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

At last week’s MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit in Boston, we had a very interesting panel of social media marketers sharing their experiences with everything from metrics to internally selling the business value of the practice.

One question that always interests me is…how should marketers deal with negative social media comments, postings, and the like? If you come across negative sentiment that is discovered during listening, or in general any type of negative blogs, blog comments, postings on Facebook, Twitter etc., how should you react?

Here at MECLABS, we follow the credo of Transparent Marketing. Hey, we’re not perfect and we don’t have all the answers. We’re always experimenting. And where we fall short, someone else might have a better idea.

At the expense of receiving a deluge of negative social media mentions, I like (clever Facebook pun intended) when we get some negativity coming our way. The overwhelming amount of social media attention we get is positive. When we get some negative feedback, it means professional marketers are passionately following our content.

And that’s the other thing – its feedback. As I said, we’re always experimenting and learning ourselves. We’re also lucky to have a very savvy audience of experienced marketers. So those negative comments help us decide how to shape our content to most benefit our audience. As I’ve said before, our job is to help you do your job better. When you tell us what you don’t need and what you do need, we get closer to hitting that mark.

(Of course, now that I’ve set myself up for all the negative comments, I also wanted to let you know that you can always give me feedback in private as well.)

Enough from me, on to the experts from the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit that were kind enough to share their wisdom… Read more…

Every day I hear a of some new-fangled thing that makes my head spin with all the implications. At MarketingSherpa B2B Summit in San Francisco, the attendees were electrified with technology-inspired buzz in spite of this terrible economy.

It reminded me of the time just before the tech bubble burst in the late ‘90s when everyone was giddy over the possibilities of the Internet. Only this time, the wild enthusiasm is tempered with the pragmatism and worry about the state of our economy. And no doubt some of us gray hairs remember the foolishness of the bubble from the ‘90s (well, and maybe even our own more recent home-buying exuberance).

I’m not sure if JigSaw or the Apple iPad is creating more buzz in the business world. I wrote about the coming JigSaw tidal wave a few weeks ago, so let me share my thoughts on Apple fever this week. Read more…

Product pages are often the moment of decision for a visitor. They may have worked through categories and directories to land on the most relevant product to their needs; or they may have weeded through a sea of search ads to have finally arrived at your page. And now, only one question remains, “Is this product worth its cost?”

Recently, our research analysts were given the opportunity to test varying designs for a given product page. At the end of our experimentation, we had discovered a product page layout that increased revenue by 24%. What follows is an overview of the test and our findings. Read more…

Many of us here in the lab headed out to California last week, a more successful West Coast swing than our hometown Jaguars thanks to a great MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit. While in the Bay Area, our own Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director (CEO) of MECLABS, headed down to Cisco headquarters in San Jose for an IPTV broadcast to the networking company’s worldwide partner community about driving better ROI from marketing campaigns.

Here’s a clip from a quick interview after the broadcast, about three simple principles that can help you optimize website conversions… Read more…

It seemed like everyone had one thing on their mind at this year’s first MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit: metrics. Well, a few people had shopping and cocktails on their mind too, as we were minutes from the shopping Mecca known as Union Square in San Francisco, not to mention a million great restaurants.

My own sidebar conversations and those of my MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS colleagues circled around a basic belief that 20 to 30 percent of the sales pipeline should come from marketing leads.

For the most part, we can all thank SiriusDecisions for this advancement in our collective understanding of funnel metrics. Everyone at budget time has a “Demand Waterfall” funnel model.

That percentage of revenue issue raises two questions for me. The first one is why 20 to 30 percent should be the correct answer. Read more…

“Many tradeshows have experienced a decline in attendance and exhibitors in recent years. In addition to companies cutting back on their tradeshow attendance due to financial reasons, many attendees are also scaling back their tradeshow participation, due to travel costs and time away from the office. Virtual events eliminate some of these issues.”

The above quote is from Chris Chariton, Vice President of Supplier Marketing & Marketing Services at GlobalSpec – the engineering search engine. To help you incorporate virtual events into your marketing mix, we conducted a virtual interview with Chris… Read more…