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

Where do new ideas come from? I often find they spring up at the intersection of two old ideas. Take today’s blog post. I recently wrote about ensuring that there is true value in your value proposition. Then I worked with Associate Editor Brad Bortone on the MarketingSherpa Wisdom Report submission form – where we publish our audience’s top lessons learned from this year.

Voila. A new idea. It made me wonder what “good” marketing you did this year.

After all, whether your hope this year is peace on Earth and goodwill toward men,tocelebrate a great miracle that happened there, or to just not get a lump of coal in your stocking…this is the time of year when our thoughts wander beyond year-end performance to actual, well, “good.”

So, with the holidays upon us, I thought it best to highlight your marketing efforts that contributed to the greater good…however you choose to define that. As well as get your thoughts on whether a marketing campaign can benefit more than just you and your company, or client.

One of my favorite “good” campaigns this year was the Pepsi Refresh Project. Pepsi decided not to advertise on the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years in favor of giving away $20 million through what is, essentially, a social media marketing campaign. So, how goes it? Will this approach become the choice of a new generation of marketers? “The brand equity is so huge we’d be crazy not to continue to work on it,” said CEO Indra Nooyi.

Well, that’s my pick. Here are some of my favorite responses from you… Read more…

We say in our online courses that every element of a Web page must state or support the value proposition. But, what communicates the value of an offer better – a beautiful image or well-crafted copy? Do people tend to respond better to images or do they prefer copy?

All marketers have to face these questions at one time or another in the creative process, and recently, our research analysts had the opportunity to test this particular issue. You might be, as I was, surprised by the results. Read more…

“Art & Copy” is a recent film about advertising and the title pretty much sums up your marketing communication tools right there. In Wednesday’s free Web clinic – Images vs. Copy: How getting the right balance increased conversion by 29% – Flint McGlaughlin, the Managing Director (CEO) of MECLABS, will a strategic process for integrating images and copy to increase response.

But first, we wanted to hear how you balance art and copy. And while no one responded, “Steel cage grudge match between the copywriter and the art director,” here are a few of our favorite answers… Read more…

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…

At the recent MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit in Boston, I had the chance to interview noted marketing strategist and best-selling author David Meerman Scott about email marketing…

Read more…

“It’s right there, just click on Company, then About the Team, and then Areas of Expertise.”

“We need the form to capture the Social Security number, because then our phone reps won’t have to ask for it when they call.”

“All they have to do is set up the domain name first, and then they can complete their Web hosting order.”

Our analysts hear this all the time—how marketers justify not immediately and clearly communicating their company’s value proposition to the visitor, requesting personal information that stops the visitor from submitting the lead form, or requiring full account setup before the sales transaction can be completed.

Those marketers are right. Not just because the value statements are indeed there or because the personal info will be provided by phone, or because account setup will be completed later anyway. They have hard numbers to show that visitors do jump through these hoops and conversions do happen.

The problem is that they are right only a tiny fraction of the time—measured by a metric we know and love: the conversion rate. Read more…