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

In 2011, this blog produced 140 blog posts. Hopefully, you found some of those blog posts helpful in your day-to-day marketing work. If you did not, let us know in the comments and we’ll write 140 better ones next year.

Of course, as a marketer, you’re probably one of the busiest people alive and you probably missed a few, if not the majority of, posts this year.

So to catch you up, we sorted our posts by how valuable they were to you (as you and your peers communicated to us via the Twitter button) and created a roundup of the 11 most-tweeted posts in 2011.

Here they are in order of least popular to THE most popular MarketingExperiments blog post of 2011 (and potentially all time).

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Writing an effective headline takes time. It’s arguably the most important part of your copy, and skimping on the time investment usually produces skimpy results.

When will inspiration strike? What will be your muse? As Douglas Adams said, “Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds.”

Unfortunately, as a marketer, you don’t have the time (or goatee) of a creative writing master’s student. However, you do have to write.

Your goal isn’t different though. It’s not art; it’s income. So you don’t have time to produce perfect headlines for every piece of copy you generate. And you can use a reproducible methodology that gets you in the ballpark of effective, conversion-driving headlines (and testing will take you the last mile).

So the question is this: how can you (a time-strapped marketer) write effective headlines in a relatively short amount of time?

In part one of this series, I proposed a methodology for getting headlines done quickly. It involves a methodology for evaluating and refining raw headline drafts. When you have a method for a task, it automatically becomes more manageable. In this case, you can write headlines the same way a plumber fixes a pipe.

However, I only gave you the first part of the methodology for evaluating your headline drafts.

For those who didn’t read Monday’s post, let me quickly fill you in.

I first wrote three headlines for our December 7^th Web clinic and chose one to evaluate:

The Year in Optimization: The top insights and transferrable principles from 121 tests in 2011

In Step 2, I underlined the noun phrases as these generally communicate the core value or what the audience will get.

Then in Step 3, I evaluated the force of the noun phrases around four key elements:

• Appeal: How attractive is the phrase to our ideal reader?
• Credibility: How believable is the phrase?
• Exclusivity: Can anyone else credibly claim to have what is offered in the phrase?
• Clarity: How easily can the reader understand it?

This second post highlights the part of the methodology for refining your headlines into a finished product.

So without further ado, I’ll continue with Step 4:

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In today’s Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes – MECLABS Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin will share our top 2011 discoveries.

But before we share what we learned, we wanted to hear from you. Here are a few of the top “Aha” moments from your peers …

Phone calls from Adwords

That 96.5% of our Adwords conversions in a three-month test were phone calls – which were not tracked in our analytics. We’re now testing KeyMetric.net capabilities on a couple campaigns so we can track phone keyword conversions.

– Michael Cordova, Managing Partner, Mercury Leads

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The majority of B2B organizations are increasing their marketing budgets for inbound marketing tactics. One of the most popular of those inbound tactics is virtual events and webinars, with 60% of marketers increasing their investment according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

“It is essential for organizations to gain the trust of their buyers before they can hope to convert them,” said Jen Doyle, the Benchmark Report’s lead author. “Webinars offer an effective platform to improve thought leadership and reputation, both essential components to winning trust. The cost effectiveness of webinars is just the icing on the cake, so many organizations are shifting to include webinars as part of their marketing plans.”

Of course, a webinar isn’t very effective if no one attends. So in today’s MarketingExperiments blog post, Gaby Paez and I will give you some test ideas for those all important webinar invite emails (and if you’d like to see how we craft our own webinar invite emails, just sign up) by reviewing a live optimization submission from The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Gaby is associate director of Research at MECLABS, and you can hear more of her test ideas in the Web clinic replay, Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%, along with some of the audience’s optimization advice for this submission.

Here’s the submission (and you can view it online as well) …

Click to enlarge

BACKGROUND

Email – Invitation to a paid social media webinar, “Going Mobile: How Nonprofits Succeed,” which features a bonus opportunity to gain access to “an exclusive discussion group” and three speakers:

• Felicia Carr, Senior Director of Online Communications, National Parks Conservation Association
• Jason Wood, Director of Digital Communications Services, Salvation Army National Headquarters
• Cody Switzer, Assistant Web Editor, The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Audience – Nonprofit professionals in fund-raising, marketing, social media and development

Objective – To get registrants for a paid webinar

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While the true value of your offer is critical, if you don’t optimize the perceived value of that offer, that true value is meaningless from a marketing perspective.

Take our MarketingExperiments Web clinics, for example. I’m not going to point any fingers, but there are a lot of bad marketing webinars out there that aren’t worth your time. Someone throws a few sales slides together the day before, pushes their product really hard in the beginning, and then drones through 60 minutes of slides.

However, we invest a lot of time and resources in our Web clinics — effort and value added to each webinar that isn’t readily apparent on the invitation landing page or in the invite email.

In other words, they have hidden value

We wanted to reveal some of that hidden value, so we produced the below video …

Now, as a MarketingExperiments blog reader, I’m letting you in pretty early on in the process. Our editorial wunderkind, Paul Cheney, is literally creating the landing page as I’m writing this blog post, so I don’t have results to share yet.

I’ll get to our plans in just a minute, but let’s first talk about your product’s hidden value …

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“Marketing is the ultimate custodian of the value proposition.” Dig it, doc… but what about those pesky consultants? #webclinic

@aaron_bolshaw Tweeted this question through #webclinic during last week’s Web clinic.

I quickly Tweeted back…

As someone who has been a consultant I can say a mktg org w/ a well-defined value prop is much easier to work w/ #webclinic

And that’s how Twitter works. I made what Malcolm Gladwell would call a “blink” decision. It wasn’t until I was driving home that night that I realized just how profound Aaron’s Tweet was.

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The value prop is the glue that holds your company’s partnerships together

Core competencies. That is the sole focus of the modern company. If the function is not central to the way your company works, outsource it. This is the reason for the relationship with your advertising agency.

And the business ideology that spurred the explosive growth of, for example, Foxconn – a company with $110 billion in revenue, more than 920,000 employees, and its own “manufacturing city” in China. You many have never heard of Foxconn, but if you’re reading this on a Dell computer or an Apple iPad while receiving a call on your Nokia phone, you are, in essence, a customer.

And your company likely has many similar partnerships. So how do you herd these cats and focus them on your company’s, and therefore your customer’s success?

As I was driving home after the Web clinic, I was listening to “Drucker’s Contributions to Marketing” which I downloaded from iTunes U (on my iPod…thanks, Foxconn).

I had an epiphany and realized how important Aaron’s statement was. Wharton professor George S. Day was talking about this challenge that companies have with outsourcing, and said (I edited slightly for clarity)… Read more…