Archive for the 'Lead Generation' Category

How To Plan Your ‘09 Online Marketing Budget

Published
by
Eric Dudley
on September 16, 2008
in Branding, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Media Buying, Online Marketing, Paid Search, SEO, Search Marketing, Social Media, Website Analytics and Website Effectiveness
. 3 Comments

During these tough economic times, budgeting is becoming an even more critical aspect of the planning process.  It’s easy for many companies to immediately dismiss marketing as a disposable expense, however, research shows that companies which continue to market during an economic downturn are that much farther ahead of those that don’t.

We consult with many clients regarding their annual online marketing strategies and plans.  Here are some tips to consider to get your 2009 Online Marketing budget approved.

1. Outline expected results

Your goal is to link marketing initiatives and strategies to financial outcomes, therefore you need to make sure you can effectively show how investing in online marketing will result in specific goals and objectives.

For example, your marketing initiatives may include one or more of the following:

  • Drive incremental sales. Show how your online marketing plan will directly impact sales. Your outcomes are pretty straightforward if your marketing directly generates sales. Tactics may include Paid Search, search engine optimization, online media buying, and email marketing.
  • Drive leads into the sales pipeline. Show how you will engage your online audience and generate interest and demand that results in generating a lead.  Tactics may include Paid Search, search engine optimization, online media buying, and email marketing.
  • Engage and convert more visitors.Show how you will engage more visitors and get them to respond to your offer.  Small lift in conversion rates can easily multiply sales.  Tactics may include web effectiveness and multivariate testing.
  • Interact with your audience.Show how you will engage your audience where they spend time online today.  Buzz and referrals can be powerful and result in customer evaluation and adoption.   Tactics may include web analytics, multivariate testing, and social media.
  • Building your brand. Show how exposing your brand will result in greater recognition and adoption resulting in greater engagement and ultimately sales.  Granted, this is a longer term approach that requires more buy-in.  Tactics may include paid search, online media buying, and social media.

To project your expected outcomes, quantify the results you have achieved prior and make sound assumptions. This gives more weight to your strategy, shows sound thinking, and often creates a positive collaborative dialog.

2. Educate decision makers on the dynamics of the strategy.

The next step and one of the most critical is getting buy-in and approval from the powers that be.  Educating your executives on the core strategy to the point that they are nodding their heads in agreement is important.  Identifying any threats to the strategy and plan should be highlighted, but not magnified. It is important to reinforce with the decision makers the following:

  • Integrated plan with critical mass. Show how complementary tactics yield even better results.  For example, how search marketing and online media combined yields higher returns when integrated successfully.
  • Marketing needs to be supported through the entire funnel. If there are other dependencies to driving sales, ensure that those parts of the funnel are held accountable to their target conversion rates.
  • Budgeting for analytics is critical to measuring and delivering expected outcomes. Without a unified measurement tool, showing expected outcomes will be challenging.  Ensure you have an analytics platform that captures leading KPIs along with bottom-line conversions.  For example, your web analytics platform should be able to tell you how a opt-in email marketing campaign directly impacts sales on the website.
  • A testing budget that allows for new champions to surface. We recommend setting aside around 10% of your budget if possible to test new hypothesis and in some cases emerging tactics.

If asked how to reduce the overall budget, suggest that the decision makers take more budget and wipe out the integrated approach because it may not be effective enough to make a substantial impact.

3. Build executive confidence in your online strategy with clear financial expectations and outcomes.

With an integrated, well thought-through strategy, and the measurement of analytics to determine the financial outcomes, you will build confidence in your executives and gain support to approve and execute your online marketing plan.

I welcome your comments and feedback below:

Multivariate Testing Accelerates and Drives Improved Conversion Rates

Published
by
Eric Dudley
on August 11, 2008
in Customer Acquisition, Lead Generation, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Marketing, Website Analytics and Website Effectiveness
. 3 Comments

As online marketers we have many levers to optimize.  As we strive to attract qualified visitors we also realize a targeted visitor is only as good as the experience they encounter when they arrive.   It is our opportunity to deliver an exceptional experience and great offer that they choose to act and achieve a desired outcome.

Testing landing pages is a great way to determine what message, experience, and offer our audience best responds.  It’s about “lift” and “improved conversion rates”. By thoroughly testing and optimizing landing pages, marketers have realized exponential returns. 

While an effective, but less sophisticated model of testing, A/B testing tests a single site element against a single control version. For example, two landing pages each with a different headline and hero image.

Quickbooks Multivariate Test

Quickbooks Multivariate Test

Multivariate testing takes A/B testing to another level by testing multiple elements at the same time. It not only shows you which combination of elements generates more leads, but shows which individual elements generates more conversions, whether it be a call to action, a button, an offer, or even a hero image. Multivariate testing allows you to identify the specific aspects of your campaign elements that have the greatest influence on site visitors.

By using multivariate testing, you will be able to ascertain which elements of your Paid Search landing page yields the highest number of site visitors to perform a desired action such as requesting information or making a purchase.

While many of the champion combinations may seem intuitive, many will also surprise you.

Using multivariate testing accelerates a marketers ability to yield the best results when comparing to A/B testing.  As an example, with one of our clients, we were able to produce a lift of over 11% using multivariate testing in a short period of time.  If you are interested in learning more about multivariate testing we would recommend these:

  • Google Optimizer is a free multivariate testing platform but has many limitations.
  • Omniture recently purchased Offermatica and have re-branded it: Test & Target.  It’s a much more sophisticated platform for multivariate testing and one we have evaluated and adopted.

What would a 11% or even 1% lift of visitor conversions do for your bottom-line?   In many cases, make it a no brainer decision.  I welcome your feedback and comments.

Search Engine Strategies Day 1 - What To Do?

Published
by
Tom Dressler
on August 7, 2008
in Branding, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, Lead Generation, Online Marketing, Paid Search, SEO, Search Marketing, Social Media, Website Analytics and Website Effectiveness
. 3 Comments

Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2008We are getting ready to head out to San Jose for the 2008 Search Engine Strategies Conference, Aug. 18-22. For the first time we will be blogging LIVE providing great information on the latest in Search Engine Marketing. Please join us here at MarketerInsight to learn what’s going on at Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search.

Below is a overview of what’s going on. Please let me know on what topics are of interest to you. I have some ideas but would like confirmation. So here it goes…

Search Engine Strategies offers 5 different tracks on the first day of the conference, they are:

  1. World View
  2. Search 2.5
  3. Search Industry Track
  4. What’s Next?
  5. ClickZ Track

The first session I’m planning to attend falls under the What’s Next track, called More Customers, Fewer Costs - Why Marketing to the ‘Long Tail’ Makes Sense.  This session “will address how marketers utilize the long tail of the Internet and search engine marketing to identify and reach consumers who are interested in what a company has to offer, but don’t fit the traditional definition of the demographic audience.”

The next session on my personal agenda is Pay Per Conversion, which is under the Search Industry Track.  This session will center around how to improve content to increase conversion rates.

The Keynote Panel follows with a conversation about How Search Fits Into Digital Advertising.

After lunch, I will be attending the Storyteller Marketing session.  This session will teach how to communicate by telling a story and how the storytelling method delivers a memorable message which will hopefully lead to positive results.

The final panel of the day is a Keynote Presentation by Lee Siegel, author of “Against the Machine.“ I’m looking forward to receiving a copy of the book and letting you know what it’s all about.

Finally, the day ends with a VIP dinner hosted by Omniture’s Chris Zaharias.  The dinner is sure to be an exciting end to an exciting day.  I plan on posting updates while I’m attending the different sessions to keep you current on what we’re learning.

Coming up Day 2 of 4.

Facebook Marketing Strategies, Food for Thought

Published
by
Tom Dressler
on July 30, 2008
in Branding, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, Lead Generation, Online Marketing and Social Media
. 0 Comments

Facebook Marketing Strategies, Food for ThoughtWe as Interactive Marketing professionals, consumer market research professionals, and eBusiness & channel strategy professionals look for solutions that meet the needs of today’s online environment. When posed with this question, Facebook comes up over and over again. So what should we do about it?

As described by Forrester,

Facebook is a media, community, and application platform that offers an existing thriving ecosystem, scalable growth, and quick word-of-mouth marketing. The ability to understand users, their preferences, networks, and helps web applications to quickly segment and rapidly grow.

WebsiteBiz FacebookWow, what does that mean? First off, as a community the opportunity to study your prospects are huge. Are they engaged on Facebook and/or Social Media as creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, or inactives? I find this information to be surprising at times. If your market is using Facebook it provides a targeted advertising platform unlike any we have ever seen before, the ability to provide messages segmented by location, gender, and/or preference gives us the ability to accurately market effectively.

Ideas to be considered when evaluating Facebook Marketing

  • Demographics and trend data
  • Word of mouth and viral growth using Newsfeeds and widgets
  • Groups, sponsored groups, and other community features
  • Harness personal and network information
  • Contextual and targeted advertising opportunities
  • Monetizing your efforts
  • Case studies of success and failure
  • Understanding costs, and strategies to measure ROI

While this can seem intimidating at first, proven strategies do in fact deliver positive results. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.

Please provide your thoughts and impressions of Facebook Marketing.

2008 Online Marketing Summit

Published
by
Tom Dressler
on July 24, 2008
in Customer Acquisition, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Online Marketing, Search Marketing and Social Media
. 0 Comments

2008 Online Marketing Summit

We are excited to be attending the 2008 Online Marketing Summit in Atlanta on August 12th, which is an educational event for marketing professionals.  This year, the topics include:

  • Website Strategy
  • Customer Life-Cycle and Loyalty Marketing
  • Search Engine Marketing
  • Demand Generation
  • Email Marketing
  • Social Media Strategies

A colleague and I are attending this event in hopes of honing our strategic thinking initiatives. The importance of knowledge-based decision making is critical in today’s economic environment. I think that the sessions offered in this summit will help us greatly with our goals and initiatives when we return.

I’m excited to get involved in the Complete Website Strategy session for a chance to understand user experience and how to improve it.  I am conflicted about whether to attend the Social Media Strategies session or the one one Behavioral Targeting and Technology. The first is geared towards learning how leading companies build online communities and leverage the latest Web 2.0 technologies to proactively engage customers.  The latter focuses on how experience-driven web initiatives can succeed with a combination of online marketing strategies and a technology infrastructure. Please leave comments to suggest which you think would be most beneficial.

This busy day will end with a much needed Happy Hour, with drinks on OMS!  Hopefully I’ll be able to remember the day’s lessons so I can reflect back after we return!