This has probably been overstated, but I find that most companies are still not treating mobile properly. You should have a mobile site, dedicated mobile advertising, and track conversions and phone calls separately for mobile than for desktops. In just 2012, smart phone adoption increased 55% in the US; and that adoption trend is seen globally. If you don’t have a mobile friendly strategy, you will be left behind by your competition in 2013.

Understand your audience before you market to them. You need to feel empathy where they feel pain, feel a desire to help where they have a thirst for knowledge, feel intellectual curiosity when you visit the sources they read – in short, you need to be in their shoes. This won’t just help you create specific marketing campaigns; it will tell you where to market, what to say, how to say it, and even find that perfect product/market fit.

Success in 2013 will be all about improving your corporate metabolism and your marketing agility. Look for every opportunity (and the tools) to increase the speed to get things done in as close to real-time as possible.

Write really good content. Don’t focus on building links, or getting press or trying to game search engines. Instead focus all of your seo efforts on content marketing as that will produce a higher ROI in the long run then link building.

Even if you end up outsourcing conversion, it’s becoming increasingly important that you know the basics yourself. It’s astonishing how many marketers still don’t understand the fundamental concepts, like those we describe in our Split-testing 101 article.

As conversion optimization becomes more and more competitive, we need to find new ways to out-convert the competition. At the moment, companies that have an effective strategy across desktop, mobile and social are leading the way – and they’re building a massive advantage over other companies who are just focused on desktop conversions.

My top marketing tip for 2013 is to invest in working out attribution. Just over 1/2 of marketers (according to research by Adobe) use any form of attribution, and most of them use last-click. Though it’s challenging to work out the IT issues and to determine which approach to use, the result will be a better understanding of channel contribution to the bottom line (including offline, mobile and social touch-points), which will lead to better marketing decisions.