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

For MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011, we brought a few of our analysts along, set them up in the MECLABS booth, and let them loose live optimizing attendee emails and landing pages. Here is one example that we thought might be helpful for you as you optimize your own pages …

St. Stephen’s University (full disclosure: our Managing Director, Flint McGlaughlin, sits on the Board of Directors for St. Stephen’s University) has been driving traffic to landing page from a Facebook ad to collect leads on potential students. The problem is that a majority of leads aren’t converting to actual applications to the school.

Here is the landing page, and here is the lead capture form from the page:

After the user fills out the form they are redirected to a “thank you” page where they have the option to apply to the university at no cost. The school wants applicants, and not leads, and found through this campaign potential students who didn’t initially apply from the thank you page did not convert to applicants once the lead was transferred to an email follow-up campaign. Read more…

Your Value Proposition is at the bottom of every decision made by every visitor for every action they make on your Website. And so when comparing the significance of this fundamental force of value with the transient nature of a PPC ad that has at most 130 characters, it might seem as if I am trying to put David on a seesaw with Goliath.

However, though seemingly small and comparatively insignificant, a PPC ad can provide an invaluable resource for marketers trying to identify and craft an effective Value Proposition. And like the rudder of a ship directs something 1000 times its size, I believe a PPC ad can inform the bedrock of all your marketing efforts, namely, your Value Proposition.

What exactly is a Value Proposition?

But before diving any deeper, we should get clear on what I actually mean by the term Value Proposition. At MarketingExperiments we define your Value Proposition as the answer you have to one simple question: Why should your ideal prospect buy from you rather than any of your competitors? So, your Value Proposition is not a catchy slogan or a detailed business plan, but rather a concise, clear, and credible answer to this question.

Seems simple, yet the answers we often receive from marketers are confusing, unappealing, braggadocios, vague, and sound just like the claims everyone else is making. So, how would you answer this question about your online offer? Can you state it clearly in about ten words or less? Take a minute and give it some thought…

We will teach more on the aspects of a good Value Proposition during today’s live web clinic, but for now, it is sufficient to understand that your Value Proposition is that primary reason why your ideal prospect should buy from you rather than your competitors. Read more…

Pity the poor PPC ad copywriter. Back in the days of the so-called mad men, before Transparent Marketing was a necessity, they could just mix hyperbole, bold fonts, and a handsome fella, and then head out for the three-martini lunch. No one is measuring anyway, so who could prove the ad didn’t work?

Fast forward to the present day. In a PPC (pay-per-click) ad, all you have are a few precious characters and tiny visuals in which to convince a skeptical consumer that will only glance at your ad for a split second that your ad deserves a click. On top of that, with paid search, you’re competing for that click with all of your competitors’ ads, as well as organic traffic, with no visual help at all.

On Wednesday’s Web clinic – Optimizing PPC Ads: How to leverage the full potential of 130 characters by clarifying the value proposition – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will review key PPC experiments illustrating the potential of a clear value proposition to help the humble PPC ad men and women of the world perfect their craft. He will also teach on the components of a properly stated value proposition and how they apply specifically to PPC ads.

But first, we wanted to hear from you. How do you create an ad that stands out from the rest of your competitors? How do you get the click? Here are a few of our favorite answers… Read more…

I’ve learned a lot in the past year.  I think we all have.

Due to a wealth of factors – most notably the economy – marketers were asked to grow, evolve, adapt and even take new risks to stay afloat in 2010. That being said, there’s a lot to be learned from the past year’s struggles … for all of us. If 2009 drove us down to unanticipated professional lows, 2010 taught us how to re-tune our marketing strategies and conform to a changing economic landscape.

As I prepare to cull through hundreds of submissions for the MarketingSherpa 2011 Wisdom Report, I felt it was only right to take one last look at the 2010 edition, to see where we were a year ago, and where we made strides along the way. While combing through the pages, many of last year’s submissions evoked some forward-thinking questions for 2011. I’ve highlighted a few of these below. If you have the same questions – or can provide some answers – I would love to hear your insights.

Below are some of the more commonly shared thoughts from last year’s report. Read on to see if last year’s wisdom still proves valuable as you prepare for 2011. Read more…

Quality traffic is essential for any marketing campaign. Shoot, it’s essential for any successful business. You could have a highly valuable product (let’s say a real cure for male baldness), at the best price (let’s say for just a shipping address with no strings attached), and the most optimized website presentation on the interwebs (let’s say it has undergone a year of MECLABS testing), but despite these advantages, if there are no address-owning bald men who can find your website, well then your business will look a lot like me trying to drive a stick-shift.

Ok, crazy example, but the point is this: Quality traffic is essential.

The question for marketers is – where can we find the most quality traffic on the Web? Should we work with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)? Is it smart to invest in social media? Will external website banner ads be worth the costs? There are many options out there, but today, I want to bring your attention to an experiment that compared the traffic quality between two of the most common online channels: PPC vs. Banner Ads.

Now, explaining this test will be a little more tedious than usual because it deals with multiple experiments of a unique multi-step conversion funnel. But, rest assured, if you can just get a bird’s eye view of the optimization strategy, that viewpoint will be sufficient for what I am talking about in this post. Read more…

It has been a while since we have published Pay Per Click (PPC) ad testing. Lately, it can seem like PPC has taken the back seat to topics like social media and mobile. However, PPC remains an integral part of the online marketing campaigns for many of our own Research Partners, so we are still testing to discover the most effective ways to craft PPC ads.

So enough introductions and segues, let’s get down to the test.

Background

This experiment involves a business-to-business (B2B) software provider. They were trying to optimize one of their best lead generation conversion paths. They started by focusing their test efforts on the channel driving traffic through this process, the PPC ad.

At the end of the day, they would end up testing and optimizing the complete conversion path (from PPC ad to form page). And the overall gains this company achieved are going to turn some heads on today’s web clinic, but for the sake of this blog post, let’s just look at how they optimized their paid search marketing campaign. Read more…