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

“Make sure we’re not building our dreams, make sure we’re building the customer’s dream.” – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS.

Our team was conducting a product planning session with our CEO, Flint, and he dropped the above quote on us. So simple, yet so profound. (And if you haven’t met Flint, this is pretty much how he speaks – with many eminently Tweetable sound bytes).

Of course, living up to the above challenge is easier said than done. How do you tie into what your customer really wants? Value proposition.

However, if you’re like me, that answer presents another question – “I’m not the CEO of our company, our value proposition is out of my control. What can I do?” After all, while we were conducting this product planning session, I was well aware that I can’t convince Flint to change the value prop for all of MECLABS (nor should I).

In this case, you need to focus on your control points while tapping into your company’s overall value proposition. Enter, the derivative value proposition. Read more…

Upon the completion of the recent MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, we learned that because of an ever more challenging environment, B2B marketers are beginning to embrace sales conversion as a Sales and Marketing responsibility, and not just Sales alone.

We are on the right track. The challenge is that marketers are having trouble gaining funnel optimization maturity.

Chart: B2B marketers show high levels of maturity at top of the funnel, not at the bottom

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B2B marketers are the most likely to have formal processes established for lead generation, and the least likely to have them for overall funnel optimization. Now is the time for marketers to capitalize on this trend, and really get ahead of the curve to establish their companies and themselves as industry leaders and champion over the competition.

So how can marketers gain maturity in funnel optimization? As a highly complex process, it is likely the reason for marketer’s struggle. Starting with some funnel optimization is going to be more effective than paying no regard to it. In this interest, we have identified a simplified, five-step process to getting started with funnel optimization. Read more…

There are so many difficult decisions to make in marketing

- Which headline will perform the best?
- Which value proposition resonates most with my potential customers?
- Which call-to-action will be most effective?

This is why evidence-based marketing resonates so strongly with some marketers. As opposed to taking a random guess to answer one of these questions, why not make the decision based on prevailing evidence?

And yet, this raises another challenge. To make good evidence-based decisions, you need accurate evidence.

To help you make business decisions on a solid footing, in today’s Web clinic at 4 p.m. EDT (educational funding provided by HubSpot) – Bad Data: The 3 validity threats that make your tests look conclusive (when they are deeply flawed) – we’ll show you a few of the ways we ensure our marketing tests, and the data they produce, are valid.

But first, we asked your peers for their top marketing data quality tips. They covered a wide spectrum of marketing data approaches and use cases… Read more…

To understand online advertising, you must understand women’s haircuts. To wit, have you ever heard this line: “How do you like my new haircut?”

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Gentlemen, you’ve probably been in this same boat before (and ladies on the other end of it). Your wife gets a new haircut. You don’t notice. Consequences ensue.

But as a man, I can attest that we only notice huge changes in things that vastly interest us. She had hair before. She has it now. What’s the difference?

However, if the wide receiver you’re starting on your fantasy team has even the slightest limp, you’ll instantly notice. Because you’re just that interested.

And I have news for you – your online advertising is not something that your audience is hugely interested in. “Visitors view Web pages as content in the middle with noise all around it. That noise is banner ads,” says Dustin Eichholt, Research Analyst, MECLABS.

So, how do you stick out among that noise and grab attention? Do you always want to? I had a discussion about that with our researchers at one of our recent Content Meetings (These are fun and educational meetings. A chance for the editorial team to pick our analysts’ brains. Think “Real Time with Bill Maher” meets “Science Friday with Ira Flatow.”) Here’s what they had to say… Read more…

At MECLABS, we’ve conducted a lot of research on value propositions. We found this element to be so essential to successful marketing, we included it in our Conversion Sequence, which our researchers use during their optimization research.

Your value proposition is the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. And since it is such a vital building block to successful marketing, you would think every professional marketer would have this down cold. But from past analysis and audience interaction, many are entirely missing the boat on what their “primary reason” should be.

In fairness, once you’ve taken a sip of your company’s Kool Aid, it’s very hard to get truly discover what your value prop should be. So, in today’s free Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share our value proposition discoveries to help you nail this crucial element of your marketing programs.

But first, we turned to your marketing peers and ask them how they find the most effective value proposition. Here are a few of our favorite nuggets of wisdom… Read more…

This week marks the fielding of MarketingSherpa’s third annual Social Marketing Benchmark Survey. Looking back, I am fascinated at how far our practices have advanced in this channel in the past three years.

One of the most significant advances has been the materialization of the social marketing architecture.  This systematic redesign of how social media sites individually contribute to overall marketing performance, has also brought attention to the significant need to incorporate landing page optimization as an important element of a social marketing strategy. Read more…