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

Ramping up for the fast approaching MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013, this blog post features a video excerpt from one of last year’s presentations.

Watch Steve Parker, Vice President, Direct Marketing Division, firstSTREET, explain how radically redesigning a landing page led to a 500% increase in sales.

In this excerpt, Steve provided the audience advice on making the decision to conduct a radical redesign on a landing page.

He said to ask yourself a few questions:

• Will I achieve my annual goals by further tweaks?
• Do I have the resources to “go radical?” (Time, budget, outside-the-box thinking, internal support)
• How will I minimize risk?
• What happens if I win, draw or fail? (To my business? To my career?)

He also offered some recommendations:

• “Pre-plan your learning” in the test design
• Manage risk
• Get truly radical
• Apply what you learned, and apply your educated guesses

If you would like to watch the entire presentation, Steve covered the entire process of this case study, beginning with why he chose a very poorly performing landing page for a new product for testing and optimization, all the way through the radical redesign of the page and eventual increase in sales on the new landing page.

Read more…

MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013, May 20-23, in Boston, is rapidly approaching. For this blog post, we are featuring a video excerpt from one of last year’s presentations.

Speaking in this video clip is Tony Doty, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS, on involving IT when prioritizing the testing sequence in a testing and optimization program.

Tony talked about some key questions, such as:

• How long will it take to develop and set up each test?
• How difficult is the underlying technology? For example, is the webpage a custom development, or was it created with off-the-shelf content management software?
• Is the landing page stand-alone, or is it more deeply connected to the architecture of the website?

One point Tony makes is this – as a marketer conducting testing and optimization, you might have a part of the website you absolutely want to test. At the same, that part of the website might not be a page you can immediately impact.

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There’s something about putting a video on YouTube and watching the view count climb as more and more people find your message and click play. Think of all that time you wasted hitting the refresh button over and over on your last video.

It’s thrilling because there’s always a chance it will go viral and reach one million views and you’ll finally be able to buy that yacht you’ve always wanted from the bonus you’ll get.

Of course, it never turns out that way. But, according to a recent experiment we ran with a Research Partner, there is one thing you can do to ensure that more people who see your video will actually click the play button.

It’s simple really — almost too simple. But it works. All you need to do is adjust your first frame to something somewhat interesting.

Here’s the test we recently ran on one YouTube video with two different first frames …

What makes a message go viral? More importantly, how can you position your marketing messages to go viral?

Here at MECLABS, we recently had a front-row seat to just how easy it can be for a message to go viral. Senior Marketing Manager Justin Bridegan attended a rally at one of Mitt Romney’s events here in Jacksonville. During a break in Mitt’s stump speech, in which the former governor was attacking Newt, Justin yelled out, “Send him to the moon.”

With that comment, Justin changed the course of history. Or at least had a big impact on the latest message to go viral in the 24-hour news cycle.

Mitt started on to his next point, but then spun on his heels and asked, “What did you say?”

Justin, ever the marketer, sold the line even better the second time, “Send him to the moon.”

With that, Mitt changed the course of his speech to talk about Newt’s moon colonies, and within just a few hours, this interaction appeared on sites from New York Post, Los Angeles Times, and 7,131 other related articles.

Click to enlarge

“I never thought what I said would be repeated or shape some of the political discussion or landscape for the day,” Justin said. “Only after posting my video did I realize my comment had been used across the country in many of the major news affiliates.”

“It really comes down to being at the right place, at the right time, and then seizing the moment. Today I witnessed firsthand what real-time marketing means.”

Of course, we were eating it up here in the office every time the quote was picked up in another major news source. (One of our favorites was a comment on a New York Times article claiming Justin was a plant for the Romney campaign.)

Read more…

This post is the first in a new series about using video effectively on your landing pages.

Many marketers assume that putting a video on a landing page is going to automatically lift conversions. As much as I wish that were true, results have shown otherwise.

Your video can have the best production value, best talent, best message, etc. — but if you don’t deliver the video in a certain way, you can actually hurt conversions.

There are many things I want to say about online videos. However, I’d like to start where your visitors start.

Your visitors need a reason to watch

The truth is none of your visitors start with a reason to watch your video.

Whether it is an email capture form or a registration page, as we have discussed in recent web clinics, your site must give a reason for every action you ask your visitor to take. The same applies to video.

You should not assume that viewers will automatically be drawn to your video. For visitors, there are many potential annoyance and risk factors associated with videos: How much time will this take? Will this have any good information? Will I have any technical difficulties?

Another way to say this is that watching a video has a value proposition associated with it. You must make sure that you are communicating this value to your visitors just to get them to watch the video.

For instance, maybe the value of the video is that visitors can get all the information of a page in less than a minute and they don’t have to read the full page. Maybe the value is that you can see and hear the CEO of the company speak about the product. Or maybe it’s a demo of the product or testimonials from other people who have used it. Whatever it is, there must to be some value that is expressed to the viewers up front.

How you communicate that value will vary. Video headlines, subheads, descriptive tags, thumbnails, and play buttons can all be used for this for this (see illustration). If you do this part right, you will see significantly better results from using videos on your landing pages.

For my next post, we will look at the relationship of the content of a landing page to the video, drilling down on what kinds of pages most effectively utilize videos.

We know that most viral campaigns do not go viral; at least that much is predictable. However, is there a way to know what might cause something to go viral or not?

Testing over the past few years shows that viral marketing, like other aspects of marketing, can not only be tracked, but also predicted.

The components of what causes videos, blog entries, or any web-based media to go viral can be separated, analyzed, and adjusted to increase what has been called the “social velocity” of the medium. After years of testing, we are discovering which steps are instrumental in making a viral marketing campaign successful.

Our sister company, MarketingSherpa, in collaboration with Yovia.com, recently put together some videos answering some of the top questions we get from marketers concerning viral marketing…

Video: Is Viral Marketing Predictable?

See these other questions answered here:

Does viral marketing work for B2B?

Can viral marketing be tracked?

Is viral marketing predictable?

Is viral marketing free?

Does viral marketing require a large budget?

We’d like to get your take on these and other questions surrounding viral marketing. And if you’re looking for ways to improve or get started with viral marketing, don’t miss MarketingSherpa’s upcoming “How To Viral Market” webinar on Wednesday, December 10.

For additional ideas on video, check out our previous blog post: “What you need to know about using video online”