MarketingSherpa Blog

Here at MECLABS, we talk a lot about the testing process.

How to optimize and improve emails, landing pages, lead generation forms, shopping carts … all things Web. But, the testing process isn’t just a way to improve website performance. The general principles are transferrable to so much more.

One thing I’ve been particularly interested in recently is how to use testing to improve office and employee productivity.

Consider you’re a manager and have an employee who has been having problems meeting deadlines.

What do you do?

Step #1. Identify the problems with productivity

You’ve already identified the overall problem – missing deadlines.

Most people immediately jump to solutions and try to answer this question: “How do I get this employee to stop missing deadlines?”

Obviously, it’s because they need more resources, right? Maybe it’s because they weren’t clear on the requirements and what was expected of them. Or maybe, they just didn’t see the point and weren’t properly motivated.

That’s the same thing as saying, “My Landing Page isn’t converting,” and immediately jumping to solutions like, “I need to change the offer, add a video, or add more testimonials.”

But, what step did we miss in that jump … Analysis!

Step #2. Dive deeper to identify the elements that impact productivity

You can’t solve a problem unless you have a deeper understanding of the root cause.

For a website, we’ve been trained to ask, “What problems or obstacles are impeding a conversion on this page?”

Thankfully, we have a handy Conversion Sequence heuristic to help us identify the elements that impact conversion by asking the right questions during analysis:

• Is it because there’s a lack of value?
• Is the value clearly communicated?
• Is the process is too confusing?
• Are people concerned about what’s going to happen with their information?

All of these answers could be the possible culprits to your low conversion rate, but you’ll never know without identifying these possible issues and testing possible solutions.

The same thing goes for your people.

For someone missing deadlines, the question isn’t “How do I fix this?” Instead, the first question needs to be “Why are they missing deadlines?” or:

• Are they confused with the exact date/time of the deadline?
• Do they have a clear understanding of all the steps involved in the project?
• Do they know all of the resources they’re going to need?
• Are they able to build a timeline backwards from the deadline with reviews and milestones?
• Do they not understand the impact the missed deadline will have on them personally or the company?

As you can see, the list of questions goes on and on, just like for your website.

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At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014, attendees will hear a wide range of case studies and keynote addresses covering many aspects of email marketing.

At last year’s event, Jay Baer, President, Convince and Convert, presented, “More Alike than Different: Why email is Madonna, and Facebook is Lady Gaga,”  in which he explained the relationship between email and Facebook and how marketers can take advantage of the two channels through integration.

In this excerpt from his presentation, filled with 16 ways to integrate email and Facebook into marketing plans, hear highlights from Jay’s session, including why this integration is so essential for businesses, now and especially in the future.

00:10 “If somebody is subscribing to your email newsletter on your website, on your thank you page, why not ask them to also like you on Facebook?” Jay asked, citing many brands he has audited have not tried this approach.

2:26 Jay explained why marketers who are doing advanced segmentation should turn to connecting Facebook accounts to websites to collect information from customers. Instead of having customers fill out a lengthy form with their information, allowing them to connect their Facebook accounts makes it easier on them to give up their information and faster for marketers to collect this essential data.

2:56 Jay revealed in this session how any time a marketer sends something, it is likely only 25% of the audience will see it at any given time. This is precisely why it is essential for marketers to surround customers with many options for communication, including email and social media.

4:08 While the integration tactics discussed in Jay’s keynote address are not difficult technically, they can be difficult to accomplish culturally, operationally and tactically. But, email marketers’ jobs depend on doing these things “because email isn’t going anywhere, but social media is getting a disproportionate amount of attention, and you know that to be true.”

Watch the full, free session from Email Summit 2013 to hear all of Jay’s insights about integrating email and Facebook.

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Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Using online video advertising as another channel to support your lead generation efforts can help you craft a global audience of potential leads.

Digital video can help keep your brand top-of-mind when it’s time for a purchase decision — if you create content designed for sharing versus selling.

Today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post features three reasons why you should adopt video content into your B2B marketing mix.

Reason #1. The digital video audience is growing

In a recent article on what makes streamers abandon video content, an interesting chart was included projecting digital viewer growth in the U.S. from 2010 to 2016.

According to those projections, 61% of the U.S. population alone will have adopted digital video viewing within the next three years, bringing the total to a staggering 77% of all Internet users viewing digital video content online by 2016.

A similar article focused on the online activities of U.S. Internet users by age revealed video sharing was a top Internet activity among U.S. Web users in every age bracket, ranking only beneath shopping and social networking in popularity.

As a result, digital video content production and/or digital video advertising will have the potential to reach what truly constitutes a growing global audience.

Reason #2. It’s no more difficult to produce online video content than it is to produce a white paper

For B2B and/or B2G marketers, concerns about adding video content in terms of difficulty, time, effort and expense are understandable, but considering the findings of previous MarketingSherpa research, where B2B and/or B2G marketers were asked…

Please indicate the DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY (time, effort and expense required) in creating each of the content products your organization is using.

Producing white papers ranked nearly equal across every range of difficulty with online video and phone apps, which leads to one important question…

What are some of the tangible benefits for adding video?

Reason #3. Digital video can improve SEO and drive multichannel traffic to your website

When I asked Gaby Paez, Associate Director of Research, Conversion Group, MECLABS, how companies could benefit overall from adopting video, she explained using video content can improve SEO campaigns.

“Not only is video a great way to share your story, it’s also a great way to build links back to your site. And, if users engage with your video, it helps to increase time on site,” Gaby explained.

Here are some of the additional benefits Gaby mentioned for adopting video:

• Branding — craft a consistent message for a 24/7 global audience
• Add human touch to testimonials — increase value and credibility of testimonials by sharing customer stories/case studies in video format
• Repurpose existing content — creating short videos using slides with the content of existing blog posts
• Boost awareness, visibility and reach — share product information, training, tips, or instructions with demos or video tutorials

When I asked Gaby how video could be used by B2B marketers to highlight products in the e-commerce space, she used software as a service (SAAS) and traditional e-commerce as two examples of where video content could supplement or even improve the customer experience.

“See video as a natural progression of customers’ expectations. In the past, they expected to see a product picture to make a purchase decision, then a gallery of pictures and now a product video,” Gaby explained.

I asked Gaby if video could also be also used to drive traffic mobile, and she explained video content was a great way to accomplish this.

“Absolutely,” Gaby explained, “You want to spend time developing mobile content that encourages potential customers to spend time on your website,” Gaby explained.

Related Resources:

Lead Gen Summit 2013: September 30 – October 3, San Francisco

Lead Generation: Content among the most difficult tactics, but also quite effective

Human Touch: 8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities

Lead Qualification: Stop generating leads and start generating revenue

Ever since I was a little girl, baking has been a hobby of mine.

There has always been something satisfying about attempting to master the complexities of baking.

Although the realist in me knew I wasn’t going to hit the big bucks through baking, I have found a few ways to apply some of the lessons I’ve learned from baking to my work as a research manager at MECLABS.

In today’s MarketingSherpa blog, I wanted to share three insights into how I think about testing and marketing as a result of my baking attempts.

Don’t stick with the directions on the box

Some of my best cakes have come from getting creative and literally thinking outside the box by adding different ingredients, or from asking friends what kind of crazy cake ingredients they’d like to try.

When working with one of our Research Partners to create a testing strategy, I often find myself confined to my own thought track – which I’ll admit can cause the creativity of test ideas to become stale and truthfully, can even get a little boring sometimes.

So, brainstorming with others in our peer review sessions is a great way to add those “new ingredients” to a test design to hopefully help our Research Partners learn more about their customers.

Beware of offering coupons in the Sunday paper too soon

Betty Crocker’s coupons excite me every time, and it’s a marketing tactic that stretches all the way back to 1929.

That’s when the company first decided to insert coupons into the flour mixture part of the box mix. And, I’ll admit the tactic works on me because I often find myself staring at the Save $1.00 off TWO boxes of cake mix coupon and debate a trip to the store.

But, here’s the big question … am I being motivated to buy more because of my aggregate experience with the product, or because of the value proposition offered in the coupon?

Before I even saw the coupon, I wasn’t planning on buying cake mixes, but now I’m thinking about it – why should I buy more cake mix from you?  It will cost me more regardless of the coupon savings.

Now, I understand the idea of incentives and they can work – people have a hard time letting savings slip through their fingers, but offering incentives right off the bat isn’t always the best answer to increasing conversion and here’s why …

At MECLABS, we generally stress incentives should be the last resort in your testing efforts to see a quick win. The reason for this is offering incentives can skew your understanding of true customer motivation, as you can tell from my coupon example above.

My need for cake mix is why I initially purchased, and a coupon incentive may not be the optimal solution to keeping me as a return customer or attracting new customers.

So, before you worry about the coupons and other incentives, try to make sure you have the basics covered first:

• A website that visitors can easily navigate and find what they’re looking for.

• A simplified purchase flow for potential customers.

• Easy, accessible support for your customers when they can’t figure things out.

If those items are in place and you’ve tested for the optimal user experience, then you can begin to explore incentives.

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In today’s MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week, we looked at the long list of organizational email marketing goals marketers told us they are focusing on for the next 12 months, and I implore marketers to narrow their focus to just the three or four goals that will really move the needle in their email marketing program this year.

This is not an exercise I’m unfamiliar with. As we launched the Call for Speakers for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 at the Aria in Las Vegas, we also had to decide the email marketing pillars to focus on – and in the spirit of simplifying, this year you can enter MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014 and submit a speaker proposal using the same form.

At Email Summit 2013, we built the agenda around five email marketing goals and two elements. Frankly, it was just too much. If you focus on everything, you focus on nothing.

So this year, we’ve narrowed down the Email Summit Call for Speakers and Email Awards Call for Entries to four topics. These topics are below, along with links to MarketingSherpa reporting to help you improve your email marketing, and perhaps get your juices flowing for your own proposal/entry.

Build and Cleanse: Efforts to build up email lists, or strengthen the program overall through cleansing make up this pillar. List data and management, database hygiene, list testing and optimization are examples of the types of campaigns to fall within it.

List Growth: 11% increase from sweepstakes for Waterford Crystal

Email Marketing: CNET win-back campaign sees 8% subscriber re-engagement

Create and Design: This pillar will recognize message testing and optimization, as well as delving into marketing efforts involving design creative, copywriting, messaging.

Email Marketing: User-generated content helps drive 16% clickthrough rate

Email Marketing Optimization: How you can create a testing environment to improve your email results

Deliver and Automate: This pillar will focus on marketers’ efforts with marketing automation and deliverability. The function and theories behind testing and optimization will also be discussed within this pillar.

Marketing Automation: 416% higher customer lifetime value from auto-email strategy

Personal vs. Robotic: How to turn automated email into personal experiences that drive new and repeat sales

Email Deliverability: How a marketing vendor with 99 percent delivery rates treats single opt-in lists vs. double opt-in lists

Connect and Integrate: The optimization of email integration tactics with social media, websites, mobile, offline and testing will make up this pillar.

Social Email Integration: Sony Electronics nets 3,000 clickthroughs from email to “pin” on Pinterest

Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels

But, enough from us. We want to see what you’ve been working on, and more importantly, how your marketing peers can learn from your work. If you have any questions, we’re here to help. You can check out the FAQ … or just ask us.

Also, we put together a quick video to show you what it’s like to be an Email Summit speaker…

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

When John Johnston, Director of Digital Marketing, began his journey at Volvo Construction, he knew things had to be completely rebuilt, starting with the website and branching out into everything else. In this excerpt of a full video session from B2B Summit 2012, see how customer service topped the list for Volvo Construction when it began an overhaul on digital marketing, where email would bring customers to the website, and the website would convert them.

2:45 First, Volvo Construction created a website that acted as a useful and current resource for customers and dealers. Johnston wanted the website to be the ultimate guide for the visitor, so they could find everything they needed, including its social media posts, without leaving the site.

4:21 Subsequently, Johnston’s team structured digital marketing around the website so that PPC, SEO and email would attract customers and the website would be helpful enough for them to stay.

5:33 He also decided that email is how they would “primarily drive traffic to the website.”

Crafting the email to serve customer needs was vital to this plan. Since customer needs vary so greatly, Johnston’s team needed “to make sure the content changes,” to match customer needs and. The emails also needed to contain dynamic content and interactive functionality the customers appreciated, as well as the analytics that the company could use.

Related Resources:

Click here to watch the full free presentation to see the rest of Johnston’s digital marketing strategy and answer more questions from the audience.

Lead Gen Summit 2013: September 30 — October 3, 2013 in San Francisco

Email Summit 2014 in Las Vegas Call for Speakers — Bonus: Enter the MarketingSherpa Email Awards using the same form

Event Recap: MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012

Customer Connection: Does your entire marketing process connect to your customers’ motivations?

Email Marketing: Segmentation, triggered sends generate twice the revenue with half as many email sends for furniture company

When asked about different types of content, more than half of marketers considered 12 of 18 types of content to be difficult to create.

At Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco, we will have sessions discussing how to use content marketing to capture and nurture leads.

To help prepare you for Summit, today on the MarketingSherpa Blog, we’re sharing a video excerpt from B2B Summit 2012 about content production …

In this video excerpt, Eric Webb, Senior Director of Corporate Communication, McGladrey, shared the steps the accounting and consulting firm took to improve its content marketing efforts and, ultimately, execute a 300% increase in content production.

To see the rest of Eric’s presentation and learn more about how you can use content marketing to better serve your customers, watch the free full presentation in the MarketingSherpa Video Archive.

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“I’m so far behind. Everyone tells me I need to be on social media, but I don’t know where to get started!”

Today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post is for the late adopters, those not yet deeply engaged in social media marketing.

But even if you are engaged in social media marketing, these tips may help you. Marketers all experience the same type of consternation when it comes to social media and receiving questions like these from peers:

• Are you on social media?
• Which platforms are you on?
• How often do you post?
• What are your engagement numbers?

Let me put your mind at ease. You are not alone. It’s a pressure we all feel within the industry. Companies large and small experience the same pressures.

• How do we get noticed?
• How do we create our social brand image?
• How do we drive sales from a social-oriented platform?

At MarketingSherpa, we have many more resources to help you dive into the complexities of social media marketing and I’ll end this blog post with a few links to help you answer some of the above questions. But first, let’s back it up a bit, and take a 10,000-foot view of the essential elements of any social media marketing endeavor.

Essential Element #1. Realistic goals

To start, we need to keep this in perspective.

Does social interaction and engagement directly correlate to conversion? No.

So, if social interaction does not directly create conversions, what are we spending our time, money and resources on? While we cannot directly correlate brand engagement, brand recognition and brand interaction with engagement on a social media platform, we can say the personality and presence of a brand helps to inform consumers and keep them engaged in the conversation.

Essential Element #2. Organic conversations

First of all, we do not need to be on every single platform to get to the next level. Start with one platform (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) and start the conversation.

To start a conversation, we need to understand our audience wants to engage in an interaction. Start by asking questions (i.e., I’m having a case of the Mondays, how are you doing today? or TGIF! What are you planning this weekend?) then move on to talking about what you do or want to promote.

Obviously, these questions should be relevant to your brand. The goal is to engage visitors in a conversation and keep it going.

Ask more questions, respond and follow up. You do not want to be that company that puts something out there and doesn’t respond. It’s the same as sending a message to a friend to ask them out to dinner, having them respond to you and never setting a date or time.

Essential Element #3. A (growing) community

Grow your following.

I know! I know! How do I grow my brand’s following?

Once you pick where to start and you have a conversation going with your followers, this is an easy transition.

Let’s talk about the demographic you are targeting. Let’s get specific. I know. This is a hard thing to do. This is where you are probably saying “Come on Rachel, my product is perfect for everyone.” I get it.  I’ve had the same trouble myself.

So, let’s pick your top demographic and go from there. Pick your top demographic and find out:

• Where they visit
• Who they follow
• What they read about.

Why is this important? It’s simple. Once you know where they go, start networking.

Social media marketing is all about the connections and creating conversations. For example, if I’m looking to help a company that is coaching boys soccer, where would I go? What would I search for?

I’d start searching locally. I would Google the top Facebook pages for the area by typing “Jacksonville” and “boys soccer” and “facebook.”

This search criteria would pull together the right information for my competition – Facebook pages I should start interacting with.

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What is marketing data really? When used right, it’s not just numbers that tell you what happened.

That is what I like to call the “newsman approach” to marketing analytics – information that simply sums up previous customer behavior.

You don’t want to be the newsman. You don’t want to be Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams. You, dear marketer, must look to the likes of Al Roker and Willard Scott. After all, it is the intrepid weatherman that discusses not only what already happened, but what is going to happen.

I discussed with Scott Hutcheson, Content Director, Paramore, how to effectively use marketing data to look beyond a simple gut reaction to numbers to find out what they can tell you about future customer behavior in this, the most recent episode of MarketingSherpa Marketing Research in Action …

In this episode, Scott and I discussed research from the MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report, which is sponsored by Paramore…

00:42 – Up is good, down is bad? Not so simple. Don’t settle for gut reactions to your marketing analytics. Scott and I discussed non-analytical decision-making strategies. 

4:44 – What can you learn from page views? Scott and I discussed content marketing metrics tracking.

  Read more…

Google AdWords campaigns are a terrific way to target specific audiences.

Unlike advertising on television or billboards, which tries to convince consumers they have a need for the product, search advertising tries to fulfill a need the customer already has.

The only problem is figuring out exactly what searches your customers are performing to express the need your product is the answer to.

Answering the following three questions is a great start to understanding your customers a little more, and will help you fulfill their needs and provide them with solutions.

Question #1.  What phase of the sales funnel are our targeted customers in?

Understanding where your target customers are within your sales funnel will help you know how they are searching for your products and what kind of queries they will be using to find them.

Here are a few points to consider when creating a Google AdWords campaign based on what stage of the purchase decision process a potential customer is in before they buy:

Initial – Very early on in the funnel, your potential customers may not even know your product exists. It is up to you to make them aware of your product, and to let them know what the benefits are of using it. For example, if a customer is just beginning their search for a new computer, they’ll probably start with general keywords like “laptop deals” or “cheap desktops.”

Intermediate – Even if your customers have a good understanding of what your product is and are interested in it, they are going to do more research on your product and compare it to similar products. This is where search queries will become more specific for products like “lightweight laptops with dual-core processors.”

Also, keep in mind at this stage, customers may begin to query brand names in their search efforts as well. This is where your keywords should become more specific about the details of your products.

Advanced – This is the stage where a customer has done their research and has reached a decision. In keeping with our computer example, it’s where search terms will likely be brand or name specific as the focus has now shifted to buying.

So if you are aware of what stage in the purchase decision process your customers are in, you can alter keywords to meet their specific needs.

You can even create different ads to match specific keywords customers will search for during each of the different phases as shown above. This will also help you discern which phases you should focus your paid search marketing efforts on.

For example, if most of your keywords are targeting customers in the early stages, you may want to concentrate on adding keywords they would use later in the funnel to make sure they follow through with the buy as ultimately every phase has the potential to turn into a buy.

Question #2. How are customers searching for us?

Potential customers generally search the Internet to find answers to questions or solutions to problems.

So, how will customers search for the answers and solutions your products can provide?

There are an infinite number of possibilities considering their queries may be an actual question, a symptom that they have a description of their problem or the cause of their problem.

For example, if someone’s air conditioner is broken, they may search “broken ac” or “how to fix a broken ac,” “why is my ac freezing over?” or  “ac repair in [anytown USA].”

Your ultimate goal is to answer those questions and solve those problems.

And, in order to do this successfully, your AdWords campaign should consider as many of the different search possibilities that relate to your products as possible.

It’s also worth mentioning whichever search terms customers use will also set certain expectations that your landing page or process needs to deliver.

So, when conducting your keyword research, you should list as many search query possibilities customers would likely use to search for your products, and match those searches with keywords that offer the most relevant solutions and answers.

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