MarketingSherpa Blog

I’m sure you’ve seen these blog posts before. They’re looking for a hook, so they throw a topical subject in the title to get you to click, and then share the deep marketing wisdom that you would naturally expect to learn from Charlie Sheen, The Bronx Zoo Cobra, and Justin Bieber.

I thought of this topic the other day because we actually did something I just knew we would never do on MarketingSherpa. We published those two proper nouns – Justin and Bieber – right next to each other.

In fairness, it was in an excellent email marketing case study about a very impressive trigger alert program, and Justin Bieber was only used as an example of search keywords this events company was targeting. But you better believe Senior Reporter Adam Sutton endured a relentless week of teasing for including the Biebs in his case study. There were the Photoshopped pictures. There were “Belieber” taunts.

Why? Because, and here is my indefensible blog post (with a hearty tip o’ the hat to Esquire magazine), marketers can’t learn anything from Justin Bieber. Or Lady Gaga. Or that kid who got his 15 minutes of fame for pretending to be in stuck in a weather balloon.

Think about it, what are 3 lessons from Charlie Sheen? 1. Be born to a famous dad. 2. Get a formulaic but highly rated sitcom. 3. Have an extremely weird but very public meltdown (using social media)

Does this really help your marketing campaigns? Get some ideas to generate more leads? Increase sales?

So, here’s the approach we take at MarketingSherpa. Perhaps the best people to learn marketing lessons from are…wait for it…actual marketers. That’s why we survey more than 10,000 marketers every year for our benchmark reports. That’s why we conduct more than 200 interviews every year for our free marketing newsletters. That’s why we invite dozens of marketers to present their case studies to their peers at our summits. And that’s why I’m writing this blog post today.

So, if I had to break down five marketing lessons I’ve learned from marketers, I would say…

1. Successful marketing comes from hard work, not “secrets” and “tricks”

Internet marketing is flat out hard work. The successful marketers I’ve seen go-to-market with a regimented marketing plan.

They understand what KPIs are key to their success – both the intermediate metrics that will help them make course corrections, as well as the key results that are critical to their business leaders.

They find ways to tear down artificial silos in their organization – between Sales and Marketing, between online marketing and offline marketing, between email marketing and social media marketing – to facilitate a cohesive funnel that drives customers to conversion.

They tame unwieldy, disjointed technology platforms to create tools that improve marketing campaigns and create clear, unified reports. They do this even though they don’t have a tech background. They do this even if it means having long conversations with IT about why Ubuntu is better than Windows.

But they don’t have “secrets to Internet marketing success.” And they don’t have “10 supercool tricks to boosting SEO.” They have war stories. And if you can get just a few minutes in their busy day to hear them, you just might learn something.

The battles are won in the trenches.

2. Your customers don’t care about your emails, your PPC ads, or even your TV campaign

They don’t even care about all that fun inbound stuff like your blog posts or YouTube videos. And they certainly don’t care about the latest features of your product, your mission statement, or your corporate structure.

They care about doing their jobs better. They care about having clean water for their kids. And they care about taking their wife out for a 12^th anniversary dinner that she’ll never forget.

Never confuse a feature with a benefit. And never confuse a marketing “benefit” with what really matters to your customers.

3. Successful marketers have losses

This is marketing, folks. You don’t have to be one of the “crazy ones,” but you do need to push the limit on what your company thinks is possible.

As Theodore Roosevelt said, “There is no effort without error or shortcoming.”

If you don’t have losses – a “negative lift” on a test, a failed product launch – you’re not pushing hard enough. And if you don’t have losses, you’re not really learning anything. You’re just guessing.

The great thing about digital marketing is that it has never been easier to learn about your customers. You’ve got real-time data you can analyze and an endless possibility of tests you can run. Test two headlines you simply can’t decide between, two offers, two entirely different approaches against each other in a real-world, real-time environment and let your customers tell you which one is better. Test new landing pages against your top performers.

Sure, it’s scary, you might lose. But if you do it right, you’ll definitely learn.

4. Strategy is better than skill

This is something that I’ve heard Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, say in almost every meeting I’ve had with him. Drill it into your team as well.

Marketers are all too used to having a goal placed in front of them – double leads, gain market share – and churning and burning and blasting and using every tool they can think of to hit that number. Just…one…more…email send…will do the trick.

Sometimes it helps to step back and look at the big picture. Is it worth scrapping and fighting for a tenth of a point of market share with your fiercest competitors? Are you inundating your lists with offers?

Take the time to step back from the marketing machine and determine what your value proposition truly is. Don’t dictate your value to your customers. Discover what they find valuable about your products and services. Why do they put their job on the line to hire your consultants? Why do they part with their precious cash to buy your products?

As with any job, you can work harder, or you can work smarter.

5. Be the customer advocate

As a marketer, you spend almost every waking moment making a proposition to the customer. That makes every customer your customer. So make sure your company comes through.

Stay in constant contact with customer service, product development, services, manufacturing, and sales to make sure you are truly serving the customer. What are customers complaining about? What are you doing right? How can you make their lives easier, better, smarter, more fun, more fulfilling? Are sales reps over promising? Does everyone understand the value proposition of your brands? Do you all speak with the same voice? Do you walk the walk and live the brand?

Hey, that’s no easy task. But if you’re looking for easy tasks, you’re in the wrong business. See point #1 above.

Your customer is empowered like never before in the history of commerce. Today, you must assume that every customer is a publisher as well. How would you react if you knew the editor of The Wall Street Journal was eating in your restaurant, trying on a suit in your store, or purchasing your software platform? There is no quicker way to sink your brand and your marketing campaign, and the huge amounts of time and money you have invested in them, than by ticking off the editor.

You know what you expect when you’re the customer. Under promise and over deliver.

And to over promise to you, my audience, my customer, I dug up a sixth lesson. But instead of telling you one more thing I’ve learned from you, I asked author and behavioral expert, Beverly Flaxington, what she’s learned from marketers. Beverly has built her career around understanding other people. Here’s what she had to say…

6. Provide your audience the context

In too many cases, a marketer develops information and materials based solely upon the data and information about a particular product or service. The marketing material reads like this: “We do this. This is what we do. This is how we do it.” It’s a great deal of data without a lot of context around why it is important to the targeted audience.

The missing component is the “So what?” What’s so important about how you do what you do? Why should someone care about it? What is it going to do for them and how will it do it? This goes deeper than the idea of selling benefits. It actually asks the marketer to create language that speaks TO an audience about their needs, and helps that audience to easily make a connection as to why what the marketer is proposing is good for them.

As you develop materials or write marketing copy, ask yourself the “So what?” question as you make statements and provide information. Think in terms of “This is good for our audience because…..” The process can be very eye-opening because instead of assuming that someone will get why what you’re saying is so important, you can more likely guarantee they will understand!

Thanks for reading today’s blog post. Stay tuned to the MarketingSherpa blog next week, where we’re going to talk about what marketing lessons you can learn from Michele Bachmann, New Mexico wildfires, and Greek debt.

Related Resources

Evidence-based Marketing: This blog post will not solve your most pressing marketing challenges…yet

Loyalty Marketing: How to get customers to stick around (and keep buying)

The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing

The Last Blog Post: Marketers must embrace change

In my last blog post, I talked about getting funding by framing a strategic lead generation initiative properly for the sponsoring executive. Let’s talk about the first step on the road to an improved lead generation capability –  configuration of a pilot.

While there is an infinite number of ways to develop a pilot, a well-designed pilot depends on:

• The current gaps in your lead generation machinery
• Perceptions of lead generation in the C-Suite,
• The risk appetite of the company
• And your own credibility.

These four guiding principles, however, can help you scope a pilot in a way that leads to long term-success:

1. Start where the economics are most forgiving.

There are two big economic factors to keep in mind when designing a lead generation pilot.

The first is the deal size (or annual recurring revenue or lifetime value). The smaller the deal size, the lower your lead costs must be. Getting to a low cost per sales-ready lead takes a great deal of efficiency and scale. So why target a market where you must be highly efficient to have success?

The second economic consideration is probability of purchase. Customers, for example, are typically more likely to buy something else from you than non-customers are. There may be vertical markets or other segments where your products or services have a better success rate. Responders are more likely to buy than non-resonders. The higher the probability of purchase, the higher your conversion is going to be and the lower, therefore, your average deal size can be.

Combining a high potential average order size with a high probability of purchase gives marketers the most room for mistakes and course correction.  So play it safe.

Action item: Start with the most probable segment where you can sell big ticket items so that you have lots of room to experiment and course-correct and then test and iterate your way to the margins of your market.

2. Keep it simple

Lead generation has gotten very complex. You are not going to be able to optimize everything at once. So don’t try. Instead, tackle things in stages and look for ways to narrow the scope: fewer sales people receiving leads, a single solution area and/or market segment, and so on.

Action item: Once you determine where the low-hanging fruit is, figure out how to narrow the scope of what you’re doing so that it manageable by clarifying the objective and using that objective to simplify the pilot.

3. Make the pilot long enough for course corrections

Too often, marketers do not give themselves the room to learn and improve. New teleprospecting reps, for example, need 30 to 60 days to get reasonably good at what they do, and that’s assuming you have the right playbook and training to give them.

You may need time to see what competitors are doing, analyze online traffic patterns, refine your service level agreement with Sales for the pilot, or any other of a number things. But most importantly, pilots should be experiments in optimization so give yourself long enough to:

• a) course correct
• b) sample properly
• c) gather sufficient results.

And the longer the buying cycle, the longer it will take to get more definitive feedback on the outcome of the leads. And the lower the traffic, the longer the test must continue to gain sufficiency to project the results with the necessary confidence level.

If possible, make the pilot last for an entire fiscal year with the understanding that you’ll come back to management sooner if possible with a plan for scaling the initiative. That way, you won’t have to go “dark” while management decides on the speed of scaling your lead generation initiative and you’ll have plenty of room for testing and optimizing and tracking results.

Action item: Develop a conservative timeline that shows key milestones at particular stages. Make part of the deliverables of a milestone or two the new knowledge the company will have about optimized lead generation processes.

4. Base the measurement of the pilot on what you can control .

While you ultimately want to drive revenue, you can only control the quality of the leads you give to sales people…not what they do with those leads. So only promise the executive stakeholder(s) that by the end of the pilot, you will give salespeople what they ask for at least 75 percent of the time (90 percent or higher is possible).

You can and should refine your customer profile and lead definition and perhaps even the follow up and reporting processes. That’s what the pilot is for, in part. With enough experimentation, you’ll get to a definition that works for sales and that marketing can deliver consistently and scale.

Action item: Collaborate with sales on an ideal customer profile, a lead definiton, and the follow up and reporting requirements you will need in exchange.

Lead generation is a set of capabilities, processes and practices that you can always improve. So it’s a never-ending journey. And these four design principles will give you the best opportunity for that kind of long-term success.

Related Resources

Lead Generation: How to get funding to improve your lead gen

Lead Marketing: Cost-per-lead and lead nurturing ROI

B2B Lead Generation: Why teleprospecting is a bridge between sales and marketing

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

You’d like to take your lead generation function to a new level. But how? The cost of all you want to do is far more than you suspect you can get budget for. Plus, you’ve seen others try new things that didn’t work. They lost credibility and any chance for getting funding in the future.

In this economy, that’s the last thing you need.

Let me share a blueprint that’s worked for me. I first used this blueprint ten years ago to help Denny Head, who worked at Avaya, get the funding that resulted in a billion-dollar sales lead pipeline in 20 months.

When framing your lead generation pilot for your CMO, keep these four critical success factors in mind:

1. Sell a vision.

Lead generation scales sales organizations. That’s a big deal. Sales channels are the least scalable part of the go-to-market machinery.

And yet, a recent survey I conducted with an American multinational conglomerate corporation (the name has to stay confidential for competitive reasons, found that sales reps were spending more than 40 percent of their time looking for sales opportunities (i.e., generating their own leads). Even worse, new reps spent more than half of their time just identifying opportunities.

That use of time has a material cost. It also robs sales of revenue production. If sales reps are spinning their wheels generating their own leads, they’re wasting time that could be better spent closing deals.

So, a very large expense is at stake, far bigger than the cost of funding your most ambitious lead generation plans. More importantly, the potential for increasing the revenue capacity of your sales team can pay for incremental investment many times over.

In addition to the financial benefit, a lead generation model that delivers insight and predictability about revenue production is a great benefit to the C-Suite.

Action Item: Survey your sales organization to find out how much time they spend looking for leads. They may not realize how pervasive the problem is. In the survey I mentioned above, even sales managers underestimated how much time was being lost. On average, they underestimated the amount of time their reps were devoting to lead identification by 27 percent.

Then use the information from that survey to estimate the cost of this time to the company and to reveal how much money the company is already spending on “lead generation.” Then collaborate with sales leaders to determine what kind of revenue production that additional sales capacity might represent.

2. Tie the vision to corporate objectives. Often, marketers are so focused on tactical considerations they fail to see the big financial picture.  Each year, the CEO develops a list of strategic objectives. Every smart department head should look at those objectives and position any initiative in that light.

For example, if the objective is higher profitability, then show how lead generation can take cost out of the business. If the objective is revenue growth, then show how lead generation can contribute to revenue growth.

Action item: Find out what the strategic objectives are for sales and then figure out how to tie lead generation to one or more sales, marketing, and/or corporate objectives. Focus on what truly matters to your business leaders. What are their KPIs? If you can move the needle even a little in a metric that matters, your lead generation initiative will be a success.

3. Under-promise and over-deliver.

Too often, marketers think they need to promise a miracle in order to get funding. That’s crazy. By painting a big enough picture of the end-state, you can soft-sell the pilot phase.

Collaborate with the executive stakeholder(s) about their priorities and success metrics. As best you can, moderate expectations. Remind everyone of the impact of the buying cycle on revenue production. The buying cycle will elongate the payback.

And make sure everyone understands the need to test and iterate during the pilot. In fact, I always stress the importance of continuous improvement through a repeatable process and scientific experimentation. It works in manufacturing. Why can’t it work in marketing?

Action item: Find relevant examples of counter-intuitive marketing experiments that produced big results. (Hint: Our sister company, MarketingExperiments, is a great resource).

4. Provide a roadmap.

A vision is great, but you need to have a practical plan on how to get from wherever you are today to where you’d like you’re company to be. Maybe you need to improve the marketing database. Maybe your content strategy needs re-engineering. Perhaps you need to do lead nurturing and lead scoring in a new, shiny marketing automation system.

And maybe you need to tie social media into the mix and convert more visitors into leads via paid search. And, well, the list is endless and growing all the time with cool possibilities.

There are “go-fast” scenarios and “stick-your-toe-in-the-water” scenarios. Which one is right for you depends on the risk appetite of the sponsoring executive, your personal track record, and the perceptions of lead generation in the company.

Action item: Collaborate with the sponsoring executive on a road map. Explain that there are many ways to get to lead generation Nirvana and it all depends on the tradeoff between the level of proof required and desire for speed and scale.

While there are many important considerations, I’ve found that these four factors are essential to get executive buy-in and to the long-term success of your lead generation initiative.

Related Resources

Lead Marketing: Cost-per-lead and lead nurturing ROI

B2B Lead Generation: Why teleprospecting is a bridge between sales and marketing

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

B2B Lead Generation: Increasing leads 296% by analyzing Web traffic – Case Study

Here at MECLABS, we have a pretty singular focus – to help you optimize your sales and marketing funnel. Or as I like to say in every email I write: Our job is to help you do your job better.

But, as Tom Cruise said to Katie Holmes (or maybe it was Cuba Gooding, Jr.), “Help me, help you.”

So evidence-based marketers, on what topic do you need more evidence? Evidence to help you understand what your peers are doing. Evidence to help you understand what really works. Evidence to do a little internal marketing to your business leaders (or for the agency folks out there, your clients)?

Below are a few key topics you’ve been telling us you want to learn more about. We’re trying to decide on the topic for our next MarketingSherpa Benchmark Report. In which topic should we invest 5 months of a research manager’s time digging into to discover the evidence you need.

Please take 7 seconds and rank them in order of importance in the poll below. Or if we missed a topic entirely, please tell us in the comments section below.

In no particular order, the nominees are…

• Analytics – Using analytics and metrics to drive business decisions from which products to launch to which landing page works best to which content is most relevant to your audience.
• Mobile – Mobile tactics can vary slightly or widely from traditional approaches, so how are marketers developing and implementing wireless strategies? How are marketers planning their budgets and measuring their results? And, for the love of all that is holy, when on Earth will I be able to view Flash on my iPad? OK, maybe not that last one. But seriously Steve, it would be nice.
• E-commerce – What do direct sale sites view as the top opportunities for the upcoming year? Are they investing in site speed enhancement, conversion optimization, or both? And is social media impacting purchases?
• Agency and vendor selection and management – What factors play into how marketers choose and compensate agencies? How do marketers determine if they need a software platform in a specific space? And if so, do they buy, go with open source, or attempt something homegrown? How do you get IT’s support in choosing a vendor? And then, more importantly, how do you get IT to stop talking about “Star Trek: The Next Generation” already?
• Salary survey – How much does Bill make?  He hasn’t had a good idea since 1993. And his tuna salad lunches stink up the office. OK, if not Bill, then what about the rest of your peers. Are you being fairly compensated? And what should you pay your team?
• Lead generation – Which information do marketers view as most valuable? How do they keep their databases updated and clean? Do marketers find third-party lists effective? And in an age of social media, do marketers value a big email list as much?
• Content marketing and lead nurturing – Do my peers outsource content creation or do it in-house? If so, how? Do they have their own teams? Or just beg, borrow, and steal from other departments?

A recently published research paper may prove to be of great interest to marketers. “No Clicks, No Problem: Using Cursor Movements to Understand and Improve Search,” by Jeff Huang, Information School University of Washington; and Ryen W. White and Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research, takes a look at the correlation of eyegaze on a webpage and cursor placement.

This research found a high correlation between where the cursor was placed on a page and where the user was actually looking, and created a tiny JavaScript capable of running invisibly on a webpage that tracks where the cursor is in real time providing information on where that webpage visitor is looking and, possibly more importantly, pausing throughout the visit.

This is from the abstract of the linked paper:

In this paper, we examine mouse cursor behavior on search engine results pages (SERPs), including not only clicks but also cursor movements and hovers over different page regions.

We: (i) report an eye-tracking study showing that cursor position is closely related to eye gaze, especially on SERPs; (ii) present a scalable approach to capture cursor movements, and an analysis of search result examination behavior evident in these large-scale cursor data; and (iii) describe two applications (estimating search result relevance and distinguishing good from bad abandonment) that demonstrate the value of capturing cursor data.

Maybe most intriguing for marketers is the final line of the abstract, “Our scalable cursor tracking method may also be useful in non-search settings.”

The JavaScript code that drives this online tracking tech is a mere 750 bytes and had a negligible effect on the load time of webpages hosting the script. Although this technology is not yet commercially available, it should eventually present another interesting avenue for marketers to test website visitor’s behavior.

Jeff Huang, the team member who implemented and deployed the cursor tracking code, mined the cursor data, and wrote parts of the paper, took a few moments to answer several questions I had about this intriguing technology.

Tell me a little more about this research.

Jeff Huang: We examined mouse cursor behavior on search engine results pages, including not only clicks but also cursor movements and hovers over different page regions. In an eye-tracking study, we showed that cursor position is closely related to eye gaze. We developed a scalable approach to capturing cursor movements, and an analysis of search result examination behavior for over 300,000 queries from around 22,000 people. Finally, we were able to use cursor movements to estimate search result relevance and distinguishing good from bad abandonment.

Marketers are probably familiar with click and heatmaps, and this seems closely related to that technology. Do you think this technology can be useful for more than search?

JH: Cursor movements can create heatmaps with a similar appeal as click maps. While click maps show only the regions being clicked, movement heatmaps can also show regions that received attention by proxy of the cursor position. Often clicks are not available for smaller sites so movements can provide richer information.

Could marketers utilize this tech for webpage research to improve, say, the eyepath of the page? Is cursor movement correlated with a page visitor’s eyepath?

JH: Yes, as we mention in the paper, the cursor is typically within 200 pixels of the eye gaze. The most common position for the cursor is to be slightly below what the user is looking at. We also found that the cursor follows the eye gaze by around 200ms [milliseconds] (although the data for this is highly variable).

Does this technology offer other applications for marketing efforts or webpage testing?

JH: Sure, having records of the cursor movements allow marketers to replay the user’s session on the Web page. For example, they can see which order a user filled out a form even if they did not complete the form and left the page instead. We have developed an efficient method to record the cursor movements so they take a minimal amount of space and can be collected without disrupting the user.

Is this tech publically available, and if not, when is commercial roll-out expected?

JH: This was developed as part of an internship at Microsoft Research last year, and deployed to internal users. I will return to Microsoft again this summer, but I cannot comment on its commercial availability.

Few issues create more conflict between sales and marketing than lead qualification criteria. In the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Benchmark Report, 72 percent of marketers listed generating higher-quality leads as their single biggest challenge, up from 69 percent the prior year. In most cases, Sales and Marketing each see lead qualification from very different perspectives, both of which have value.

In sales, management spends considerable time, including extensive one-on-one coaching, teaching sales people about lead qualification criteria, often dissecting specific sales calls, contacts, opportunities, and accounts. Good sales people soon learn that qualifying prospects takes significant skill and judgment.  Invariably, the best sales people are superb at this skill.

In contrast, the best marketers look at a sophisticated combination of techniques for delivering more qualified prospects to sales:

• Targeting. By soliciting the right audience, fewer out-of-market prospects inquire.
• Messaging and calls-to-action. The right message and supporting content will attract the most qualified buyers.
• Explicit user-supplied information. Registration forms enable marketers to ask qualifying questions, questions that can evolve as the prospect moves deeper into the buying cycle.  Unfortunately, prospects are unwilling to fill-out a lot of information on a registration form so this tactic must be used with great restraint. MECLABS has one case study, for example, that shows a 189 percent increase in registration largely by decreasing the amount of information on a registration form.
• Implicit data. Increasingly, marketers are drawing inferences about not just an area of interest, but the likely depth of interest, the role of the responder in the buying process, and similar qualifying information, all based not on what a prospect says but on what he or she does, primarily via his or her clickstream behavior but also via other media and transactional information.
• Data Hygiene, enhancement, and consolidation. The cloud is creating very scalable and cost-effective tools for cleaning up inquiries, appending additional or better business card or firmagraphic information to each record, and consolidating duplicate accounts, contacts or areas of interest. The right processes will typically identify 14 to 21 percent of the lead pool as either duplicate or not usable (e.g., the visitor enters “Mickey Mouse” for a name).
• Lead Scoring. Lead scoring uses any and all of the implicit, user-supplied information along with explicit and appended information to identify and prioritize records worthy of human follow up.

Leaving aside tele-qualification as a marketing function, the key difference between the approach of sales and marketing is this: marketing uses largely quantifiable techniques, primarily driven by highly scalable business rules and automation while sales uses qualitative techniques that are extremely nuanced and very subjective and invariably much more exacting for a given account.

In other words:

• Marketing improves the probability of success across a pool of responders.
• Sales identifies the probability of success for a particular responder.

Customers and prospects hedge, withhold information intentionally, change their minds, and/or misunderstand and even fabricate information.  Sales people use, not just the words of a customer, but a range of information, including someone’s tone, body language (in the case of on-site sales calls), the perspective of others within the account, external sources, and many other tools to evaluate the probability of purchase. While lead scoring is improving every day, it obviously has a long way to go before replicating the qualification techniques of sales people.

The truth is these two approaches are highly complementary

The more sales understands the tools and limitations marketing uses, the more insightful their suggestions can be; likewise, the more marketing understands the criteria and methods the best sales people use, the more marketers can improve their own upstream practices.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 – in San Francisco and Boston

B2B Marketing: Building a quality list

B2B Marketing: The 7 most important stages in the teleprospecting funnel

Members library – B2B How-To: 5 lead nurturing tactics to get from lead gen to sales-qualified

Free MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter

Review: B2B Marketing Best Practices – MarketingSherpa 2011 Handbook by Lee Odden at TopRank online marketing blog

If you’ve been reading this blog for just about any amount of time, you already know that landing page optimization is an effective way to increase the ROI of your website traffic.

But when most people think of landing pages, they think of pages tied to certain traffic sources. The most popular of those sources are generally PPC ads and email messaging.
But there are a few other opportunities to capitalize on your traffic with landing pages. Take a look at this marketing research chart from Boris Grinkot’s 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report:

According to the chart, most marketers aren’t optimizing traffic from:

1. Social media sites
2. Referring sites
3. Organic search

Now right off the bat, you might be thinking that the reason those traffic sources aren’t capitalized on has to do with the fact that most websites aren’t getting traffic from those sources.

However, this data only factors in marketers who have traffic from these sources.

So for example, of the E-Commerce sites that are currently receiving organic search traffic, only 31% of them are capitalizing on it with dedicated landing pages.

The fact that some marketers are dedicating landing pages to these particular sources of traffic is a good indicator that they are working to convert that traffic, but that most marketers are simply missing out.

This one chart signals that there is a tremendous opportunity to get ahead of your competition and start capitalizing on more of your traffic.

Get 41 more charts like this one…FREE

This is simply one insight from one chart in the Benchmark Report. If you really wanted to, I’m sure you could get a lot more out of this chart. You’re only limited by your own business intelligence.

For the next few days, the entire chapter from the Benchmark Report this chart is in can be downloaded for free thanks to a generous sponsorship from HubSpot. All you need to do to get your 41 free charts including Boris’ insightful analysis is click the link below, fill out the form on the landing page, and download the chapter.

Get your free chapter now…

Optimization testing can be daunting. With so many elements on a Web page, and so many ways each could be customized, knowing what to test and how to change it can feel like testing spaghetti the old college way (throw it at the ceiling and see if it sticks).

But optimization does not have to be daunting or random. Some marketers will receive a crash course in landing page optimization at our Optimization Summit this week. If you can’t make it, don’t fret. There’s always next year. In the meantime, MarketingSherpa just published the 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report.

I pulled two charts from the report to give marketers some reference points when designing their tests. Hopefully they will help keep crusty pasta off your ceiling.

This chart lists the four page elements that rank most consistently as having a “very significant impact” across three optimization objectives. Note that a different page element ranks highest for each objective:

• Direct lead gen: The highest performing element is the form layout at 44 percent
• Incentivized lead: The highest performing element is the body copy at 41 percent
• Ecommerce: The highest performing element is the image content at 43 percent

The chart lists only four of 17 page elements measured by our analysts, so there are many other elements that can be impactful in your tests. Your results may not mimic this data exactly, but this chart points to elements that other marketers are seeing as having the most impact.

Once you select a page element to test, the big question becomes “how do we change it?” This chart lists tactics you can use to segment your audience and add more relevance to your optimization pages. Each tactic is ranked by its effectiveness, ease of use, and usage rate among marketers.

The far right of the chart features the most effective tactics: segmenting based on purchase history and other CRM data. Customizing landing pages to a customer’s purchase history appears to be an opportunity for marketers. It is the most-effective tactic listed and appears relatively easy to implement.

In the report, our analysts also point to another opportunity: messaging in the referring ad or page.

“Using the messaging in the referring ad or page can be especially easy to apply when the marketer also controls that messaging, making it a highly efficient way to segment,” according to the report.

However you go about your optimization tests, it is important that you test accurately and continuously learn from the results. The data in these charts can provide reference points to guide your plans, but only your team can uncover the best tactics to fit your audience and your brand.

Related resources

Optimization Summit 2011

2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report

Marketing Research Chart: Top website objectives to determine optimization priorities and tactics

Landing Page Optimization: Minimizing bounce rate with clarity

Optimization and A/B Testing: Why words matter (for more than just SEO)

Members Library — Campaign Analysis: Optimization expert lists 5 tweaks to boost an email campaign’s conversions

Members Library — Landing Page Optimization: How to serve 2 markets with 1 page

Members Library — How to Plan Landing Page Tests: 6 Steps to Guide Your Process

More than 80 percent of CMOs were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI and less than 20 percent said their company employed meaningful metrics according to a CMO council study quoted in Harvard Business Review.

The same article cited Copernicus Marketing Research findings that noted that most acquisition efforts fail to break even, no more than ten percent of new products succeed, most sales promotions are unprofitable, and advertising ROI is below four percent.

There is no absence of metrics or measurement tools. The problem is less one of analytics than of lack of alignment across the enterprise as to ROI goals.

But how can that alignment be attained?

There is a need for a common vocabulary and shared buy-in as to key performance indicators (KPIs). It is commonly assumed that all can be resolved if the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing just go off and have a beer together. This rarely works. A better way to achieve alignment is to borrow from the toolbox of strategic planning and to use scenarios.

Scenario planning is a discipline popularized by Royal Dutch Shell in the ‘80s that has become a standard tool of strategic planning professionals. It is the process in which managers invent and consider the implications of alternate assumptions and futures. As a team-building exercise, it can remove the barriers that office politics, turf wars, and loyalty to current vendors bring to the effort to align goals and assumptions.

As consultant Juergen Daum has written, “The purpose of scenario planning is to help managers to change their view of reality, to match it up more closely with reality as it is, and reality as it is going to be. The end result, however, is not an accurate picture of tomorrow, but better decisions about the future.”

Scenario planning session

A Scenario planning session can be done over a one- or two-day off-site:

• Start by modeling a scenario in which the current ROI goals and benchmarks are accurate and lead to a positive future. This is the “rosy scenario” that is implicitly guiding current thinking.
• The team can then turn, in a politically non-threatening way, to alternate scenarios – those in which current goals and assumptions can be challenged. This process surfaces doubts and uncertainties while clarifying disconnects among the team as to definitions and priorities. Whatever the outcome, the very process builds agreement and understanding.

This process allows managers to confront, without defensiveness, the essential question:

“What if our current assumptions and procedures are wrong?”

Contemplating a scenario without a “rosy” outcome forces participants to both question current practices and to work together to forecast outcomes. The implications of using “wrong” ROI goals can be discussed collaboratively, fostering collaboration and understanding. Ideally, new metrics can be identified and outmoded ones discarded. Inevitably, participants emerge with greater understanding of their goals, of their key performance indicators, and of each other.

Bob Heyman is a keynote speaker at Optimization Summit 2011, and all attendees will receive a copy of his book, “Marketing by the Numbers: How to Measure and Improve the ROI of Any Campaign,” provided by HubSpot.

Gary Angel, President and CTO, Semphonic, contributed heavily to this blog post as well.

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Confession time…one of my favorite movies is the Will Ferrell classic, Elf. I love the scene where Buddy (the elf) sees a sign outside of a coffee shop announcing that it has “The World’s Best Cup of Coffee.”

It’s quite a value proposition and thanks to Buddy’s innocence (or ignorance) he barges into the shop and congratulates the entire staff for a job well done. The reason it’s so funny is because we know better. Even the staff at the coffee shop knows better.  To believe such a claim is ridiculous.

Yet many companies still have trouble avoiding such preposterous value propositions in their marketing.

According to a recent incentivized survey done by MarketingExperiments (MarketingSherpa’s sister company), 120 out of the 275 (30%) total business plans we reviewed had no real value proposition. Another 60% were categorized as having only limited or substantial value. Only 10% were considered to have a strong, unique value proposition.

In all, on our scale of zero to five, 90% of those surveyed were at or under a two.

It’s an unnerving statistic given that a well-stated value proposition has (according to our research) been proven to get better response rates on everything from business plans to landing pages.

So how do we craft a value prop that isn’t going to induce a side-splitting laugh in your audience?

Well, I have yet another confession to make…

I’m probably not the right person to ask. I honestly don’t have a lot of background with value proposition. But I DID recently attend a workshop on Landing Page Optimization with the Managing Director (CEO) of MECLABS, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

In it, he devoted a whole section to getting your value proposition straight. So I’m going to share what I learned there and share a little of my own commentary as well.

A true value prop isn’t dictated in a board room

According to Flint, the basic key to determining a strong value proposition for your company is understanding that a value prop is not usually determined, it is discovered.

It’s a simple shift in thinking that makes a huge difference. Sitting at your desk and trying to manufacture a shiny new value proposition that you think will sound good is usually pretty fruitless.

Prepare yourself for some hard thinking and investigation into the bowels of your company, as we explore four steps to discovering your value proposition…

1. Answer the question: If I am your ideal customer, why buy from you rather than your competitors?
Assuming it was true, “The World’s Best Cup of Coffee” could be an excellent value proposition. The ideal customer in this case is your typical Manhattan coffee drinker and the reason they should buy coffee there is obvious – it’s the best in the world.

The problem is, it’s not true. The modern consumer simply does not believe your overindulgent hype. So the ideal customer is put off and ends up without a reason to buy coffee there instead of the better-looking shop across the street.

Admittedly, this is an extreme example. Yet marketers make this mistake every day. You likely come across this marketing jargon-filled hype every day. Does a two-person B2B tech start-up really offer a scalable solution for Fortune 500 companies, for example? Just because you say it in your marketing material doesn’t make it true. And your savvy audience is well aware of this fact.

When you’re answering this question for your own value prop, it’s important to note here that you are putting yourself into your customer’s mind by answering as if you were them. So spit out the Kool-Aid and be a little skeptical.

2. Compare your answer with the claims of your main competitors.

Of course we all know that just about anywhere you go, there’s a coffee shop claiming to have the world’s best cup of coffee. Again, that’s part of the comedy of this scene.

If any of your competitors can say the same thing about their products or business as you without completely lying, you don’t have a strong value proposition.

While your mother probably told you how special you were, a unique snowflake unlike all the other kindergarteners in the world, the same can’t automatically be said about your product offering and company. Is it really unique? Or do people only buy from you on a lark or because they haven’t stumbled across your competitors yet?

3. Refine your value proposition until you can articulate it in a single, instantly credible sentence.

The problem with the coffee shop’s value proposition was that it wasn’t instantly credible. No one believes their coffee is the best coffee in the world because there’s no way to prove that.

Your value proposition must be instantly believable. A great way to do this is to add numbers to your value proposition. If that coffee shop had said something along the lines of, “9 out of 10 people preferred our coffee to Starbucks”…you’d be more likely to believe it.

Another strategy is to be as specific as possible. Let’s say you’re not quite there yet with the imaginary value proposition above. What if it said, “9 out of 10 people preferred our coffee to Starbucks in a double-blind taste test?”

The double-blind taste test adds a dimension of specificity that increases the credibility of the sentence.

4. In the end, you must test your value proposition.

No matter what you do to come up with a value proposition, there’s no way to guess what resonates the best with your audience. You need to test it.

Your value prop should be visible in every step of your sales process. Wherever you display it, test different phrasing, angles, and ideas to get deeper inside the mind of your customers.

The better you know what they find valuable, the better you can serve them.

The next stop of the MarketingExperiments Landing Page Optimization Workshop tour is on June 1 in Atlanta. It will also be taught by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin. Then our MECLABS team will take the workshop on the road to New York, San Francisco…and more cities to be announced.

Related Resources

B2B Marketing: On Occam’s razor and value propositions

Optimizing Landing Pages: 3 Keys to Increasing Conversion Rates

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