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

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

  Read more…

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

  Read more…

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 …

Read more…

“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…

If you’re applying for jobs, you should consider LinkedIn as a landing page that sells … well … you. Earlier this year, LinkedIn hit the 100 million user mark, making it the fourth American social network to do so. And it’s not just the job seekers that log in — 73 of the Fortune 100 companies use LinkedIn Hiring Solutions.

In other words, expect potential employers to search for you on LinkedIn. And between applying for positions directly on LinkedIn and HR checking you out beyond your hard-copy resume, your profile could determine if you secure an interview and, ultimately, the job you want.

This is why optimizing your LinkedIn profile, like you would a product’s landing page, is important to your job hunt. Let’s see how we can apply MarketingExperiments’ research about landing page conversion to help optimize your LinkedIn profile page. To refresh your memory, we have developed the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence  to help marketers optimize landing pages for conversion:

C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a ^©

Wherein:
C = Probability of conversion
m = Motivation of user (when)
v = Clarity of the value proposition (why)
i = Incentive to take action
f = Friction elements of process
a = Anxiety about entering information

In this situation, let’s define conversion as convincing a hiring manager that you are worth an interview. And to keep this blog post at a decent length (and focused on elements of the LinkedIn page you can actually optimize), we’ll focus on optimizing your value proposition (after all, you have very little control over the actual layout of the page).

After all, LinkedIn offers many interesting applications and add-ons, but you must first focus on the heart of your profile: the value proposition. In this blog post, I will show you how to optimize your LinkedIn profile by focusing on 3 value proposition-based steps.

  Read more…

Optimizing your webpages and marketing campaigns is a daunting task for any marketer. We need all the help we can get. Free help is even better (as long as it’s actually, well, helpful). So to assist our audience of marketers with daily optimization tasks, our researchers have created 11 free marketing tools over the years, and I compiled the below list.

You can think of this as our idea of Halloween candy.

Please try them out and let us know how they work for you in the comments. Read more…