It's time to step up your marketing optimization game

I came across this research brief today: Tech Marketers Want to See ROI From Their Media Spend, the content of which I’m sure is not breaking news to frequent readers here.

Old news is new news:

Some highlights from the brief:

• The majority of digital spending is concentrated on branded content sites (41%)
• Spending on ad networks is on the rise and fast approaching spending on paid search
• Marketers are interested in ROI, audience composition, targeting, and reach
• Lead gen, custom content and targeting rank as three most important opportunities
• Marketers are investing in a variety of custom programs including collateral, webinars, videos and the creation of new websites

Time to step up your game:

Like I said, I’m sure none of this is breaking news for frequent readers here; however, it is a reminder to step up your game in 2011. For some time now many online marketers enjoyed a competitive advantage by running lackluster post-click marketing programs because no one else was doing it, or really understood how to do it. Therefore by just showing up with a few tested & optimized landing pages you won half the battle.  But that’s not going to be enough any more.

Last week I was at the Online Marketing Summit and I can tell you: there was a huge focus on marketing measurement and optimization. Everyone was talking about testing, conversion optimization, and landing pages. So how should you keep the competitive advantage now?

Do more.

Do more, more, more for less:

Create more content, more landing pages, more microsites, more lead gen forms, run more tests, generate more traffic.

And do it all with less spend by converting that traffic like crazy.

If your team hasn’t expanded or been given more budget this year, make sure you have a systematic process in place and a good tool set so you can get more done with the same resources. This year should be all about scaling your post-click marketing program up.

My suggestions for helping you do this:

• Work with templates to reduce the amount you spend on creative pieces and your time to launch new pages/microsites
• Use a codefree testing tool to reduce the time you spend waiting for IT to run your tests
• Measure only what matters to reduce the time you spend wading through useless data

Doing the above three things will ensure you’re managing your time well.

Instead of worry about getting pieces ready to launch and test, you should focus on creating quality content and providing value to visitors. Have a process and a tool in place to take care of the rest.

Create good stuff, get it in front of the right people, and convert those people with optimized pages.

Do it well, do it often and do a lot of it to keep your competitive advantage this year. 

Graphics are the enemy!

There’s no surer way to bog down the rapid landing experience innovation/iteration cycle than to loop through the design department for every test you want to run. It’s inefficient. And inefficiency is the sworn enemy of rapid conversion rate improvement.

Landing experiences must be two things…

…stunning and cheap. Stunning in that they must be credible, on message, and the best user experiences on the web. Cheap in that an entire original experience must be produced in less than seven hours and iteration should be possible within minutes. If you exceed seven hours, you’ve invested too much in something that must be considered disposable. If a landing experience isn’t disposable, you surely won’t be willing to test and eliminate it if it fails. Think about it: if you have high-volume traffic, your experience could easily fail out of a test in less time than it took to produce it.

Rapid = ROI

If rapid creation and iteration leads to massive ROI improvements, then you can’t let anything muck up the works. Ba bye graphics. Nothing against Photoshop and designers, but looping through them every time you need a new button or a headline is anything but agile.

Workaround for quality and quantity

We workaround the graphics problem by creating highly designed reusable, dynamic Flash templates. This lets us loop through our design team far less often than if we produced the same elements using Photoshop. (It also makes our experiences much more SEO friendly in that their text is crawlable.)

Our account managers and content publishers can make changes to links, buttons, headlines, copy, even images without going through the design team. Yet the experiences appear highly designed and super polished because the Flash templates govern everything.

Using Flash objects reduces our design resource load by at least 60%. This lets us create original, multi-page conversion paths in less than our magic seven-hour time budget. And it lets us iterate and challenge champions in rapid testing — duplicate an experience, make adjustments to dynamic text and imagery and launch a new challenger — within a few minutes.

Graphics are inflexible and resource intensive. They are the enemy of rapid ROI optimization. Lose ‘em, speed things up and crank up your conversion rates.

Examples

Here are some screenshots of recent dynamic Flash-object based landing pages. All text and imagery you see can be dynamically updated without looping through the design department.

All of the text (including the button labels) and the images may all be quickly edited for rapid testing. No designer required.All text may be changed without a design loop. Even the circle images are placed as squares (dynamically) and are masked by Flash. The images and all the text (including the text and buttons casting shadows over the lifestyle imagery) may be changed within minutes. No designers, no Flash developers. Rapid = ROI.This one’s super cool. The images in the Flash carousel on the right are easily swapped in and out for testing — no XML, no developer, no designer. Once we have the asset library, we can test and test to find the optimum.Everything here can be affected without design or development interference. All text, the background image, the form — everything. Even the tab content (see below).

UX Notes: We optimize the user experience by eliminating Flash builds (no time-sucking animations) and by standardizing on the Flash 9 player (March 2009: 98.8% penetration versus 74% for Flash 10). Users will NOT upgrade their Flash player for a landing page!

A picture is worth a thousand conversions

Our new ad appearing in next month’s Chief Marketer Magazine says more than I can say with words about the impact of strategic post-click marketing:

 

Post-Click Marketing Review - Week of March 27th

•  PPCHero recently conducted a survey that asked which second tier search engine (i.e., not Google, Yahoo, or MSN) has gotten the best results for marketers. Check out their results and consider spending on an engine other than the Big 3.
• A new study by IBM found that “ad agencies are years behind in catching up to digitally savvy consumers”. As digital continues to grow, now’s a great time to transform your traditional, old school house to an ROI-focused, post-click powerhouse. 
• In his weekly ClickZ search column, Kevin Lee explains the importance of the human touch in the heavily automated world of SEM. Same goes for post-click — you can’t automate strategy or great creative. 
• Finally, a new article in MediaPost asks “How Do You Know If it’s Time to Spend MORE?” The author notes some good points, but it’s important to remember that to gain market share and a competitive advantage, you don’t necessarily have to spend more. You have to spend smarter — and re-allocate budget to post-click.

Dangerous Weeds

The biggest challenge you face in maximizing your post-click marketing ROI might not be budget power, or even brain power.  It could be the weeds.

If you’re not careful, somewhere along the line between planning and launch, you’ll get caught up in the weeds – the weeds of executional details, over-thinking, or needless complication.

When you’re in the weeds, it’s very easy to lose sight of the over-arching reasons why you’re doing the campaign in the first place. You miss the start-to-finish flow from ad to landing experience to conversion.

I bring this up because yesterday I was giving a quick post-click consultation to a team from a potential client company. They called because they wanted to get some perspective on their landing page, and perhaps some tips on design and layout.

Instead of providing an overall impression of their landing page from an executional standpoint, I asked a question they weren’t expecting: how are people getting to this page? The answer was from various sources: search ads, emails and banner ads. So then I asked if the messages in all these media were the same. The answer was no.  So THEN I asked if everyone gets the same page, and the answer was yes.

Oh.

What difference does it make if the button is in the right place if the overall message doesn’t match what respondents were searching for?  What difference does it make if there are tabs on the landing page, if the copy on them doesn’t clearly communicate the offer benefits?

Buttons and tabs are weed issues. But it’s all too easy to get stuck in them and lose sight of what’s really important.

Ever notice how eagles and falcons hunt successfully? They do it from the air. That way, they’ve got the full perspective of their environment.  With a big picture they can clearly see where the targets are coming from, and where they’re going.

On the fly, these efficient hunters swoop down and efficiently pick up their prey. There’s no way they would be effective without that high-level view.

It’s the same for you. You’re a lot more effective identifying and snatching up conversions when you take the high-level view.  Don’t get tangled up in the weeds.