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

Having worked both in the Landing Page Optimization (a.k.a., Conversion Optimization) and Social Media sides of marketing, I am amazed how quickly the latter stole our hearts and minds, while the former continues to be a mystery for most marketers.

When I set out to write the LPO Benchmark Survey for MarketingSherpa this January (publication date: May 4), I naturally—and erroneously—assumed that just like all the past research partners I worked with at MarketingExperiments, and our workshop attendees, and our webinar audiences, the marketers that hear about our survey would be at least accustomed to LPO as a category.

The survey is out now (Editor’s note: the survey closed on Mar 1), but what has surprised me is the response rate, compared to the response rate to the Social Media Marketing benchmark survey, which was fielded only a month earlier. 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…

Here’s why I like “tweet count” as the ultimate metric for a blog post. It’s basically a resounding “yes” to the oft-asked marketing question, “would you refer this to a friend?” Sure, you can look at “visits,” but that may be a better indication of a
good headline than a good post. Even “time on site” only tells you that someone stuck around longenough to kick the tires, but it doesn’t mean they got enough value from a post to take action.

As with any analytics tool, the Topsy Retweet Button isn’t perfect. Based on our traffic through TweetDeck, it seems to undercount the retweets on many posts. I’m pretty sure one of the posts below has some serious over-counting issues. And there has been a hanging chad or two.

Nevertheless, it remains the best way for us to gauge what posts have value for you. So, without any further ado, here are the 10 posts you told us were most valuable in 2010, along with a quote from your peers about each post… 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…

Foursquare or GroupOn? I think the playground game four square is far more impressive than the social media platform with the same name…and only then if you absolutely, positively can’t find a football. I think GroupOn has far more value for local social media marketers.

On the other hand, Senior Manager of Research Partnerships Andy Mott thinks that Foursquare is the natural evolution of the loyalty card.

Andy and I had fun with this debate in the above blog posts, taking an extreme side and insulting each other in creative ways. But our main point was to get you thinking about how you use local social media marketing with your brand.

We wanted to take this debate one step further and give you a look at how your other marketers are using local social media marketing. If you haven’t waded into this new form of local marketing yet, take a look at what your peers are doing… Read more…

In a recent blog post, Andy Mott brought up some excellent points about silos and skewed compensations plans in marketing departments.

I want to take this idea a step further. If only this were just confined within the marketing (or any) department. An even bigger problem is when different groups within the same company have different incentives that jeopardize your relationship with the customer.

Second only to intellectual property, a company’s most valuable resource is its customers. Not just the new customers we’re constantly chasing, but existing ones as well … especially in the age of social media, when your triumphs and foibles are just a click away from becoming a huge sales generator or PR disaster.

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” – Henry Ford

As an experienced business leader, customers = valuable is not a breathtakingly new equation to you. But, why, then, in an era of social media, do so many companies still treat customers the way they did in the early industrial age? In other words, does the mission serve the process, or does the process serve the mission?

Take the airline industry, for example. Customers hate to be nickeled and dimed, yet every major airline does it. They charge fees for checked bags, phone reservations, curbside check-in, and snacks and beverages.

And they have to, right? It’s how they make money. Except … they don’t make money, do they? It is the rare airline that has not been through bankruptcy protection, let alone turned a consistent profit.

That rare airline is Southwest, which charges no fees, yet has been profitable for 37 consecutive years. Read more…