tagged 
C-Level
C-Level Tuesday
06Jan
36 landing page management secrets for post-click marketing
Most articles on landing pages talk about tactics for individual pages, such as tips for page layout or best practices for content. Those are useful lessons, to be sure, but as organizations scale up the number of distinct landing pages and post-click marketing initiatives they’re running, they encounter a different set of challenges.
These are landing page management issues.
Although few people discuss these issues, I can say, after many years of consulting in this industry, that these are ultimately the hurdles that prevent most companies from achieving best-in-class post-click marketing. Or, turning that around, efficient post-click marketing management is an untapped, strategic opportunity for competitive advantage.
With that in mind, I put together a report on enterprise post-click marketing that focuses exclusively on structures and methods to efficiently grow landing page management. It discusses people, processes, scaling mechanisms, and risk management in a collection of 36 recommendations:
- Build post-click recognition: bring all the stakeholders and participants together.
- Officially assign responsibility for post-click marketing to someone.
- Agree on post-click performance metrics and connect them to the online marketing ROI funnel.
- A pilot program is a splendid way to introduce post-click concepts and processes.
- Determine an overarching post-click marketing strategy that people can navigate by.
- Establish a way to coordinate continuity between pre-click ads and post-click experiences.
- Harness the very best creative talent you can — post-click is a creative channel.
- Communicate regular post-click updates and feedback with the whole online marketing team.
- Invest in education and plug into the global online marketing community.
- Establish a central repository for all landing pages and their components.
- Provide a standardized mechanism to “preview” and “proof” landing experiences.
- Minimize IT dependency for daily landing page production and management.
- Create a set of design templates for landing pages that adhere to your brand standards.
- Maintain pre-approved content elements that can be reused across multiple landing pages.
- Standardize data collection and form handling.
- Don’t fragment your respondent data by turning your landing page environment into a data silo.
- Interface consistently with enterprise-wide web analytics.
- Favor A/B testing over multivariate testing (MVT) for the power of simplicity.
- Handle special-case rules in a standardized manner.
- Organize your post-click marketing initiatives into campaigns and portfolios.
- Recycle and test good ideas from landing page in other contexts.
- Consider software-as-a-service (SaaS) for your landing page environment to grow smoothly.
- Rig your landing pages to automatically expire when their content is outdated.
- Have A/B tests automatically remove underperforming alternatives once statistical significance has been reached.
- Take notes on your experiments, briefly documenting hypotheses and conclusions.
- Promote the development of reusable/parameterized widgets and Flash objects.
- Install post-click marketing dashboards to continually “scan the horizon”.
- Grow the different stages of your online marketing funnel in proportion to each other.
- Support international landing pages properly in your environment.
- Leverage a portfolio strategy: more experiments = more opportunities to find gold.
- Learn from your shared, centralized campaign history.
- Use disproportionate traffic allocation for champion/challenger tests.
- Mitigate unsuccessful tactical ideas by always representing the brand well.
- Celebrate wins and share the credit — remember, post-click marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
- Review your ROI, even beyond the scope of your official post-click performance metrics.
- Finally, don’t rest on your laurels — online marketing is a highly dynamic environment.
To learn more, read the full 14-page report on enterprise post-click marketing.
Friday
02Jan
I'll brand you today for a conversion on Tuesday...
Welcome to 2009, post-click marketers!
As the first tip of the New Year, consider Matt Greitzer’s Search Insider column from a couple of days ago, Just One Opportunity for 2009. Matt is the head search guru at Razorfish, and if he could offer only one piece of advice to search marketers for the year ahead, it would be this: redefine success metrics by paying more attention to branding and other indirect effects of your online marketing.
We’ve settled squarely on directly measured, Web-based response metrics (sales, leads, revenue, etc.) as the primary indicator of value. And these metrics have a profound influence on everything from our optimization decisions to segmentation and targeting to budgeting to internal and external resourcing against the search opportunity.
What we’ve seen in the last quarter of 2008, however, is that every metric, whether derived from search, banner media, offline advertising, or “other”, is up for debate as marketers scrutinize their investments like never before.
Matt believes that marketers should incorporate three other dimensions into thinking about ROI:
First and foremost, we should factor in value outside of the online order process.
Second, we should push incessantly for brand awareness, message association and brand favorability metrics as a factor in evaluating search marketing success.
And third, we should quantify and include into our success metrics the opportunity costs of not participating in the search landscape, or segments therein.
A lot of Matt’s arguments extend quite logically into the landing pages and post-click marketing experiences associated with the click-throughs from these advertising sources. This is a big part of what I was getting at with my post a few weeks ago: Optimizing yourself out of a brand.
To be sure, we all want a higher conversion rate in our online marketing. That should remain as the primary metric of success, especially in post-click marketing programs. However, even if someone does not convert immediately on a particular landing page, we still want their brand experience to be a positive one — setting up the opportunity for a conversion in the future.
Wednesday
31Dec
Post-click marketing industry grows
As we noted last week, 2008 has been a breakthrough year for post-click marketing.
To round out the year, Chris Golec, the CEO of Demandbase, just wrote an article for today’s Online Media Daily titled Click to Close: How Marketers Are Supercharging Online Campaigns. Chris notes that of the billions of online ad dollars spent in B2B to drive clicks, some 98% of that traffic goes “unrealized”.
Basically, what do marketers do after the click? Fortunately, there is an emerging cottage industry focused on this very issue, picking up where the click leaves off. Welcome to the wonderful world of post-click marketing.
The biggest mistake companies make is to think the end goal of an online campaign is to drive traffic to a site. Click-throughs are an important metric, but traffic alone won’t bring home the proverbial bacon for most companies. Savvy customers now want a personalized experience — they want to know that you can fulfill their needs, yet they are not likely to fill out lengthy surveys to help show you the way.
It’s interesting to note that the term “post-click marketing” is taking on several different meanings — or, more accurately, several different sub-categories:
Landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites and their optimization, what we focus on here at ion — and what I primarily intended when I coined the term post-click marketing in 2005.
Identification, filtering and tracking of site visitors, such as what Demandbase does, which can enable light personalization of one’s core web site accordingly.
Lead nurturing after a respondent has been converted, which certainly happens after the initial click, but since it also happens after the initial conversion, I think of this more as post-conversion marketing.
These are not mutually exclusive — in fact, they’re highly complementary. All of them contribute to the same benefit:
More selling opportunities and higher marketing ROI.
Tuesday
30Dec
Resolutions for 2009 (Online Marketing Edition)
You’re an online marketer, the New Year is almost upon you, and the old stand-by resolutions — exercise a little more, eat a little better, kick an old habit — don’t do justice to your creative intuition. So if you’re coming up short on meaningful and achievable New Year’s Resolutions, we have a few suggestions:
If you haven’t already, get on top of the post-click marketing stage of your online marketing funnel.
Do a competitive benchmark of the other firms in your space, from advertising through post-click. Commit to becoming best-in-class.
Make search marketing continuity a rallying mission. If you haven’t already, put together a message match message map — the exercise alone will reveal new opportunities.
Discover at least three new attractive segments in your audience that can be targeted specifically with Long Tail marketing.
Experiment with at least three interactive widgets or Flash objects to increase the engagement and utility of select landing pages in your portfolio.
Build at least three landing pages specifically for mobile devices — all those millions of iPhones and Blackberries are attached to potential customers, eager to be engaged on the go.
Double your conversion rate — yes, double it — by improving user experience after the click.
Of course, just like you might hire a personal trainer at the gym to help with some of those other, mundane resolutions, please know that our team of post-click professionals would be delighted to help you achieve any or all of these goals in the year ahead.
Have a safe Happy New Year!
Monday
22Dec
'Twas the moment of click-through
‘Twas the moment of click-through, and all through the site
All the pages were crafted to bring visitors delight
The images were placed in the layout with care
Along with the headlines that perfectly paired
The tracking codes were nestled, all snug in the page
To measure performance (that’s what we do in this age)
The variations were ready for a good A/B test
To discover which versions would convert people best
Landing pages were added to match ads even more
Knowing the secret to a great quality score
“Now Flash, now widgets”, the marketer cried
Improving engagement by wow’ing their eyes
Respondents were segmented with a choice and a click
Receiving the right content and offers right quick
Behaviors were noted so the whole team could learn
How to do even better when respondents return
And as the traffic arrived, through the funnel it went
From pre-click to post-click to money well spent
How the dashboard twinkled as the conversion rate soared
And the marketer knew there’d be joy on the Board
As the conversion rate multiplied, the marketer winked
“This post-click marketing rocks, don’t you think?”
And you could hear her exclaim as she drove out of sight
“Happy click-throughs to all, and to all a good night!”