoted? Swerved? Tempered your expectations? Adapted your existing campaigns to the new normal? Found new opportunities even?
Let me know in the comments.
Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020 published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/
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Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020
As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.
We wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?
Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true.
Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. I thought I’d share some of the results with you today.
Takeaway #1: The most popular digital marketing strategy is a diverse one.
When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business.
No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:
The “Other” category also yields some varied answers, from paper mailers to podcasts to push notifications.
In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)
These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)
Which brings us to another question…
How often are marketers including landing pages as part of their campaigns in 2020?
Very often, it turns out.
36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.
We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.
New to landing pages? One reason they appeal to so many marketers is that they help you squeeze more conversions out of your existing ad budget. If we’ve piqued your interest, take a look at our guide to creating your first Unbounce landing page to learn more about how you can get started.
Takeaway #2: Marketers are doing a whole lot with their landing pages.
So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often.
When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:
Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.
This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.
For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow. As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.
Takeaway #3: When it comes to reaching their conversion potential, marketers are an ambitious bunch.
In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving.
As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:
Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)
But here’s where you told us you’d like to be:
Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!
Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.
So…
How do landing pages in your industry actually perform?
Drumroll, please…
According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).
That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.
And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)
This graph from the Conversion Benchmark Report shows the median (rather than average) conversion rates for four subcategories in the home improvement industry.
These are just a few generalities. In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.
Why’d we create the report? More than just benchmarks, the data-derived insights from the Conversion Benchmark Report will help you pair your savvy with AI to create the highest-converting campaigns of your career. It’s part of the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence mission to bring marketers new ways to optimize and level up their skills.
Takeaway #4: Delivering the right landing page for the right audience remains a challenge.
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned so far. Marketers have big ambitions for their landing pages, and they’re looking to do even more with them in 2020. We also saw that the best-performing landing pages routinely hit double-digit conversion rates. (Yowza.)
So, what’s holding the rest of ’em back? We wanted to know where our respondents saw room to improve their landing pages, and here’s what they told us:
It wasn’t deliberate, but it seems to me that the answers here fall into four broad categories:
First, there are issues with optimization. Marketers feel they don’t have time to optimize their pages using A/B testing. Sometimes they may not have the data or expertise to make meaningful choices when it comes to improving their conversion rates.
Second, matching the right page to the right audience can be tricky. Fixing it can involve traffic optimizations further up the funnel. But how do you also make sure that each visitor hits the landing page that’s right for them?
Third, whether it’s a matter of talent or time, sometimes marketers don’t feel like the copy and design on their pages are effective. (Testing could help, yes. But see #1 on this list.) For small businesses, marketers may have to play too many roles. And they may not have access to learning material that helps them improve.
And fourth are technical hurdles, like slow loading times or ensuring pages look perfect on different devices. (These made up the “Other” category above.) In this case, marketers have risen to the challenge of building lighter, more mobile-friendly experiences.
Today’s marketers have a lot on their plate—you could say they’re young, scrappy, and hungry—but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking for easy ways to step up their game.
How’d we get these numbers? We fielded the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Survey between December 2019 and February 2020. To ensure a healthy sample size, we surveyed 439 people. After a few qualifying questions, we paired it down 400 respondents who identified as marketers.
How can marketers overcome these challenges?
When it comes to getting the most conversions from your landing pages, we’ve been talking a lot about a shift in mindset we’re calling Conversion Intelligence. Again and again, we’ve seen evidence that better performance isn’t an accident. It’s the result of continuously fine-tuning each element of your campaigns.
But when marketers often do this optimization work on their own, they quickly run up against limits—of time and money, of expertise, of insight. By pairing your expertise with Artificial Intelligence, you can overcome these limits. You can create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible.
Our teams are working to share opportunities you couldn’t spot without the processing power of a machine. For now, you can check out the Conversion Benchmark Report. Starting with the benchmarks, dig into your industry. Use the machine-derived insights about reading ease, word count, and sentiment to create higher-converting pages.
Better yet, build a low-commitment (as in, quick and easy) variant or two based on the insights in the CBR, then flip on Smart Traffic and see how they perform. This feature uses machine learning to automatically match each and every visitor to the landing page most likely to convert. There’s no need to babysit it or declare a champion variant, and it never stops learning.
Using Smart Traffic is a quick win, especially if you don’t have the time or traffic for the traditional A/B testing. It needs just a little bit of attention to get it up and running on your most important pages. All you need to do is build a few variants, and turn it on. We see an average lift in conversions of 20% for customers who use it, so it’s very much worth the small effort.
Finding a New Normal
The Conversion Benchmark Report Survey was a bit of informal market research before starting on an intimidating project. But your responses also helped us enrich the quantitative data (generated with the help of AI) with some good old-fashioned human intuition.
It continues to be a challenging year, and we’ll run a follow-up survey to see how things have changed for you in 2021. But, for now, I’m curious: how have your plans changed? Have you adjusted? Have you pivoted? Swerved? Tempered your expectations? Adapted your existing campaigns to the new normal? Found new opportunities even?
Let me know in the comments.
0 notes
Text
Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020
As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.
We wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?
Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true.
Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. I thought I’d share some of the results with you today.
Takeaway #1: The most popular digital marketing strategy is a diverse one.
When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business.
No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:
The “Other” category also yields some varied answers, from paper mailers to podcasts to push notifications.
In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)
These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)
Which brings us to another question…
How often are marketers including landing pages as part of their campaigns in 2020?
Very often, it turns out.
36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.
We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.
New to landing pages? One reason they appeal to so many marketers is that they help you squeeze more conversions out of your existing ad budget. If we’ve piqued your interest, take a look at our guide to creating your first Unbounce landing page to learn more about how you can get started.
Takeaway #2: Marketers are doing a whole lot with their landing pages.
So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often.
When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:
Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.
This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.
For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow. As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.
Takeaway #3: When it comes to reaching their conversion potential, marketers are an ambitious bunch.
In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving.
As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:
Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)
But here’s where you told us you’d like to be:
Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!
Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.
So…
How do landing pages in your industry actually perform?
Drumroll, please…
According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).
That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.
And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)
This graph from the Conversion Benchmark Report shows the median (rather than average) conversion rates for four subcategories in the home improvement industry.
These are just a few generalities. In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.
Why’d we create the report? More than just benchmarks, the data-derived insights from the Conversion Benchmark Report will help you pair your savvy with AI to create the highest-converting campaigns of your career. It’s part of the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence mission to bring marketers new ways to optimize and level up their skills.
Takeaway #4: Delivering the right landing page for the right audience remains a challenge.
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned so far. Marketers have big ambitions for their landing pages, and they’re looking to do even more with them in 2020. We also saw that the best-performing landing pages routinely hit double-digit conversion rates. (Yowza.)
So, what’s holding the rest of ’em back? We wanted to know where our respondents saw room to improve their landing pages, and here’s what they told us:
It wasn’t deliberate, but it seems to me that the answers here fall into four broad categories:
First, there are issues with optimization. Marketers feel they don’t have time to optimize their pages using A/B testing. Sometimes they may not have the data or expertise to make meaningful choices when it comes to improving their conversion rates.
Second, matching the right page to the right audience can be tricky. Fixing it can involve traffic optimizations further up the funnel. But how do you also make sure that each visitor hits the landing page that’s right for them?
Third, whether it’s a matter of talent or time, sometimes marketers don’t feel like the copy and design on their pages are effective. (Testing could help, yes. But see #1 on this list.) For small businesses, marketers may have to play too many roles. And they may not have access to learning material that helps them improve.
And fourth are technical hurdles, like slow loading times or ensuring pages look perfect on different devices. (These made up the “Other” category above.) In this case, marketers have risen to the challenge of building lighter, more mobile-friendly experiences.
Today’s marketers have a lot on their plate—you could say they’re young, scrappy, and hungry—but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking for easy ways to step up their game.
How’d we get these numbers? We fielded the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Survey between December 2019 and February 2020. To ensure a healthy sample size, we surveyed 439 people. After a few qualifying questions, we paired it down 400 respondents who identified as marketers.
How can marketers overcome these challenges?
When it comes to getting the most conversions from your landing pages, we’ve been talking a lot about a shift in mindset we’re calling Conversion Intelligence. Again and again, we’ve seen evidence that better performance isn’t an accident. It’s the result of continuously fine-tuning each element of your campaigns.
But when marketers often do this optimization work on their own, they quickly run up against limits—of time and money, of expertise, of insight. By pairing your expertise with Artificial Intelligence, you can overcome these limits. You can create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible.
Our teams are working to share opportunities you couldn’t spot without the processing power of a machine. For now, you can check out the Conversion Benchmark Report. Starting with the benchmarks, dig into your industry. Use the machine-derived insights about reading ease, word count, and sentiment to create higher-converting pages.
Better yet, build a low-commitment (as in, quick and easy) variant or two based on the insights in the CBR, then flip on Smart Traffic and see how they perform. This feature uses machine learning to automatically match each and every visitor to the landing page most likely to convert. There’s no need to babysit it or declare a champion variant, and it never stops learning.
Using Smart Traffic is a quick win, especially if you don’t have the time or traffic for the traditional A/B testing. It needs just a little bit of attention to get it up and running on your most important pages. All you need to do is build a few variants, and turn it on. We see an average lift in conversions of 20% for customers who use it, so it’s very much worth the small effort.
Finding a New Normal
The Conversion Benchmark Report Survey was a bit of informal market research before starting on an intimidating project. But your responses also helped us enrich the quantitative data (generated with the help of AI) with some good old-fashioned human intuition.
It continues to be a challenging year, and we’ll run a follow-up survey to see how things have changed for you in 2021. But, for now, I’m curious: how have your plans changed? Have you adjusted? Have you pivoted? Swerved? Tempered your expectations? Adapted your existing campaigns to the new normal? Found new opportunities even?
Let me know in the comments.
from Marketing https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/marketers-behind-the-scenes-for-2020/ via http://www.rssmix.com/
0 notes
Text
Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020
As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.
We wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?
Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true.
Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. I thought I’d share some of the results with you today.
Takeaway #1: The most popular digital marketing strategy is a diverse one.
When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business.
No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:
The “Other” category also yields some varied answers, from paper mailers to podcasts to push notifications.
In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)
These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)
Which brings us to another question…
How often are marketers including landing pages as part of their campaigns in 2020?
Very often, it turns out.
36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.
We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.
New to landing pages? One reason they appeal to so many marketers is that they help you squeeze more conversions out of your existing ad budget. If we’ve piqued your interest, take a look at our guide to creating your first Unbounce landing page to learn more about how you can get started.
Takeaway #2: Marketers are doing a whole lot with their landing pages.
So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often.
When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:
Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.
This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.
For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow. As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.
Takeaway #3: When it comes to reaching their conversion potential, marketers are an ambitious bunch.
In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving.
As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:
Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)
But here’s where you told us you’d like to be:
Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!
Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.
So…
How do landing pages in your industry actually perform?
Drumroll, please…
According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).
That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.
And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)
This graph from the Conversion Benchmark Report shows the median (rather than average) conversion rates for four subcategories in the home improvement industry.
These are just a few generalities. In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.
Why’d we create the report? More than just benchmarks, the data-derived insights from the Conversion Benchmark Report will help you pair your savvy with AI to create the highest-converting campaigns of your career. It’s part of the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence mission to bring marketers new ways to optimize and level up their skills.
Takeaway #4: Delivering the right landing page for the right audience remains a challenge.
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned so far. Marketers have big ambitions for their landing pages, and they’re looking to do even more with them in 2020. We also saw that the best-performing landing pages routinely hit double-digit conversion rates. (Yowza.)
So, what’s holding the rest of ’em back? We wanted to know where our respondents saw room to improve their landing pages, and here’s what they told us:
It wasn’t deliberate, but it seems to me that the answers here fall into four broad categories:
First, there are issues with optimization. Marketers feel they don’t have time to optimize their pages using A/B testing. Sometimes they may not have the data or expertise to make meaningful choices when it comes to improving their conversion rates.
Second, matching the right page to the right audience can be tricky. Fixing it can involve traffic optimizations further up the funnel. But how do you also make sure that each visitor hits the landing page that’s right for them?
Third, whether it’s a matter of talent or time, sometimes marketers don’t feel like the copy and design on their pages are effective. (Testing could help, yes. But see #1 on this list.) For small businesses, marketers may have to play too many roles. And they may not have access to learning material that helps them improve.
And fourth are technical hurdles, like slow loading times or ensuring pages look perfect on different devices. (These made up the “Other” category above.) In this case, marketers have risen to the challenge of building lighter, more mobile-friendly experiences.
Today’s marketers have a lot on their plate—you could say they’re young, scrappy, and hungry—but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking for easy ways to step up their game.
How’d we get these numbers? We fielded the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Survey between December 2019 and February 2020. To ensure a healthy sample size, we surveyed 439 people. After a few qualifying questions, we paired it down 400 respondents who identified as marketers.
How can marketers overcome these challenges?
When it comes to getting the most conversions from your landing pages, we’ve been talking a lot about a shift in mindset we’re calling Conversion Intelligence. Again and again, we’ve seen evidence that better performance isn’t an accident. It’s the result of continuously fine-tuning each element of your campaigns.
But when marketers often do this optimization work on their own, they quickly run up against limits—of time and money, of expertise, of insight. By pairing your expertise with Artificial Intelligence, you can overcome these limits. You can create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible.
Our teams are working to share opportunities you couldn’t spot without the processing power of a machine. For now, you can check out the Conversion Benchmark Report. Starting with the benchmarks, dig into your industry. Use the machine-derived insights about reading ease, word count, and sentiment to create higher-converting pages.
Better yet, build a low-commitment (as in, quick and easy) variant or two based on the insights in the CBR, then flip on Smart Traffic and see how they perform. This feature uses machine learning to automatically match each and every visitor to the landing page most likely to convert. There’s no need to babysit it or declare a champion variant, and it never stops learning.
Using Smart Traffic is a quick win, especially if you don’t have the time or traffic for the traditional A/B testing. It needs just a little bit of attention to get it up and running on your most important pages. All you need to do is build a few variants, and turn it on. We see an average lift in conversions of 20% for customers who use it, so it’s very much worth the small effort.
Finding a New Normal
The Conversion Benchmark Report Survey was a bit of informal market research before starting on an intimidating project. But your responses also helped us enrich the quantitative data (generated with the help of AI) with some good old-fashioned human intuition.
It continues to be a challenging year, and we’ll run a follow-up survey to see how things have changed for you in 2021. But, for now, I’m curious: how have your plans changed? Have you adjusted? Have you pivoted? Swerved? Tempered your expectations? Adapted your existing campaigns to the new normal? Found new opportunities even?
Let me know in the comments.
Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020 published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/
0 notes
Text
Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020
As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.
We wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?
Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true.
Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. I thought I’d share some of the results with you today.
Takeaway #1: The most popular digital marketing strategy is a diverse one.
When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business.
No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:
The “Other” category also yields some varied answers, from paper mailers to podcasts to push notifications.
In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)
These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)
Which brings us to another question…
How often are marketers including landing pages as part of their campaigns in 2020?
Very often, it turns out.
36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.
We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.
New to landing pages? One reason they appeal to so many marketers is that they help you squeeze more conversions out of your existing ad budget. If we’ve piqued your interest, take a look at our guide to creating your first Unbounce landing page to learn more about how you can get started.
Takeaway #2: Marketers are doing a whole lot with their landing pages.
So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often.
When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:
Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.
This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.
For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow. As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.
Takeaway #3: When it comes to reaching their conversion potential, marketers are an ambitious bunch.
In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving.
As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:
Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)
But here’s where you told us you’d like to be:
Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!
Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.
So…
How do landing pages in your industry actually perform?
Drumroll, please…
According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).
That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.
And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)
This graph from the Conversion Benchmark Report shows the median (rather than average) conversion rates for four subcategories in the home improvement industry.
These are just a few generalities. In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.
Why’d we create the report? More than just benchmarks, the data-derived insights from the Conversion Benchmark Report will help you pair your savvy with AI to create the highest-converting campaigns of your career. It’s part of the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence mission to bring marketers new ways to optimize and level up their skills.
Takeaway #4: Delivering the right landing page for the right audience remains a challenge.
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned so far. Marketers have big ambitions for their landing pages, and they’re looking to do even more with them in 2020. We also saw that the best-performing landing pages routinely hit double-digit conversion rates. (Yowza.)
So, what’s holding the rest of ’em back? We wanted to know where our respondents saw room to improve their landing pages, and here’s what they told us:
It wasn’t deliberate, but it seems to me that the answers here fall into four broad categories:
First, there are issues with optimization. Marketers feel they don’t have time to optimize their pages using A/B testing. Sometimes they may not have the data or expertise to make meaningful choices when it comes to improving their conversion rates.
Second, matching the right page to the right audience can be tricky. Fixing it can involve traffic optimizations further up the funnel. But how do you also make sure that each visitor hits the landing page that’s right for them?
Third, whether it’s a matter of talent or time, sometimes marketers don’t feel like the copy and design on their pages are effective. (Testing could help, yes. But see #1 on this list.) For small businesses, marketers may have to play too many roles. And they may not have access to learning material that helps them improve.
And fourth are technical hurdles, like slow loading times or ensuring pages look perfect on different devices. (These made up the “Other” category above.) In this case, marketers have risen to the challenge of building lighter, more mobile-friendly experiences.
Today’s marketers have a lot on their plate—you could say they’re young, scrappy, and hungry—but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking for easy ways to step up their game.
How’d we get these numbers? We fielded the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Survey between December 2019 and February 2020. To ensure a healthy sample size, we surveyed 439 people. After a few qualifying questions, we paired it down 400 respondents who identified as marketers.
How can marketers overcome these challenges?
When it comes to getting the most conversions from your landing pages, we’ve been talking a lot about a shift in mindset we’re calling Conversion Intelligence. Again and again, we’ve seen evidence that better performance isn’t an accident. It’s the result of continuously fine-tuning each element of your campaigns.
But when marketers often do this optimization work on their own, they quickly run up against limits—of time and money, of expertise, of insight. By pairing your expertise with Artificial Intelligence, you can overcome these limits. You can create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible.
Our teams are working to share opportunities you couldn’t spot without the processing power of a machine. For now, you can check out the Conversion Benchmark Report. Starting with the benchmarks, dig into your industry. Use the machine-derived insights about reading ease, word count, and sentiment to create higher-converting pages.
Better yet, build a low-commitment (as in, quick and easy) variant or two based on the insights in the CBR, then flip on Smart Traffic and see how they perform. This feature uses machine learning to automatically match each and every visitor to the landing page most likely to convert. There’s no need to babysit it or declare a champion variant, and it never stops learning.
Using Smart Traffic is a quick win, especially if you don’t have the time or traffic for the traditional A/B testing. It needs just a little bit of attention to get it up and running on your most important pages. All you need to do is build a few variants, and turn it on. We see an average lift in conversions of 20% for customers who use it, so it’s very much worth the small effort.
Finding a New Normal
The Conversion Benchmark Report Survey was a bit of informal market research before starting on an intimidating project. But your responses also helped us enrich the quantitative data (generated with the help of AI) with some good old-fashioned human intuition.
It continues to be a challenging year, and we’ll run a follow-up survey to see how things have changed for you in 2021. But, for now, I’m curious: how have your plans changed? Have you adjusted? Have you pivoted? Swerved? Tempered your expectations? Adapted your existing campaigns to the new normal? Found new opportunities even?
Let me know in the comments.
from Digital https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/marketers-behind-the-scenes-for-2020/ via http://www.rssmix.com/
0 notes
Text
Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020
As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.
We wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?
Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true.
Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. I thought I’d share some of the results with you today.
Takeaway #1: The most popular digital marketing strategy is a diverse one.
When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business.
No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:
The “Other” category also yields some varied answers, from paper mailers to podcasts to push notifications.
In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)
These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)
Which brings us to another question…
How often are marketers including landing pages as part of their campaigns in 2020?
Very often, it turns out.
36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.
We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.
New to landing pages? One reason they appeal to so many marketers is that they help you squeeze more conversions out of your existing ad budget. If we’ve piqued your interest, take a look at our guide to creating your first Unbounce landing page to learn more about how you can get started.
Takeaway #2: Marketers are doing a whole lot with their landing pages.
So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often.
When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:
Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.
This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.
For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow. As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.
Takeaway #3: When it comes to reaching their conversion potential, marketers are an ambitious bunch.
In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving.
As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:
Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)
But here’s where you told us you’d like to be:
Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!
Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.
So…
How do landing pages in your industry actually perform?
Drumroll, please…
According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).
That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.
And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)
This graph from the Conversion Benchmark Report shows the median (rather than average) conversion rates for four subcategories in the home improvement industry.
These are just a few generalities. In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.
Why’d we create the report? More than just benchmarks, the data-derived insights from the Conversion Benchmark Report will help you pair your savvy with AI to create the highest-converting campaigns of your career. It’s part of the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence mission to bring marketers new ways to optimize and level up their skills.
Takeaway #4: Delivering the right landing page for the right audience remains a challenge.
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned so far. Marketers have big ambitions for their landing pages, and they’re looking to do even more with them in 2020. We also saw that the best-performing landing pages routinely hit double-digit conversion rates. (Yowza.)
So, what’s holding the rest of ’em back? We wanted to know where our respondents saw room to improve their landing pages, and here’s what they told us:
It wasn’t deliberate, but it seems to me that the answers here fall into four broad categories:
First, there are issues with optimization. Marketers feel they don’t have time to optimize their pages using A/B testing. Sometimes they may not have the data or expertise to make meaningful choices when it comes to improving their conversion rates.
Second, matching the right page to the right audience can be tricky. Fixing it can involve traffic optimizations further up the funnel. But how do you also make sure that each visitor hits the landing page that’s right for them?
Third, whether it’s a matter of talent or time, sometimes marketers don’t feel like the copy and design on their pages are effective. (Testing could help, yes. But see #1 on this list.) For small businesses, marketers may have to play too many roles. And they may not have access to learning material that helps them improve.
And fourth are technical hurdles, like slow loading times or ensuring pages look perfect on different devices. (These made up the “Other” category above.) In this case, marketers have risen to the challenge of building lighter, more mobile-friendly experiences.
Today’s marketers have a lot on their plate—you could say they’re young, scrappy, and hungry—but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking for easy ways to step up their game.
How’d we get these numbers? We fielded the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Survey between December 2019 and February 2020. To ensure a healthy sample size, we surveyed 439 people. After a few qualifying questions, we paired it down 400 respondents who identified as marketers.
How can marketers overcome these challenges?
When it comes to getting the most conversions from your landing pages, we’ve been talking a lot about a shift in mindset we’re calling Conversion Intelligence. Again and again, we’ve seen evidence that better performance isn’t an accident. It’s the result of continuously fine-tuning each element of your campaigns.
But when marketers often do this optimization work on their own, they quickly run up against limits—of time and money, of expertise, of insight. By pairing your expertise with Artificial Intelligence, you can overcome these limits. You can create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible.
Our teams are working to share opportunities you couldn’t spot without the processing power of a machine. For now, you can check out the Conversion Benchmark Report. Starting with the benchmarks, dig into your industry. Use the machine-derived insights about reading ease, word count, and sentiment to create higher-converting pages.
Better yet, build a low-commitment (as in, quick and easy) variant or two based on the insights in the CBR, then flip on Smart Traffic and see how they perform. This feature uses machine learning to automatically match each and every visitor to the landing page most likely to convert. There’s no need to babysit it or declare a champion variant, and it never stops learning.
Using Smart Traffic is a quick win, especially if you don’t have the time or traffic for the traditional A/B testing. It needs just a little bit of attention to get it up and running on your most important pages. All you need to do is build a few variants, and turn it on. We see an average lift in conversions of 20% for customers who use it, so it’s very much worth the small effort.
Finding a New Normal
The Conversion Benchmark Report Survey was a bit of informal market research before starting on an intimidating project. But your responses also helped us enrich the quantitative data (generated with the help of AI) with some good old-fashioned human intuition.
It continues to be a challenging year, and we’ll run a follow-up survey to see how things have changed for you in 2021. But, for now, I’m curious: how have your plans changed? Have you adjusted? Have you pivoted? Swerved? Tempered your expectations? Adapted your existing campaigns to the new normal? Found new opportunities even?
Let me know in the comments.
from Marketing https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/marketers-behind-the-scenes-for-2020/ via http://www.rssmix.com/
0 notes
Text
Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020
As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.
We wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?
Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true.
Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. I thought I’d share some of the results with you today.
Takeaway #1: The most popular digital marketing strategy is a diverse one.
When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business.
No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:
The “Other” category also yields some varied answers, from paper mailers to podcasts to push notifications.
In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)
These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)
Which brings us to another question…
How often are marketers including landing pages as part of their campaigns in 2020?
Very often, it turns out.
36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.
We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.
New to landing pages? One reason they appeal to so many marketers is that they help you squeeze more conversions out of your existing ad budget. If we’ve piqued your interest, take a look at our guide to creating your first Unbounce landing page to learn more about how you can get started.
Takeaway #2: Marketers are doing a whole lot with their landing pages.
So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often.
When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:
Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.
This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.
For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow. As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.
Takeaway #3: When it comes to reaching their conversion potential, marketers are an ambitious bunch.
In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving.
As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:
Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)
But here’s where you told us you’d like to be:
Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!
Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.
So…
How do landing pages in your industry actually perform?
Drumroll, please…
According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).
That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.
And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)
This graph from the Conversion Benchmark Report shows the median (rather than average) conversion rates for four subcategories in the home improvement industry.
These are just a few generalities. In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.
Why’d we create the report? More than just benchmarks, the data-derived insights from the Conversion Benchmark Report will help you pair your savvy with AI to create the highest-converting campaigns of your career. It’s part of the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence mission to bring marketers new ways to optimize and level up their skills.
Takeaway #4: Delivering the right landing page for the right audience remains a challenge.
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned so far. Marketers have big ambitions for their landing pages, and they’re looking to do even more with them in 2020. We also saw that the best-performing landing pages routinely hit double-digit conversion rates. (Yowza.)
So, what’s holding the rest of ’em back? We wanted to know where our respondents saw room to improve their landing pages, and here’s what they told us:
It wasn’t deliberate, but it seems to me that the answers here fall into four broad categories:
First, there are issues with optimization. Marketers feel they don’t have time to optimize their pages using A/B testing. Sometimes they may not have the data or expertise to make meaningful choices when it comes to improving their conversion rates.
Second, matching the right page to the right audience can be tricky. Fixing it can involve traffic optimizations further up the funnel. But how do you also make sure that each visitor hits the landing page that’s right for them?
Third, whether it’s a matter of talent or time, sometimes marketers don’t feel like the copy and design on their pages are effective. (Testing could help, yes. But see #1 on this list.) For small businesses, marketers may have to play too many roles. And they may not have access to learning material that helps them improve.
And fourth are technical hurdles, like slow loading times or ensuring pages look perfect on different devices. (These made up the “Other” category above.) In this case, marketers have risen to the challenge of building lighter, more mobile-friendly experiences.
Today’s marketers have a lot on their plate—you could say they’re young, scrappy, and hungry—but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking for easy ways to step up their game.
How’d we get these numbers? We fielded the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Survey between December 2019 and February 2020. To ensure a healthy sample size, we surveyed 439 people. After a few qualifying questions, we paired it down 400 respondents who identified as marketers.
How can marketers overcome these challenges?
When it comes to getting the most conversions from your landing pages, we’ve been talking a lot about a shift in mindset we’re calling Conversion Intelligence. Again and again, we’ve seen evidence that better performance isn’t an accident. It’s the result of continuously fine-tuning each element of your campaigns.
But when marketers often do this optimization work on their own, they quickly run up against limits—of time and money, of expertise, of insight. By pairing your expertise with Artificial Intelligence, you can overcome these limits. You can create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible.
Our teams are working to share opportunities you couldn’t spot without the processing power of a machine. For now, you can check out the Conversion Benchmark Report. Starting with the benchmarks, dig into your industry. Use the machine-derived insights about reading ease, word count, and sentiment to create higher-converting pages.
Better yet, build a low-commitment (as in, quick and easy) variant or two based on the insights in the CBR, then flip on Smart Traffic and see how they perform. This feature uses machine learning to automatically match each and every visitor to the landing page most likely to convert. There’s no need to babysit it or declare a champion variant, and it never stops learning.
Using Smart Traffic is a quick win, especially if you don’t have the time or traffic for the traditional A/B testing. It needs just a little bit of attention to get it up and running on your most important pages. All you need to do is build a few variants, and turn it on. We see an average lift in conversions of 20% for customers who use it, so it’s very much worth the small effort.
Finding a New Normal
The Conversion Benchmark Report Survey was a bit of informal market research before starting on an intimidating project. But your responses also helped us enrich the quantitative data (generated with the help of AI) with some good old-fashioned human intuition.
It continues to be a challenging year, and we’ll run a follow-up survey to see how things have changed for you in 2021. But, for now, I’m curious: how have your plans changed? Have you adjusted? Have you pivoted? Swerved? Tempered your expectations? Adapted your existing campaigns to the new normal? Found new opportunities even?
Let me know in the comments.
from Marketing https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/marketers-behind-the-scenes-for-2020/ via http://www.rssmix.com/
0 notes
Text
Marketers and Landing Pages: Behind the Scenes for 2020
As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.
We wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?
Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true.
Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. I thought I’d share some of the results with you today.
Takeaway #1: The most popular digital marketing strategy is a diverse one.
When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business.
No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:
The “Other” category also yields some varied answers, from paper mailers to podcasts to push notifications.
In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)
These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)
Which brings us to another question…
How often are marketers including landing pages as part of their campaigns in 2020?
Very often, it turns out.
36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.
We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.
New to landing pages? One reason they appeal to so many marketers is that they help you squeeze more conversions out of your existing ad budget. If we’ve piqued your interest, take a look at our guide to creating your first Unbounce landing page to learn more about how you can get started.
Takeaway #2: Marketers are doing a whole lot with their landing pages.
So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often.
When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:
Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.
This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.
For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow. As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.
Takeaway #3: When it comes to reaching their conversion potential, marketers are an ambitious bunch.
In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving.
As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:
Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)
But here’s where you told us you’d like to be:
Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!
Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.
So…
How do landing pages in your industry actually perform?
Drumroll, please…
According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).
That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.
And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)
This graph from the Conversion Benchmark Report shows the median (rather than average) conversion rates for four subcategories in the home improvement industry.
These are just a few generalities. In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.
Why’d we create the report? More than just benchmarks, the data-derived insights from the Conversion Benchmark Report will help you pair your savvy with AI to create the highest-converting campaigns of your career. It’s part of the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence mission to bring marketers new ways to optimize and level up their skills.
Takeaway #4: Delivering the right landing page for the right audience remains a challenge.
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned so far. Marketers have big ambitions for their landing pages, and they’re looking to do even more with them in 2020. We also saw that the best-performing landing pages routinely hit double-digit conversion rates. (Yowza.)
So, what’s holding the rest of ’em back? We wanted to know where our respondents saw room to improve their landing pages, and here’s what they told us:
It wasn’t deliberate, but it seems to me that the answers here fall into four broad categories:
First, there are issues with optimization. Marketers feel they don’t have time to optimize their pages using A/B testing. Sometimes they may not have the data or expertise to make meaningful choices when it comes to improving their conversion rates.
Second, matching the right page to the right audience can be tricky. Fixing it can involve traffic optimizations further up the funnel. But how do you also make sure that each visitor hits the landing page that’s right for them?
Third, whether it’s a matter of talent or time, sometimes marketers don’t feel like the copy and design on their pages are effective. (Testing could help, yes. But see #1 on this list.) For small businesses, marketers may have to play too many roles. And they may not have access to learning material that helps them improve.
And fourth are technical hurdles, like slow loading times or ensuring pages look perfect on different devices. (These made up the “Other” category above.) In this case, marketers have risen to the challenge of building lighter, more mobile-friendly experiences.
Today’s marketers have a lot on their plate—you could say they’re young, scrappy, and hungry—but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking for easy ways to step up their game.
How’d we get these numbers? We fielded the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Survey between December 2019 and February 2020. To ensure a healthy sample size, we surveyed 439 people. After a few qualifying questions, we paired it down 400 respondents who identified as marketers.
How can marketers overcome these challenges?
When it comes to getting the most conversions from your landing pages, we’ve been talking a lot about a shift in mindset we’re calling Conversion Intelligence. Again and again, we’ve seen evidence that better performance isn’t an accident. It’s the result of continuously fine-tuning each element of your campaigns.
But when marketers often do this optimization work on their own, they quickly run up against limits—of time and money, of expertise, of insight. By pairing your expertise with Artificial Intelligence, you can overcome these limits. You can create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible.
Our teams are working to share opportunities you couldn’t spot without the processing power of a machine. For now, you can check out the Conversion Benchmark Report. Starting with the benchmarks, dig into your industry. Use the machine-derived insights about reading ease, word count, and sentiment to create higher-converting pages.
Better yet, build a low-commitment (as in, quick and easy) variant or two based on the insights in the CBR, then flip on Smart Traffic and see how they perform. This feature uses machine learning to automatically match each and every visitor to the landing page most likely to convert. There’s no need to babysit it or declare a champion variant, and it never stops learning.
Using Smart Traffic is a quick win, especially if you don’t have the time or traffic for the traditional A/B testing. It needs just a little bit of attention to get it up and running on your most important pages. All you need to do is build a few variants, and turn it on. We see an average lift in conversions of 20% for customers who use it, so it’s very much worth the small effort.
Finding a New Normal
The Conversion Benchmark Report Survey was a bit of informal market research before starting on an intimidating project. But your responses also helped us enrich the quantitative data (generated with the help of AI) with some good old-fashioned human intuition.
It continues to be a challenging year, and we’ll run a follow-up survey to see how things have changed for you in 2021. But, for now, I’m curious: how have your plans changed? Have you adjusted? Have you pivoted? Swerved? Tempered your expectations? Adapted your existing campaigns to the new normal? Found new opportunities even?
Let me know in the comments.
https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/marketers-behind-the-scenes-for-2020/
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my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems
My senior manager recently left her husband for another man. This new relationship is very unstable in that they split up on an almost weekly basis. I’ve known my manager for over 20 years, but she has only recently come to work in our team. When she and the new man split up, it is always his decision and she takes it really badly and it severely affects things at work. She will tell everyone about her problems and regularly posts about it on social media. She has called me at home in a state and I’ve spent hours with her trying to console her. But now I’m beginning to feel smothered by her, she won’t leave me alone outside of work, and me and my colleagues are literally carrying her at work and we get no thanks from her for it. I’m at the end of my tether.
Stop answering her calls outside of work. Or if you do answer and she wants to talk about her relationship problems, explain you’re unable to talk (you’re walking into a movie theater / just met a friend for dinner / entertaining guests / running out the door to meet your sister) and will see her the next day at work.
At work, if she tries to lay relationship talk on you, say this: “I know you’re going through a tough time, but since you’re my boss, I don’t feel right being a sounding board for this anymore. I’m sorry I can’t help. I hope you have people outside of work you can talk with.” And then if she continues to try it after that: “Sorry, I’ve got to finish up the X project — I hope things get better for you!” (Accompany that with appropriate body language like turning back to your computer and continuing to work.) And if it still continues: “Jane, I’m so sorry you’re having a tough time, but I’m not comfortable being your sounding board at work. Now that you’re my boss, I feel strongly that we need to have different boundaries in place. I know I didn’t say that earlier, but I’ve realized that I should have. I hope you understand.” And encourage your coworkers to set boundaries with her too.
Regarding carrying her at work — one option is simply to stop. By covering her work for her, you’re enabling her in not doing it herself. Step back from that and see if she steps up (and if she doesn’t, let her deal with the consequences of that).
2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch
I’m coming up to my first Christmas at my current company, and recently found out about their end-of-year tradition: Close early on the final Friday, head into the central business district’s premier restaurant precinct, and enjoy a long (and at 1-2 hours, presumably multi-course) Christmas luncheon.
Here’s the problem: several years ago I was struck down by an unidentified post-viral gastric condition. While the symptoms eventually stopped, six months of near-starvation had a lasting effect: I now eat like the proverbial bird — a SMALL bird. Less than a child, probably. An entirely adequate lunch for me is half a sandwich and two-thirds of a muesli bar … if I’m on my own. I tend to eat even less in company due to self-consciousness nobbling my appetite. A slap-up meal of the type I’m expected to attend is impossible.
I really do NOT want to broadcast my private (and unhelpfully vague) medical history to the entire office, but I’m not sure what else to do. It’s a very small company — no crowd to hide amongst — so if I go, my “abnormal” eating patterns will be blatantly apparent to everyone. I’m afraid that the suspicion of anorexia or another eating disorder will cross at least one person’s mind — a suspicion that’ll be hard to deny without sounding like I’m, well, in denial. (Can’t claim dietary restrictions as I’ve discreetly picked my way though several office bring-a-plates without demur.)
If I can manage not to go, I’ll feel obliged to offer some kind of reason for skipping it … but since I’ve been given ample notice to avoid scheduling clashes, have no family to serve as an excuse, and am known not to have travel plans, I can’t think of one. Either way (go, and nibble at half a salad; or don’t go at all), I’d be concerned about the etiquette implications of seeming to spurn the company’s hospitality. Possibly I’m overthinking this, but I’m new-ish to the workforce and feeling rather lost. What’s the best way out of this dilemma?
You are indeed over-thinking it! Go, eat what you want, and push the rest of your food around on your plate (a time-honored tradition to disguise the fact that you’re not eating it). If anyone questions you about it, say that you ate a late lunch or are on medication that’s giving you a small appetite or “I didn’t have a big appetite tonight but didn’t want to miss this” or even just “I’m not sure! The food is great — just not super hungry right now.” No polite person will scrutinize what you eat after that kind of quick explanation. And definitely don’t worry about seeming to spurn your company’s hospitality — by showing up and being pleasant, you are meeting your obligations there. You aren’t obligated to clean your plate.
That said, assuming you’re going to be working with these people for a while and there will likely be other events, if you’re comfortable with it, it might make your life easier to just say, “I have a medical condition where I can’t eat a lot at one time.” You don’t need to disclose more than that (and if people ask questions, it’s fine to say, “Oh, it’s boring” or “I don’t like to talk about it at work”), but it might help you not have to worry about dealing with this each time.
3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications
I am a senior in college who is looking for a post graduate job, specifically in the museum development field. I am ambitious, go to a top school, and have a high GPA. I have had many prestigious museum internships over the past few years, which have all resulted in glowing recommendations from my supervisors. At the end of my most recent internship, I was told that I was perfectly qualified for a development assistant position.
My father often sends me job listings he finds online.. He recently sent me a bunch, most of which were for associates (the next level up). They all requested somewhere between 1-4 years of experience in various ranges (1-3, 2-4, etc). I have rarely seen assistant positions available. I suspect that in smaller museums, they may not even exist. My experience in development only constitutes a 3-month internship, but it was with one of the best museums in the country, I have extensive museum experience in other internship positions, and all the required tasks on the listing look quite easy for me. I would apply instantly, if not for the requested years of experience. (FYI, they do not request things like “demonstrated experience with ______.” I understand I cannot provide that.)
My father seems to think this is imposter syndrome, and keeps telling me that I’m smart and accomplished (which I do know I am) and should just go for it. But I am afraid I will look silly if I apply for a position for which I do not have requested experience. Additionally, I do not want to call upon my reference from last summer for such a position.
I’d apply for the ones asking for 1-3 years of experience (or 1-X) and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you don’t get interviews for any of them and then you’ll have more data about what’s feasible. But you’re not going to offend anyone or look ridiculous; people apply for jobs all the time that they’re not fully qualified for, and anyone who’s done more than a week of hiring work isn’t going to find that weird. And don’t worry about wasting your reference’s time, since if they call her, it’s because they’re seriously considering you. They’re not going to call a reference for someone who’s not even in the ballpark.
You should also talk to your reference and other people in your network who work in your field and ask them to weigh in on what level of position you should be targeting. You might find out you’re being too cautious (or you might find out that you’re not, which would also be good to know).
4. How do I motivate my employees?
I’m a 24-year-old manager of two employees who are both in their 30s. As you can imagine, my confidence is challenged pretty often on my ability to manage them, but I do know I’ve got the right skillset.
My biggest concern at the moment is motivating the team. I always feel uncomfortable throwing motivational ideas at them because I feel like they can see through my attempts to get them to work harder. How do I go about motivating them to feel ready to take on the day without feeling like an idiot?
Do they need motivating, or do you just think that’s something you’re supposed to be doing? Generally when people need motivating, it’s an indicator that something is wrong with the situation — either you have the wrong people for the job, or something in their environment is de-motivating them (like unreasonable expectations or terrible pay/benefits/management/culture). Generally, if you have the right people on your team and a decent environment, they’ll be motivated if you’re doing your job well — meaning that you’ve given them meaningful roles with real responsibility, ensured that they’re making progress toward meaningful goals, and recognized them for good work (both via feedback and via their compensation).
If there’s nothing in the environment that would de-motivate a reasonable person and you’ve laid out clear and reasonable expectations about how you want them to operate, and you’re having trouble getting them to hit the level of productivity and results you need (and you’ve told them that, to no avail), then I’d look at whether you have (a) reasonable expectations and (b) the right people for the work. But usually a manager shouldn’t need to get people ready to take on the day.
5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?
I am an office and HR coordinator for a small (under 20 employees) consulting firm. I’m the only HR person in the company and had no previous experience in HR when I started here 12 years ago as the first employee in a tiny start-up. Because we don’t have our own HR department, we have an HR consultant who we contact when we don’t know how to best (or legally) handle a situation. The company we use is one of the oldest and most respected HR companies in our town.
After 12 years here, I’m afraid I’m getting burned out. And the ownership is making a lot of decisions that are disappointing to me. So, I’m feeling like it might be time to look for another job. But, I would also like some “career counseling” to get an objective opinion on the employment situation that I’m currently in. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is and I’m just too emotionally involved since I’ve been here so long? Maybe I need better coping skills? Or maybe, I really do have a bad boss who isn’t going to change (I think I’ve read all of your posts on that topic).
I would really like to reach out to our HR consultant for career counseling and possibly career placement. But, I don’t know if this would put them in an awkward position or not. Do you think it’s appropriate for me to contact their career placement person, who I know and have worked with, on my own for my own job search?
If I go through with this, I’d like to use this company specifically because 1) they have a great reputation and do great work, and 2) they know my company and I think could give me an honest assessment.
Yeah, you’d be putting them in an awkward situation since they need to have some loyalty to your employer, who could be irked if it came out later that they’d helped you leave. That’s not necessarily reasonable (your employer doesn’t own you and you’re allowed to seek help in leaving), but it’s common enough that your HR company could understandably feel uncomfortable about it. And if nothing else, they might feel uncomfortable keeping a personnel-related secret from your company.
That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.
You may also like:
my boss is smothering me
I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends
I’m sick of being the office therapist
my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems
My senior manager recently left her husband for another man. This new relationship is very unstable in that they split up on an almost weekly basis. I’ve known my manager for over 20 years, but she has only recently come to work in our team. When she and the new man split up, it is always his decision and she takes it really badly and it severely affects things at work. She will tell everyone about her problems and regularly posts about it on social media. She has called me at home in a state and I’ve spent hours with her trying to console her. But now I’m beginning to feel smothered by her, she won’t leave me alone outside of work, and me and my colleagues are literally carrying her at work and we get no thanks from her for it. I’m at the end of my tether.
Stop answering her calls outside of work. Or if you do answer and she wants to talk about her relationship problems, explain you’re unable to talk (you’re walking into a movie theater / just met a friend for dinner / entertaining guests / running out the door to meet your sister) and will see her the next day at work.
At work, if she tries to lay relationship talk on you, say this: “I know you’re going through a tough time, but since you’re my boss, I don’t feel right being a sounding board for this anymore. I’m sorry I can’t help. I hope you have people outside of work you can talk with.” And then if she continues to try it after that: “Sorry, I’ve got to finish up the X project — I hope things get better for you!” (Accompany that with appropriate body language like turning back to your computer and continuing to work.) And if it still continues: “Jane, I’m so sorry you’re having a tough time, but I’m not comfortable being your sounding board at work. Now that you’re my boss, I feel strongly that we need to have different boundaries in place. I know I didn’t say that earlier, but I’ve realized that I should have. I hope you understand.” And encourage your coworkers to set boundaries with her too.
Regarding carrying her at work — one option is simply to stop. By covering her work for her, you’re enabling her in not doing it herself. Step back from that and see if she steps up (and if she doesn’t, let her deal with the consequences of that).
2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch
I’m coming up to my first Christmas at my current company, and recently found out about their end-of-year tradition: Close early on the final Friday, head into the central business district’s premier restaurant precinct, and enjoy a long (and at 1-2 hours, presumably multi-course) Christmas luncheon.
Here’s the problem: several years ago I was struck down by an unidentified post-viral gastric condition. While the symptoms eventually stopped, six months of near-starvation had a lasting effect: I now eat like the proverbial bird — a SMALL bird. Less than a child, probably. An entirely adequate lunch for me is half a sandwich and two-thirds of a muesli bar … if I’m on my own. I tend to eat even less in company due to self-consciousness nobbling my appetite. A slap-up meal of the type I’m expected to attend is impossible.
I really do NOT want to broadcast my private (and unhelpfully vague) medical history to the entire office, but I’m not sure what else to do. It’s a very small company — no crowd to hide amongst — so if I go, my “abnormal” eating patterns will be blatantly apparent to everyone. I’m afraid that the suspicion of anorexia or another eating disorder will cross at least one person’s mind — a suspicion that’ll be hard to deny without sounding like I’m, well, in denial. (Can’t claim dietary restrictions as I’ve discreetly picked my way though several office bring-a-plates without demur.)
If I can manage not to go, I’ll feel obliged to offer some kind of reason for skipping it … but since I’ve been given ample notice to avoid scheduling clashes, have no family to serve as an excuse, and am known not to have travel plans, I can’t think of one. Either way (go, and nibble at half a salad; or don’t go at all), I’d be concerned about the etiquette implications of seeming to spurn the company’s hospitality. Possibly I’m overthinking this, but I’m new-ish to the workforce and feeling rather lost. What’s the best way out of this dilemma?
You are indeed over-thinking it! Go, eat what you want, and push the rest of your food around on your plate (a time-honored tradition to disguise the fact that you’re not eating it). If anyone questions you about it, say that you ate a late lunch or are on medication that’s giving you a small appetite or “I didn’t have a big appetite tonight but didn’t want to miss this” or even just “I’m not sure! The food is great — just not super hungry right now.” No polite person will scrutinize what you eat after that kind of quick explanation. And definitely don’t worry about seeming to spurn your company’s hospitality — by showing up and being pleasant, you are meeting your obligations there. You aren’t obligated to clean your plate.
That said, assuming you’re going to be working with these people for a while and there will likely be other events, if you’re comfortable with it, it might make your life easier to just say, “I have a medical condition where I can’t eat a lot at one time.” You don’t need to disclose more than that (and if people ask questions, it’s fine to say, “Oh, it’s boring” or “I don’t like to talk about it at work”), but it might help you not have to worry about dealing with this each time.
3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications
I am a senior in college who is looking for a post graduate job, specifically in the museum development field. I am ambitious, go to a top school, and have a high GPA. I have had many prestigious museum internships over the past few years, which have all resulted in glowing recommendations from my supervisors. At the end of my most recent internship, I was told that I was perfectly qualified for a development assistant position.
My father often sends me job listings he finds online.. He recently sent me a bunch, most of which were for associates (the next level up). They all requested somewhere between 1-4 years of experience in various ranges (1-3, 2-4, etc). I have rarely seen assistant positions available. I suspect that in smaller museums, they may not even exist. My experience in development only constitutes a 3-month internship, but it was with one of the best museums in the country, I have extensive museum experience in other internship positions, and all the required tasks on the listing look quite easy for me. I would apply instantly, if not for the requested years of experience. (FYI, they do not request things like “demonstrated experience with ______.” I understand I cannot provide that.)
My father seems to think this is imposter syndrome, and keeps telling me that I’m smart and accomplished (which I do know I am) and should just go for it. But I am afraid I will look silly if I apply for a position for which I do not have requested experience. Additionally, I do not want to call upon my reference from last summer for such a position.
I’d apply for the ones asking for 1-3 years of experience (or 1-X) and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you don’t get interviews for any of them and then you’ll have more data about what’s feasible. But you’re not going to offend anyone or look ridiculous; people apply for jobs all the time that they’re not fully qualified for, and anyone who’s done more than a week of hiring work isn’t going to find that weird. And don’t worry about wasting your reference’s time, since if they call her, it’s because they’re seriously considering you. They’re not going to call a reference for someone who’s not even in the ballpark.
You should also talk to your reference and other people in your network who work in your field and ask them to weigh in on what level of position you should be targeting. You might find out you’re being too cautious (or you might find out that you’re not, which would also be good to know).
4. How do I motivate my employees?
I’m a 24-year-old manager of two employees who are both in their 30s. As you can imagine, my confidence is challenged pretty often on my ability to manage them, but I do know I’ve got the right skillset.
My biggest concern at the moment is motivating the team. I always feel uncomfortable throwing motivational ideas at them because I feel like they can see through my attempts to get them to work harder. How do I go about motivating them to feel ready to take on the day without feeling like an idiot?
Do they need motivating, or do you just think that’s something you’re supposed to be doing? Generally when people need motivating, it’s an indicator that something is wrong with the situation — either you have the wrong people for the job, or something in their environment is de-motivating them (like unreasonable expectations or terrible pay/benefits/management/culture). Generally, if you have the right people on your team and a decent environment, they’ll be motivated if you’re doing your job well — meaning that you’ve given them meaningful roles with real responsibility, ensured that they’re making progress toward meaningful goals, and recognized them for good work (both via feedback and via their compensation).
If there’s nothing in the environment that would de-motivate a reasonable person and you’ve laid out clear and reasonable expectations about how you want them to operate, and you’re having trouble getting them to hit the level of productivity and results you need (and you’ve told them that, to no avail), then I’d look at whether you have (a) reasonable expectations and (b) the right people for the work. But usually a manager shouldn’t need to get people ready to take on the day.
5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?
I am an office and HR coordinator for a small (under 20 employees) consulting firm. I’m the only HR person in the company and had no previous experience in HR when I started here 12 years ago as the first employee in a tiny start-up. Because we don’t have our own HR department, we have an HR consultant who we contact when we don’t know how to best (or legally) handle a situation. The company we use is one of the oldest and most respected HR companies in our town.
After 12 years here, I’m afraid I’m getting burned out. And the ownership is making a lot of decisions that are disappointing to me. So, I’m feeling like it might be time to look for another job. But, I would also like some “career counseling” to get an objective opinion on the employment situation that I’m currently in. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is and I’m just too emotionally involved since I’ve been here so long? Maybe I need better coping skills? Or maybe, I really do have a bad boss who isn’t going to change (I think I’ve read all of your posts on that topic).
I would really like to reach out to our HR consultant for career counseling and possibly career placement. But, I don’t know if this would put them in an awkward position or not. Do you think it’s appropriate for me to contact their career placement person, who I know and have worked with, on my own for my own job search?
If I go through with this, I’d like to use this company specifically because 1) they have a great reputation and do great work, and 2) they know my company and I think could give me an honest assessment.
Yeah, you’d be putting them in an awkward situation since they need to have some loyalty to your employer, who could be irked if it came out later that they’d helped you leave. That’s not necessarily reasonable (your employer doesn’t own you and you’re allowed to seek help in leaving), but it’s common enough that your HR company could understandably feel uncomfortable about it. And if nothing else, they might feel uncomfortable keeping a personnel-related secret from your company.
That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.
You may also like:
my boss is smothering me
I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends
I’m sick of being the office therapist
my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703 http://ift.tt/2BtfBQr via IFTTT
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my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems
My senior manager recently left her husband for another man. This new relationship is very unstable in that they split up on an almost weekly basis. I’ve known my manager for over 20 years, but she has only recently come to work in our team. When she and the new man split up, it is always his decision and she takes it really badly and it severely affects things at work. She will tell everyone about her problems and regularly posts about it on social media. She has called me at home in a state and I’ve spent hours with her trying to console her. But now I’m beginning to feel smothered by her, she won’t leave me alone outside of work, and me and my colleagues are literally carrying her at work and we get no thanks from her for it. I’m at the end of my tether.
Stop answering her calls outside of work. Or if you do answer and she wants to talk about her relationship problems, explain you’re unable to talk (you’re walking into a movie theater / just met a friend for dinner / entertaining guests / running out the door to meet your sister) and will see her the next day at work.
At work, if she tries to lay relationship talk on you, say this: “I know you’re going through a tough time, but since you’re my boss, I don’t feel right being a sounding board for this anymore. I’m sorry I can’t help. I hope you have people outside of work you can talk with.” And then if she continues to try it after that: “Sorry, I’ve got to finish up the X project — I hope things get better for you!” (Accompany that with appropriate body language like turning back to your computer and continuing to work.) And if it still continues: “Jane, I’m so sorry you’re having a tough time, but I’m not comfortable being your sounding board at work. Now that you’re my boss, I feel strongly that we need to have different boundaries in place. I know I didn’t say that earlier, but I’ve realized that I should have. I hope you understand.” And encourage your coworkers to set boundaries with her too.
Regarding carrying her at work — one option is simply to stop. By covering her work for her, you’re enabling her in not doing it herself. Step back from that and see if she steps up (and if she doesn’t, let her deal with the consequences of that).
2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch
I’m coming up to my first Christmas at my current company, and recently found out about their end-of-year tradition: Close early on the final Friday, head into the central business district’s premier restaurant precinct, and enjoy a long (and at 1-2 hours, presumably multi-course) Christmas luncheon.
Here’s the problem: several years ago I was struck down by an unidentified post-viral gastric condition. While the symptoms eventually stopped, six months of near-starvation had a lasting effect: I now eat like the proverbial bird — a SMALL bird. Less than a child, probably. An entirely adequate lunch for me is half a sandwich and two-thirds of a muesli bar … if I’m on my own. I tend to eat even less in company due to self-consciousness nobbling my appetite. A slap-up meal of the type I’m expected to attend is impossible.
I really do NOT want to broadcast my private (and unhelpfully vague) medical history to the entire office, but I’m not sure what else to do. It’s a very small company — no crowd to hide amongst — so if I go, my “abnormal” eating patterns will be blatantly apparent to everyone. I’m afraid that the suspicion of anorexia or another eating disorder will cross at least one person’s mind — a suspicion that’ll be hard to deny without sounding like I’m, well, in denial. (Can’t claim dietary restrictions as I’ve discreetly picked my way though several office bring-a-plates without demur.)
If I can manage not to go, I’ll feel obliged to offer some kind of reason for skipping it … but since I’ve been given ample notice to avoid scheduling clashes, have no family to serve as an excuse, and am known not to have travel plans, I can’t think of one. Either way (go, and nibble at half a salad; or don’t go at all), I’d be concerned about the etiquette implications of seeming to spurn the company’s hospitality. Possibly I’m overthinking this, but I’m new-ish to the workforce and feeling rather lost. What’s the best way out of this dilemma?
You are indeed over-thinking it! Go, eat what you want, and push the rest of your food around on your plate (a time-honored tradition to disguise the fact that you’re not eating it). If anyone questions you about it, say that you ate a late lunch or are on medication that’s giving you a small appetite or “I didn’t have a big appetite tonight but didn’t want to miss this” or even just “I’m not sure! The food is great — just not super hungry right now.” No polite person will scrutinize what you eat after that kind of quick explanation. And definitely don’t worry about seeming to spurn your company’s hospitality — by showing up and being pleasant, you are meeting your obligations there. You aren’t obligated to clean your plate.
That said, assuming you’re going to be working with these people for a while and there will likely be other events, if you’re comfortable with it, it might make your life easier to just say, “I have a medical condition where I can’t eat a lot at one time.” You don’t need to disclose more than that (and if people ask questions, it’s fine to say, “Oh, it’s boring” or “I don’t like to talk about it at work”), but it might help you not have to worry about dealing with this each time.
3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications
I am a senior in college who is looking for a post graduate job, specifically in the museum development field. I am ambitious, go to a top school, and have a high GPA. I have had many prestigious museum internships over the past few years, which have all resulted in glowing recommendations from my supervisors. At the end of my most recent internship, I was told that I was perfectly qualified for a development assistant position.
My father often sends me job listings he finds online.. He recently sent me a bunch, most of which were for associates (the next level up). They all requested somewhere between 1-4 years of experience in various ranges (1-3, 2-4, etc). I have rarely seen assistant positions available. I suspect that in smaller museums, they may not even exist. My experience in development only constitutes a 3-month internship, but it was with one of the best museums in the country, I have extensive museum experience in other internship positions, and all the required tasks on the listing look quite easy for me. I would apply instantly, if not for the requested years of experience. (FYI, they do not request things like “demonstrated experience with ______.” I understand I cannot provide that.)
My father seems to think this is imposter syndrome, and keeps telling me that I’m smart and accomplished (which I do know I am) and should just go for it. But I am afraid I will look silly if I apply for a position for which I do not have requested experience. Additionally, I do not want to call upon my reference from last summer for such a position.
I’d apply for the ones asking for 1-3 years of experience (or 1-X) and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you don’t get interviews for any of them and then you’ll have more data about what’s feasible. But you’re not going to offend anyone or look ridiculous; people apply for jobs all the time that they’re not fully qualified for, and anyone who’s done more than a week of hiring work isn’t going to find that weird. And don’t worry about wasting your reference’s time, since if they call her, it’s because they’re seriously considering you. They’re not going to call a reference for someone who’s not even in the ballpark.
You should also talk to your reference and other people in your network who work in your field and ask them to weigh in on what level of position you should be targeting. You might find out you’re being too cautious (or you might find out that you’re not, which would also be good to know).
4. How do I motivate my employees?
I’m a 24-year-old manager of two employees who are both in their 30s. As you can imagine, my confidence is challenged pretty often on my ability to manage them, but I do know I’ve got the right skillset.
My biggest concern at the moment is motivating the team. I always feel uncomfortable throwing motivational ideas at them because I feel like they can see through my attempts to get them to work harder. How do I go about motivating them to feel ready to take on the day without feeling like an idiot?
Do they need motivating, or do you just think that’s something you’re supposed to be doing? Generally when people need motivating, it’s an indicator that something is wrong with the situation — either you have the wrong people for the job, or something in their environment is de-motivating them (like unreasonable expectations or terrible pay/benefits/management/culture). Generally, if you have the right people on your team and a decent environment, they’ll be motivated if you’re doing your job well — meaning that you’ve given them meaningful roles with real responsibility, ensured that they’re making progress toward meaningful goals, and recognized them for good work (both via feedback and via their compensation).
If there’s nothing in the environment that would de-motivate a reasonable person and you’ve laid out clear and reasonable expectations about how you want them to operate, and you’re having trouble getting them to hit the level of productivity and results you need (and you’ve told them that, to no avail), then I’d look at whether you have (a) reasonable expectations and (b) the right people for the work. But usually a manager shouldn’t need to get people ready to take on the day.
5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?
I am an office and HR coordinator for a small (under 20 employees) consulting firm. I’m the only HR person in the company and had no previous experience in HR when I started here 12 years ago as the first employee in a tiny start-up. Because we don’t have our own HR department, we have an HR consultant who we contact when we don’t know how to best (or legally) handle a situation. The company we use is one of the oldest and most respected HR companies in our town.
After 12 years here, I’m afraid I’m getting burned out. And the ownership is making a lot of decisions that are disappointing to me. So, I’m feeling like it might be time to look for another job. But, I would also like some “career counseling” to get an objective opinion on the employment situation that I’m currently in. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is and I’m just too emotionally involved since I’ve been here so long? Maybe I need better coping skills? Or maybe, I really do have a bad boss who isn’t going to change (I think I’ve read all of your posts on that topic).
I would really like to reach out to our HR consultant for career counseling and possibly career placement. But, I don’t know if this would put them in an awkward position or not. Do you think it’s appropriate for me to contact their career placement person, who I know and have worked with, on my own for my own job search?
If I go through with this, I’d like to use this company specifically because 1) they have a great reputation and do great work, and 2) they know my company and I think could give me an honest assessment.
Yeah, you’d be putting them in an awkward situation since they need to have some loyalty to your employer, who could be irked if it came out later that they’d helped you leave. That’s not necessarily reasonable (your employer doesn’t own you and you’re allowed to seek help in leaving), but it’s common enough that your HR company could understandably feel uncomfortable about it. And if nothing else, they might feel uncomfortable keeping a personnel-related secret from your company.
That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.
You may also like:
my boss is smothering me
I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends
I’m sick of being the office therapist
my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703 http://ift.tt/2BtfBQr via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems
My senior manager recently left her husband for another man. This new relationship is very unstable in that they split up on an almost weekly basis. I’ve known my manager for over 20 years, but she has only recently come to work in our team. When she and the new man split up, it is always his decision and she takes it really badly and it severely affects things at work. She will tell everyone about her problems and regularly posts about it on social media. She has called me at home in a state and I’ve spent hours with her trying to console her. But now I’m beginning to feel smothered by her, she won’t leave me alone outside of work, and me and my colleagues are literally carrying her at work and we get no thanks from her for it. I’m at the end of my tether.
Stop answering her calls outside of work. Or if you do answer and she wants to talk about her relationship problems, explain you’re unable to talk (you’re walking into a movie theater / just met a friend for dinner / entertaining guests / running out the door to meet your sister) and will see her the next day at work.
At work, if she tries to lay relationship talk on you, say this: “I know you’re going through a tough time, but since you’re my boss, I don’t feel right being a sounding board for this anymore. I’m sorry I can’t help. I hope you have people outside of work you can talk with.” And then if she continues to try it after that: “Sorry, I’ve got to finish up the X project — I hope things get better for you!” (Accompany that with appropriate body language like turning back to your computer and continuing to work.) And if it still continues: “Jane, I’m so sorry you’re having a tough time, but I’m not comfortable being your sounding board at work. Now that you’re my boss, I feel strongly that we need to have different boundaries in place. I know I didn’t say that earlier, but I’ve realized that I should have. I hope you understand.” And encourage your coworkers to set boundaries with her too.
Regarding carrying her at work — one option is simply to stop. By covering her work for her, you’re enabling her in not doing it herself. Step back from that and see if she steps up (and if she doesn’t, let her deal with the consequences of that).
2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch
I’m coming up to my first Christmas at my current company, and recently found out about their end-of-year tradition: Close early on the final Friday, head into the central business district’s premier restaurant precinct, and enjoy a long (and at 1-2 hours, presumably multi-course) Christmas luncheon.
Here’s the problem: several years ago I was struck down by an unidentified post-viral gastric condition. While the symptoms eventually stopped, six months of near-starvation had a lasting effect: I now eat like the proverbial bird — a SMALL bird. Less than a child, probably. An entirely adequate lunch for me is half a sandwich and two-thirds of a muesli bar … if I’m on my own. I tend to eat even less in company due to self-consciousness nobbling my appetite. A slap-up meal of the type I’m expected to attend is impossible.
I really do NOT want to broadcast my private (and unhelpfully vague) medical history to the entire office, but I’m not sure what else to do. It’s a very small company — no crowd to hide amongst — so if I go, my “abnormal” eating patterns will be blatantly apparent to everyone. I’m afraid that the suspicion of anorexia or another eating disorder will cross at least one person’s mind — a suspicion that’ll be hard to deny without sounding like I’m, well, in denial. (Can’t claim dietary restrictions as I’ve discreetly picked my way though several office bring-a-plates without demur.)
If I can manage not to go, I’ll feel obliged to offer some kind of reason for skipping it … but since I’ve been given ample notice to avoid scheduling clashes, have no family to serve as an excuse, and am known not to have travel plans, I can’t think of one. Either way (go, and nibble at half a salad; or don’t go at all), I’d be concerned about the etiquette implications of seeming to spurn the company’s hospitality. Possibly I’m overthinking this, but I’m new-ish to the workforce and feeling rather lost. What’s the best way out of this dilemma?
You are indeed over-thinking it! Go, eat what you want, and push the rest of your food around on your plate (a time-honored tradition to disguise the fact that you’re not eating it). If anyone questions you about it, say that you ate a late lunch or are on medication that’s giving you a small appetite or “I didn’t have a big appetite tonight but didn’t want to miss this” or even just “I’m not sure! The food is great — just not super hungry right now.” No polite person will scrutinize what you eat after that kind of quick explanation. And definitely don’t worry about seeming to spurn your company’s hospitality — by showing up and being pleasant, you are meeting your obligations there. You aren’t obligated to clean your plate.
That said, assuming you’re going to be working with these people for a while and there will likely be other events, if you’re comfortable with it, it might make your life easier to just say, “I have a medical condition where I can’t eat a lot at one time.” You don’t need to disclose more than that (and if people ask questions, it’s fine to say, “Oh, it’s boring” or “I don’t like to talk about it at work”), but it might help you not have to worry about dealing with this each time.
3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications
I am a senior in college who is looking for a post graduate job, specifically in the museum development field. I am ambitious, go to a top school, and have a high GPA. I have had many prestigious museum internships over the past few years, which have all resulted in glowing recommendations from my supervisors. At the end of my most recent internship, I was told that I was perfectly qualified for a development assistant position.
My father often sends me job listings he finds online.. He recently sent me a bunch, most of which were for associates (the next level up). They all requested somewhere between 1-4 years of experience in various ranges (1-3, 2-4, etc). I have rarely seen assistant positions available. I suspect that in smaller museums, they may not even exist. My experience in development only constitutes a 3-month internship, but it was with one of the best museums in the country, I have extensive museum experience in other internship positions, and all the required tasks on the listing look quite easy for me. I would apply instantly, if not for the requested years of experience. (FYI, they do not request things like “demonstrated experience with ______.” I understand I cannot provide that.)
My father seems to think this is imposter syndrome, and keeps telling me that I’m smart and accomplished (which I do know I am) and should just go for it. But I am afraid I will look silly if I apply for a position for which I do not have requested experience. Additionally, I do not want to call upon my reference from last summer for such a position.
I’d apply for the ones asking for 1-3 years of experience (or 1-X) and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you don’t get interviews for any of them and then you’ll have more data about what’s feasible. But you’re not going to offend anyone or look ridiculous; people apply for jobs all the time that they’re not fully qualified for, and anyone who’s done more than a week of hiring work isn’t going to find that weird. And don’t worry about wasting your reference’s time, since if they call her, it’s because they’re seriously considering you. They’re not going to call a reference for someone who’s not even in the ballpark.
You should also talk to your reference and other people in your network who work in your field and ask them to weigh in on what level of position you should be targeting. You might find out you’re being too cautious (or you might find out that you’re not, which would also be good to know).
4. How do I motivate my employees?
I’m a 24-year-old manager of two employees who are both in their 30s. As you can imagine, my confidence is challenged pretty often on my ability to manage them, but I do know I’ve got the right skillset.
My biggest concern at the moment is motivating the team. I always feel uncomfortable throwing motivational ideas at them because I feel like they can see through my attempts to get them to work harder. How do I go about motivating them to feel ready to take on the day without feeling like an idiot?
Do they need motivating, or do you just think that’s something you’re supposed to be doing? Generally when people need motivating, it’s an indicator that something is wrong with the situation — either you have the wrong people for the job, or something in their environment is de-motivating them (like unreasonable expectations or terrible pay/benefits/management/culture). Generally, if you have the right people on your team and a decent environment, they’ll be motivated if you’re doing your job well — meaning that you’ve given them meaningful roles with real responsibility, ensured that they’re making progress toward meaningful goals, and recognized them for good work (both via feedback and via their compensation).
If there’s nothing in the environment that would de-motivate a reasonable person and you’ve laid out clear and reasonable expectations about how you want them to operate, and you’re having trouble getting them to hit the level of productivity and results you need (and you’ve told them that, to no avail), then I’d look at whether you have (a) reasonable expectations and (b) the right people for the work. But usually a manager shouldn’t need to get people ready to take on the day.
5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?
I am an office and HR coordinator for a small (under 20 employees) consulting firm. I’m the only HR person in the company and had no previous experience in HR when I started here 12 years ago as the first employee in a tiny start-up. Because we don’t have our own HR department, we have an HR consultant who we contact when we don’t know how to best (or legally) handle a situation. The company we use is one of the oldest and most respected HR companies in our town.
After 12 years here, I’m afraid I’m getting burned out. And the ownership is making a lot of decisions that are disappointing to me. So, I’m feeling like it might be time to look for another job. But, I would also like some “career counseling” to get an objective opinion on the employment situation that I’m currently in. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is and I’m just too emotionally involved since I’ve been here so long? Maybe I need better coping skills? Or maybe, I really do have a bad boss who isn’t going to change (I think I’ve read all of your posts on that topic).
I would really like to reach out to our HR consultant for career counseling and possibly career placement. But, I don’t know if this would put them in an awkward position or not. Do you think it’s appropriate for me to contact their career placement person, who I know and have worked with, on my own for my own job search?
If I go through with this, I’d like to use this company specifically because 1) they have a great reputation and do great work, and 2) they know my company and I think could give me an honest assessment.
Yeah, you’d be putting them in an awkward situation since they need to have some loyalty to your employer, who could be irked if it came out later that they’d helped you leave. That’s not necessarily reasonable (your employer doesn’t own you and you’re allowed to seek help in leaving), but it’s common enough that your HR company could understandably feel uncomfortable about it. And if nothing else, they might feel uncomfortable keeping a personnel-related secret from your company.
That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.
You may also like:
my boss is smothering me
I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends
I’m sick of being the office therapist
my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703 http://ift.tt/2BtfBQr via IFTTT
0 notes