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

Transparent Marketing: Do your campaigns sound like North Korean propaganda?

Daniel Burstein — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:01:22 +0000

I know, I know. Your product is super fantastic. The best in the industry. Perhaps the best ever. In a word – infallible.

Except, well, I don’t know how to break this to you, it’s not. No product is perfect. And not every product is right for every person (while we’re at it, you’re really not that special and there is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny).

The only challenge is, when you make your offer sound like it’s too good to be true, no one believes you and you’re only shooting yourself in the foot. Let’s look at an extreme example …

Overhyped marketing from the North

According to The Wall Street Journal – Pyongyang Myth-Builders Step It Up – here is some of the official line from the other side of the Northern Limit Line …

About Kim Il Sung, founder of North Korea: He once made a hand grenade from a pine cone to blow up an American tank.

About his son and successor, Kim Jong Il: When he was born, the sky was filled with lightning and thunder, and a rainbow.

About the new leader, Kim Jong Eun: He is ‘an excellent general who displays the extraordinary talent of hitting the center of the target no matter how many times he fires.’

Your product should not have a cult of personality

OK, that’s obviously ridiculous. So your product might not be mythmaking for the Dear Leader, but, I ask you, are some of these lines really any more believable?

Huge Savings! Exclusive Deals! Limited Time Offer!

70% Off! 80% Off! 90% Off! (this will eventually hit 100% off, right?)

Decision Management Solutions research identifies the ultimate real-time predictive marketing solution requirements (and exhale)

Don’t believe the hype

Your own, that is. Because, frankly, nobody else does.

As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, has said in Transparent Marketing: How to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer, “While this writer has no desire to demean the work of another professional, the Postmodern Consumer couldn’t care less. He actually despises hype and anything else that insults his intelligence.

“He is armed and dangerous. With a single click, he can terminate a company’s opportunity.”

However …

If your marketing campaigns (and especially your content marketing) elucidate and don’t obfuscate …
If in a hype-filled world, you actually live up to Dr. Philip Kotler’s value-focused definition of marketing – “A social and managerial process by which individual groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and exchanging products of value with others” …
If you help your customers find true value instead of grabbing a quick hit sale before they figure you out …
And if you focus on serving the customer instead of your own dictatorial ego …

… then I was wrong about you after all.

You really are special.

Related Resources:

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

Transparent Marketing: A slice of honesty from Domino’s Pizza

Transparent Marketing and Social Media: Twitter and Facebook are the new Woodward and Bernstein

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11 Most-Tweeted Posts of 2011: Social media marketing, copywriting, email testing and more …

Paul Cheney — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 08:01:20 +0000

In 2011, this blog produced 140 blog posts. Hopefully, you found some of those blog posts helpful in your day-to-day marketing work. If you did not, let us know in the comments and we’ll write 140 better ones next year.

Of course, as a marketer, you’re probably one of the busiest people alive and you probably missed a few, if not the majority of, posts this year.

So to catch you up, we sorted our posts by how valuable they were to you (as you and your peers communicated to us via the Twitter button) and created a roundup of the 11 most-tweeted posts in 2011.

Here they are in order of least popular to THE most popular MarketingExperiments blog post of 2011 (and potentially all time).

#11: Social Media Marketing: To tweet or to convert, that is the question

By Boris Grinkot

This is so true, and a great post. RT @yanmtl32: To tweet or to convert, that is the question #SocialMedia #Marketing – @MattKoyak

Social media has been the darling of the marketing world for years now. With the promise of free, overnight super-exposure for your brand or product, it’s no wonder. But getting a ROI from social has been plaguing marketers for almost as long as the medium itself. In this post, Boris Grinkot explains how to combine social media with LPO for bottom-line results.

#10: Value Proposition: How to use social media to help discover why customers buy from you

By Daniel Burstein

Using social media to discover your value proposition via @DanielBurstein featuring MMS’s own @i_mandi – @makemesocial

While it may be difficult to see an ROI from social media, one of the things it’s very useful for is market research. In fact, if you’re not testing to find your company’s value proposition, social media is a great place to start looking for it. In this post, Daniel Burstein highlights two ways to use social media for discovering why customers buy from you.

#9: Email Test: Shorter copy brings 100% more total clickthroughs

By Daniel Burstein

We all knew this but good to read RT @MktgExperiments Email Test: Shorter copy brings 100% more total clickthroughs – @rommil

Since at least Aristotle, people have been discussing copy length. In this email test, Daniel Burstein explains why shorter copy brought 100% more total clickthroughs than a long copy control.

#8: Copywriting: Long copy vs. short copy matrix

By Daniel Burstein

Free webinar? Short copy. Paid webinar? Long copy. (but you already knew that, right?) – @amaaanda

As we proved in blog post #9, short copy is the bona fide winner of the 2000+ year old copy length debate … or is it? It turns out that long copy can actually be more effective in certain situations. To help settle the debate, our Director of Sciences, Bob Kemper, developed a copywriting matrix to show when to use both forms.

Marketing Wisdom: Testing basics prove worthy as a foundation for 2012 planning

Brad Bortone — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 08:01:41 +0000

As I prepare to wade through hundreds of submissions for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Marketing Wisdom Report, (sponsored by HubSpot) I was compelled to take a final glance at the 2011 edition.

While combing through the pages, many of last year’s submissions evoked some forward-thinking thoughts for 2012. Here are just a few of the standouts…

1. Mind your metrics

Around here, we love using the term “boost.” We also get giddy about “triple-digit growth,” and view test results with the same exuberance teens have for Twilight.

But, when all the excitement fades, and we begin to dissect the numbers, we often find that positive growth in certain areas can mask bigger concerns beneath the surface.

Yes, your latest email series may have doubled your open rates in record time, but that positive growth could possibly force a massive increase in unsubscribes, highlighting problems with content, design, or some other variable. These moments can be disconcerting, but also beneficial, as deeper analysis of metrics can lead to a more optimized result in the long run.

Look at all your metrics when testing. In email test results from different campaigns this year, I have seen:

1) A subject line test with unique click rate up 45%, only to find total click rate unchanged

2) No change in click rate in a creative redesign but the pattern of what was clicked changed

3) A “from name” test giving a 33% increase in open rate, by using a person not a brand, but a 150% increase in unsubscribes.

These results were all statistically valid and significant for the test cell size. While it’s necessary in testing to have key evaluation metric that closely reflects your campaign objective, do also look deeper at all campaign metrics. You may find unexpected side effects or an apparent no result actually having a result, such as the creative test that had the same clicks but what was clicked changed.

- Tim Watson, smartFOCUS

Key Takeaway for 2012: Metrics can be deceiving. Be sure to look at the “numbers behind the numbers” and see if growth in one area negatively affects other areas of your performance. And, if you do find one of these, take advantage of this new knowledge to correct areas of concern and optimize your results.

2. List management is as important as ever

The predominant theme of the 2011 Marketing Wisdom Report was a seemingly universal return to “back to basics” marketing practices. For many, this meant embracing the power of interpersonal communication, maximizing internal resources, and integrating new technologies with old fashioned marketing know-how.

In the following entry, we see that “back to basics” went a little deeper for one marketer, who learned the hard way that the old adages “measure twice, cut once” and “never assume” are also sage points of wisdom when it comes to the daunting task of list management.

Grant Wrangler is our free grants listing service for teachers and schools. We operate it as a community service and a “sandbox” for testing technologies, content, and services.

In November 2009, we made major updates to our site design and content. After the redesign, we expected traffic, ad revenue, and newsletter signups to increase. Instead, we saw very modest increases in traffic, some loss in ad revenue and no increase in our newsletter list.

After several months of testing newsletter subject lines, promotions, buying ad words, revamping our SEO – all the strategies that are supposed to matter – I stumbled upon the answer. We were cleaning up our mailing lists and I discovered two opt‐in lists with nearly identical names. One was growing; the other had no new addresses since November 2009.

During our redesign, we had posted the wrong opt‐in to on our subscribe page. People were signing up on one list and we were mailing to another one!

A couple of lessons:

1. Assume nothing and test everything.

2. A sandbox site that does good for the community is a great way to learn how to do your best for your clients.

- Karen Henke, Nimble Press

Key Takeaway for 2012: While email marketing’s focus remains largely on list growth and nurturing potential leads, it’s more than wise to regularly check the names you already have. You may very well have an audience hungry for content and product … who could be completely unaware of your offerings because your sends are arriving elsewhere.

3. Testing = ROI

My father often told me, “Satisfaction is the death of desire.” Perhaps it was a tad melodramatic, but the statement made a lasting impression on my youthful mindset. It taught me how being idly content can effectively kill growth and forward-thinking.

In marketing, this is no exception. Today’s reason for success is tomorrow’s reason for double-digit conversion loss. See for yourself…

Cycle of innovation and iteration leads to big wins. No matter how high your campaigns are converting, or how optimized you think they are, a continuous cycle of innovation and iteration can help to push the envelope even further. This year I increased SEM leads 200% over last year, thanks to ongoing landing page testing and optimization.

Most recently, an iteration wave resulted in over a 90% increase in Web conversions in our top performing market. Learning in pilot markets is then leveraged across markets to improve overall lead conversions, and maintain brand consistency across 12 states. Having a nonstop cycle of content testing is the biggest piece of wisdom I can share with my fellow marketers looking to continually increase ROI.

- Arden Buchanan, Wellpoint, Inc.

Key Takeaway for 2012: The Web is a living entity, with a very short attention span. If you’re not consistently evolving, you could be falling behind in a race you may have just entered. Test often, and never stop using these results to innovate and optimize.

4. New technology is still the future of marketing

While our focus on somewhat minimalist approaches, and “roots-level” marketing made for a rewarding collection of anecdotes these past few years, we must not forget that many of the marketers applying these tried-and-true tenets were integrating these ideas with emerging technologies.

In the following entry, you’ll see how a team maximized the speed and efficiency of its testing through a simple set of tools, allowing them to create an optimized Web experience that better conveyed its value proposition.

At the University of St. Thomas, online lead generation is very important to increase interest in our non‐degree and degree programs in business. Unfortunately, our frontline Web experiences weren’t living up to the standards of the programs themselves.

We adopted a post‐click marketing tool to help us improve our Web presence. Whereas before it would take us months to test just one aspect of our online campaigns, in the same amount of time we’ve now tested video testimonials, long‐tail messaging, incentives, second‐level segmentation and three levels of narrowing by visitor’s intent. This has led to a 3x conversion rate improvement, higher quality of leads, and a Web experience that now reflects our programs.

This year, we also integrated the tool with our marketing automation platform, allowing for seamless passing of lead data. In 2011, we will be focusing on bringing an exceptional user experience to the mobile market by creating, testing and optimizing mobile landing pages within the platform.

- Mykola Sarazhynskyy, University of St. Thomas

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Key Takeaway for 2012: Yes, marketing 101 will never go out of style, but when coupled with exciting new platforms in which to optimize your process, the combination can produce phenomenal results.

Often, the past seems to dictate the future. But in the case of marketing success, the future is entirely up to you. These four slices of wisdom aren’t meant to be a guidebook for exponential growth, but rather an inspiration for what is possible through learning, innovation, open-mindedness, and a deep understanding of marketing’s roots.

We hope your 2010 wisdom proved to be beneficial for your 2011 campaigns, and has set the groundwork for further success in 2012. If so, we’d love to hear about it.

Related Resources:

Share your wisdom for a chance to be published in the 2012 Marketing Wisdom Report

B2B Marketing: Top “Aha moments” of 2011 from your peers

The Indefensible Blog Post: Actually, the old rules of marketing are pretty good

Personal Branding: The five elements of being seen as a thought leader through crowdsourcing

2011 Marketing Wisdom Report

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Marketing Optimization: What your peers learned this year about Adwords, the inbox, and telling the truth

Daniel Burstein — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:01:19 +0000

In today’s Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes – MECLABS Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin will share our top 2011 discoveries.

But before we share what we learned, we wanted to hear from you. Here are a few of the top “Aha” moments from your peers …

Phone calls from Adwords

That 96.5% of our Adwords conversions in a three-month test were phone calls – which were not tracked in our analytics. We’re now testing KeyMetric.net capabilities on a couple campaigns so we can track phone keyword conversions.

– Michael Cordova, Managing Partner, Mercury Leads

Are we still welcome in your inbox?

Finding a simple, no sales language approach was best to engage email subscribers who had stopped opening and clicking. The message tone and approach needs to match the situation and strength of relationship between the individual and brand. Incentives can look too much like yet another “sell” to the disengaged.

Best subject line in tests – “Are we still welcome in your inbox?”

– Tim Watson, Operations Director, Emailvision

Marketing a blog is no easy task

That marketing a blog for business use is no easy task. It takes time, strategy and dedication. I am close to calling it quits as I have just not seen the results I expected from my efforts. Learning the tools, the writing, editing and publishing is complicated and time consuming. You have to work this effort diligently like any good marketing effort!

– Jennifer Norene, Strategy Consultant, Haley Marketing Group

Tell the truth. Tell it early. Tell it often.

That no matter how much resources you invest in social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn), one public relations misstep can wipe away all the goodwill you’ve sought to build.

When it comes to potential public relations disasters and their inextricable relationship to marketing, the best advice is the simplest: “Tell the truth. Tell it early. Tell it often.” The American consumer will forgive genuine mistakes but not cover-ups, obfuscation or outright lies.

– Bruce Mendelsohn, Director, Communications and Outreach, Gordon Engineering Leadership Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Go East, young man …

80% of U.S. Internet users live east of the Mississippi.

Living in California, it’s very easy to forget this.

Of all the statistics in this article on the science of social timing published back in June of 2011, that one really smacked me upside the head.

– Kevin Convertito, Group Creative Director, High Speed Productions

Refine and Reproduce

Top Lesson – That excellent marketing is a series of small steps and not just one great big awesome value proposition.

Aha Moment – Seeing the true value of lead nurturing and the human touch put into full practice through the marketing funnel and not just at the top or bottom end.

Advice – Measure, track, share, discuss, refine and reproduce with your colleagues and peers.

– Jason Croyle, Business Development Representative, MECLABS

Be authentic

10,000-foot view – it is all about authenticity these days. If you are not authentic, you do not stand a chance in marketing, especially on social networks.

Product AHA – Google Plus with its “hangouts.” Very cool.

Side note but impactful – Learning about Steve Job’s death on the very device he helped create.

– Maria Nikishyna, Account Manager, Google

In memory

Realizing how “big” the “Apple fandom base” is. You need to go to one of the mature markets and see people standing in lines in front of Apple store to really understand and appreciate the accomplishment of late Mr. Steve Jobs.

– Branko Norwisz, Digital Strategy Manager for Central and Eastern Europe, IBM

What was your top “Aha” moment of the year? Tell our sister company, MarketingSherpa, what you learned this year for a chance to be published in the upcoming 2012 Marketing Wisdom Report, sponsored by HubSpot.

Related Resources:

How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes – Sign up for today’s Web clinic

Share your wisdom for a chance to be published in the 2012 Marketing Wisdom Report

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

B2B Marketing: Top “Aha moments” of 2011 from your peers

2011 Marketing Wisdom Report

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B2B Marketing: Top “Aha moments” of 2011 from your peers

Daniel Burstein — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 08:01:28 +0000

It seems like 2011 just started, and just like that, in a flash, it’s almost over.

Guess what?

You’ll be saying the same thing about 2012 soon enough. But before you do that, take a few moments to stop and think about what you learned in 2011 that can help you optimize marketing performance in 2012.

To spur your thinking, MECLABS a/v Specialist Luke Thorpe and I grabbed a camera and mic, went around to attendees and speakers at B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco (hosted by MarketingExperiments’ sister company, MarketingSherpa), and asked for their top “Aha moments” of 2011 …

Now that we’ve given you a few ideas to jog your thinking, schedule some time in your Outlook calendar to reflect on what really worked (and what didn’t) this year … and while you’re at it, send us those thoughts for possible inclusion in the MarketingSherpa 2012 Wisdom Report, sponsored by HubSpot.

Heck, even hold a one-person brainstorming session and make December your secret power-work month.

If you need a little more inspiration to get the ball rolling, you can join us on Wednesday as MECLABS Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin (the third speaker in the above video, coming in at 1:23) as we share our top discoveries from 2011 in our upcoming Web clinic – How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes.

Until then, take another look at the above video, and hear your peers’ epiphanies (in order of appearance) …

Jason Striker discussing how people find a way to buy, even in a challenging economy
Jay Baer discussing social media
Flint McGlaughlin describing how marketers should think more like plumbers
Karen Hayward discussing the need for accountability
Michelle Mogelson Levy pontificating about how Marketing-Sales alignment is more than just a service-level agreement, but should be a real relationship, as well
Milap Shah warning marketers they get what they pay for
Brian Carroll on why Marketing should lead the business (and not the other way around)
Kristin Zhivago showing us what she’s learned from interviewing customers in 2011 – more are turning to friends instead of Google for product recommendations
Ge Moua explaining demand generation
Tracy DeMay on why you should talk with, not to customers
Tony Doty on the similarity between SMB and Fortune 500 marketing department challenges

Related Resources:

Website Optimization: Landing page test leads to 548% increase in conversion

B2B Funnel Optimization: What happens after you capture the lead?

Landing Page Optimization: How IBM applied homepage redesign learnings to landing page testing

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Evidence-based Marketing: How to overcome the overconfidence bias

Daniel Burstein — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:39:43 +0000

What marketing errors are easiest to avoid? And how do we avoid making them?

My answer would be…those related to overconfidence. And, as to the second question, I’ll take the rest of this blog post to attempt to answer that.

Are you too confident?

In the business world, as in marketing, we usually look at confidence as a good thing. But the “overconfidence bias” can seriously harm your performance.

Here’s how Jonah Lehrer, an American journalist who writes on the topics of psychology and neuroscience, describes this overconfidence bias in The Science of Irrationality: A Nobelist explains our fondness for not thinking…

Consider the overconfidence bias, which drives many of our mistakes in decision-making. The best demonstration of the bias comes from the world of investing. Although many fund managers charge high fees to oversee stock portfolios, they routinely fail a basic test of skill: persistent achievement. As Mr. [Nobel Laureate, and professor of psychology at Princeton] Kahneman notes, the year-to-year correlation between the performance of the vast majority of funds is barely above zero, which suggests that most successful managers are banking on luck, not talent.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. The stock market is a case study in randomness, a system so complex that it’s impossible to predict. Nevertheless, professional investors routinely believe that they can see what others can’t. The end result is that they make far too many trades, with costly consequences.

Sound familiar? Is marketing a product any less complex than trading on the stock market?

How to bank on talent, not luck

I disagree with one aspect of Lehrer’s article. Not to put words into his mouth, but he seems to imply that there is no way to overcome the overconfidence bias. In marketing, I believe there is a way to do so (of course, perhaps that’s just me being …ahem … overconfident).

Let me explain what I mean, and let you be the judge…

Actually stop and ask some questions

I’m quoting a Nobel Laureate and a neuroscience journalist in this blog post, so you might have thought I was going to offer an equally cerebral observation. But, honestly, I just don’t think the solution is that complex.

Which doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. You’re busy. Your focus is on executing and hitting numbers. It can be exceedingly hard to stop the freight train of a dedicated marketing manager once she really gets moving.

But stop … and ask. What should you ask? Well, anything. Just the very practice of asking is a check on that overconfidence bias.

My second answer is, the specific questions will likely vary for your company and based on your situation, but a good place to always start is the”Six Ws of Journalism” (well, one ends with a “w”).

1. Why are we doing this in the first place?

This is, perhaps, my all-time favorite business question. We so often make the assumption that are doing the right thing. (“Hey, I called a meeting and am taking up all these people’s time, it must be a good idea.”) Overconfidence in action.

It never hurts to step back and question the entire goal and objective in the first place.

Take landing page optimization as an example. Why are you optimizing your current page? Sure, you want to improve results, but let me ask again…why are you optimizing your current page?

As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS has said, “Some pages should be optimized. Some should be torn down and started over from scratch.”

2. Who are my customers?

When I’ve been most successful, I’ve had a specific person in mind with whom I was trying to communicate. Sometimes it was someone I personally knew that fit the demographic. Sometimes it was a fictional character.

But, by personalizing the ad, email, or other communication, I was more able to accurately assess what they would find valuable, what concerns and objectives they have, and how I could best serve them.

Take this blog post. In my mind, I’m thinking of many of the marketers I’ve met at MarketingSherpa Summits. Specifically, the time-starved marketer, who is so focused on (and so good at) executing on a plan that s/he can easily fall into the trap of overconfidence bias, simply by executing, executing, executing without stopping to ask, “With whom am I speaking?”

So, start with a buyer persona or customer theory (see slide 22). And then carry on a conversation in your mind with the customer every time you execute on your plan.

3. What’s in it for the customer?

Spit out that Kool-Aid! And post this next statement on your office wall – The customer does not care about [insert your product, feature, service, event, or network TV show here]; they care about what brings them value.

This is one of the most difficult questions to answer honestly. The feature or product around which you’re building your entire campaign (or, perhaps, the one around which someone is telling you to build your entire campaign) may not matter to the customer at all.

Sure, you may be able to increase how much they care, thanks to the sheer mass of your media budget. But you’ll be much more effective if you’re not so overconfident that you assume you can tell the people responsible for your paycheck what matters to them.

I can’t think of a more perfect example of this than the current print ads from Budweiser, which tout the new red crown tab on their cans. This is an excellent example of using marketing to try to make something out of a feature that provides zero value to the customer – overconfidence– plus massive marketing spend — in practice.

4. Where should my customers see my marketing message?

Sure, the media planner at your agency got a great deal on space in AARP magazine, but will your skateboard really sell to the 65 and older set?

An extreme example, I admit. But now that I’ve gotten your attention, how much thought have you put into the media for your message? Do you just go with a default option? Or do you really think through your customer’s thought sequence, and understand where the message makes the most sense?

5. When should my customers receive my marketing message?

Same as above. Timing can have a huge impact.

6. How do I know the answers to these questions?

Conduct real-world, real-time testing. And let your customers answer these questions for you.

There’s nothing more humbling — and nothing that can knock the overconfidence bias out of you quicker — than conducting a test and finding out you were wrong.

Related Resources:

Value Proposition: Revealing hidden value in your products and offers

Research Update: The state of email marketing testing and optimization

Value Proposition: The key to improving agency and vendor performance

Conversion Window: How to find the right time to ask your customer to act

A/B Split Testing — How to use A/B Split Testing to Increase Conversion Rates, Challenge Assumptions and Solve Problems (Web clinic replay)

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