Branding + learning = future conversions and ROI

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking on the Advanced Landing Page Strategies panel at SMX West. I knew it was going to be a great session when the moderator, Gordon Hotchkiss, CEO of Enquiro and a past chairman of SEMPO, started by declaring that post-click marketing moves the needle for their search clients more than anything else.

It reminded me of when Tom Leung said that Google loves post-click marketing at last year’s SES San Jose conference.

That the search industry has gone from “post-wha?” to a hearty embrace of post-click marketing over the past year — elevating the conversation beyond landing pages and deep link tactics into a holistic strategy of handling respondents effectively in the second stage of the funnel — makes me very happy. Progress marches on!

For my section of the the talk, I began with the warning of conversion rate tactical myopia and then covered the capabilities of landing page management that an organization needs to build to have a living, breathing post-click marketing program.

Even though conversion rate is the primary business goal of investing in post-click marketing, it’s not the only one. Overall ROI is important too, because if it costs you $200 to win a $100 conversion — well, you probably don’t want to scale that up.

But branding and learning are the post-click goals that often get the least attention. Branding is making sure that your respondents have a great experience when they click on your ads — even if they don’t convert at that particular moment in time. And learning is what you take away from your post-click marketing experiments, regardless of whether they were successful or not. Even a bomb of a landing page can reveal useful insight for how you can do better in the future.

However, it can be difficult to get people to pay too much attention to branding and learning because of the deafening drumbeat for conversion rate, conversion rate, conversion rate.

So here’s the way to frame it: branding and learning are investments in future conversions and ROI.

A well-branded experience gives respondents a good impression of your company, so even if they don’t convert on a specific offer, you’ve planted a seed that can germinate in them returning on this or other campaigns with a positive image of doing business with you. It opens the door to second and third chances that poorly designed and executed landing pages can deny you.

And learning is about breaking free from the inefficient, endless fog of “throwing random things against the wall” — to instead methodically ratchet up your conversion rate over time. You don’t repeat the same mistakes twice, and your structured, hypothesis-driven approach to testing helps you discover the real levers in your market and audience segmentation.

Best of all, you don’t have to make a trade-off: your post-click marketing can — and should — pursue conversion rate, ROI, branding, and learning simultaneously. They’re mutually reinforcing objectives.

Comments

[Jeff Ogden]

Good post, Scott. Branding and learning are very important.

It is critical to the bottom line of your company that the customer experience is as ideal as it possibly can be. That requires testing and tweaking. And the customer forms his or her image of your company from that experience, hence it is your "brand."