MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

Over at MarketingExperiments’ sister company, we’re accepting entries for MarketingSherpa’s 6th Annual Email Marketing Awards. We’ve added a new category this year: best innovation. I’m really looking forward to seeing the latest ideas marketers have cooked up.

One new tactic we’ve seen this year is the integration of social media and email. And Facebook just launched the mother-of-all mashups between these two channels: Facebook Messages. Read more…

Afraid you’ll be the last brand picked for the kickball team? Worried you’ll throw a big party and no one will come? Sometimes it can feel like social media marketing is another trip through middle school.

The greatest social media challenge marketers say they face is getting their target audience to engage and participate. According to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report, 64% of marketers consider it a very important challenge to achieving social marketing objectives.

Translation: I’m a new kid in a new school and I’m worried no one will be my friend. So let’s take a look at a few Facebook beginner ideas… Read more…

Every year, for the past 16 years, something amazing has happened in Austin, TX around this time. And this year hopes to be no different as Austin gears up for its annual South by Southwest Interactive technology conference – an event which can only be described as one of the largest, most exciting, most comprehensive collections of marketing and social web entertainment and technology this side of the Internet.

In what amounts to five days of epic conversations, presentations and social media events disguised as a “technology conference,” the world (and all of Twitter) tunes in to see the Internet trends of the last year scrutinized and the trends for the next year laid out in incredible, Apple-Keynote-quality detail. Read more…

To the detractors, Facebook advertising only works for dating sites (and perhaps online degrees). As we demonstrate with the MarketingExperiments Conversion Heuristic, motivation is the most important factor influencing the probability of conversion. And the detractors would claim that most people who visit Facebook are motivated by one thing and one thing only.

Other marketers are happy to jump at any social media marketing opportunity. To them, Facebook is one big opportunity that they’re just trying to find the right tactics to embrace (of course, it might help to wipe the dollar signs out of their eyes first). Read more…

Let’s say you make mass-produced pizza that tastes like cardboard. How would you sell it?

A) Hire Jessica Simpson as a spokesperson to tell everyone how good your pizza tastes
B) Have your founder drive across the country in a classic sports car to tell everyone how great your pizza tastes
C) Launch a nationwide campaign to tell everyone how bad your pizza tastes (and then make it better)

Domino’s Pizza actually picked option C (and if they didn’t, really, would it be worth blogging about?). In fact, the cardboard reference above is something Domino’s itself is promoting… Read more…

It’s the time of year when I’m preparing the annual sojourn to Salt Lake City to gather with my fellow digital marketers at the Omniture Summit, and it makes me a bit nostalgic. No, not because I grew up in Utah, or because I miss the cold mountain air (as a former Montana-resident-turned-Florida resident, nothing could be further from my mind), but for my navy days. Years ago, when I was just out of high school, I joined the navy and the first boat I served on was USS SALT LAKE CITY (SSN-716). It’s tough to make a visit to SLC without thinking about these days.

I remember being a scrawny high school kid, band geek, 97 lbs, and hearing over and over that I would never make it through boot camp. By the time I got there, I actually started to believe it myself. But, nine weeks later, I had finished all the trials, gained 25 lbs, and was marching with the rest of my class in the pass-in-review ceremony. I had done it, and (to borrow a popular phrase from that year) thought I was the king of the world.

What does being in boot camp have to do with online marketing?

Well, let me say that when you first get to boot camp, your mind does wander to thoughts of quitting and getting back home to a comfortable life where all you really had to worry about was next Friday’s math test. However, you can’t just quit when you get to boot camp; no, they make you persevere. And by the time it’s done, you’re very glad you stuck through the tough times and accomplished something remarkable.

I think that my experience at boot camp can be a lot like the experience we marketers go through when starting to test online, except it’s MUCH easier to quit testing than it is boot camp. There is a large temptation to think that it will just be too much work – first figuring out what to test, designing alternative creative, selecting a testing tool, getting your boss to sign off, then moving mountains to get the IT work prioritized. It’s easy for a marketer to just stick to the status quo and quit the fight before it’s even begun. Read more…