With the proliferation of digital channels, marketing is undergoing a tremendous evolution. As a result, marketers at progressive organizations are redirecting their efforts and concentrating on a more holistic understanding of marketing performance.
To drive response and determine the appropriate marketing mix in this new paradigm, marketers must adopt a fresh approach to understand how to influence prospects and customers. By doing so, marketers can maximize marketing spend and generate stronger return on investment.
Five core strategies are needed to measure marketing effectiveness. Let’s look at them, as well as at some key implementation tactics and ways to overcome the most-common challenges marketers face during execution.
1. Plan ahead and design a response-attribution infrastructure to support all channels
Many organizations treat marketing measurement as an afterthought of campaign planning. However, measurement and reporting are critical items on the campaign-planning agenda. Up-front planning ensures the appropriate tracking and testing conditions.
Different channels require different tracking mechanisms, but there are some common questions that should be addressed:
- What types of campaigns (acquisition, conversion cross-sell, etc.) will be tracked?
- How do cross-channel communications and campaigns roll up into a single program?
- What information is available to match a response, and should response metadata be enhanced?
- How will metadata be managed for direct-marketing and indirect-marketing campaigns?
When a marketing program uses multiple channels, the campaign hierarchy must account for each channel along with the appropriate rollups so that measurement aligns with business goals. Each level within the hierarchy should be well defined and understood by stakeholders prior to campaign implementation. Defining those structures after the launch of the campaign, even if possible to do, greatly increases the effort and frequently equates to inconclusive outcomes.
2. Create control groups for a more-accurate measurement of campaign lift
With the growth of digital media, it is even more important to adequately define control-group criteria across all channels during the planning process. Doing so ensures mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive segments that will result in accurate accounting of the incremental results.
A lack of a centralized planning process frequently hinders a marketer’s ability to design and execute cross-channel campaigns without polluting control groups, preventing accurate attribution, and biasing measurement analyses. Defined control groups help to accurately measure true campaign-lift metrics. Organizations that have marketing-planning and campaign-management tools are able to create and manage control groups much more effectively.
3. Define relevant measurement metrics
Organizations must define relevant metrics and measurement criteria, taking care to systematically craft a metrics framework aligned with corporate strategy and provide meaningful data to key stakeholders. The metrics must correlate the marketing activities (cause) with the marketing performance, financial results, and customer impact (effect).
A successful metrics framework is used to understand the correlation of marketing campaigns to defined corporate goals and objectives; moreover, it is not limited to just basic response measurement but extends to true financial results and customer-value metrics.
4. Define specific attribution rules by campaign
Attribution rules are a function of a campaign’s goals, the response channels, and the outbound communications. Among the strategies for developing attribution rules are the following:
- Designing and capturing rules for all channels in a campaign or program
- Understanding that tracking customer response may require some trial and error
- Focusing on more-generalized rules, devoting less attention to rules designed to manage a small percentage of responses
- Testing and validating rules for each campaign because different campaigns may behave differently
- Applying a waterfall approach for matching responses so that more-accurate rules can be assigned a higher priority
For digital media, defining appropriate attribution tactics that cover the complete spectrum of responses is vital. Different attribution tactics can be applied, because multiple campaigns could be responsible cumulatively for the response:
- First impression: The first campaign gets the credit for the response.
- Last impression: The last campaign gets the credit for the response.
- Equal distribution: All contributing campaigns get equal credit.
- Weighted distribution: The credit is divided among different campaigns on the basis of a weighted distribution.
5. Automate and use visual reporting and analytic tools
Organizations can use many tools to automate portions of the tracking and reporting process. Those tools can be configured to regularly track selected metrics on a periodic basis and produce reports or graphs, which can be consumed by small or large audiences.
Typically, response processes capture disparate data elements, apply attribution rules, and measure results to determine significant findings. Those steps present a challenge to most organizations because of the sheer volume of information represented across all campaigns, channels, and segments. Accordingly, automation is the only means to achieve the necessary scale.
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Implementing the above-noted essential strategies will allow marketers to gain significant insight into the performance and effectiveness of the different channels and interaction effect among those channels. It will also help guide decisions in marketing spend and investment across the channels.
Ram Krishnamurthy and Brad Ewald: Ram is director of professional services in the marketing automation practice at Quaero (quaero.csgsystems.com), a CSG Solution; Brad is a solutions architect in the hosted solutions practice at Quaero.
Permalink: Five Essential Strategies for Measuring Marketing Effectiveness
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The demand for social media, search engine optimization, and internet marketing skills as a whole has exploded in the world of online work. After all, why wouldn’t it? The internet provides the marketing industry a new, low-cost platform to distribute information (read: marketing materials) on a global scale in a variety of formats – video, still images, audio, text, interactive games, and more.
A Facebook Fan Page is one perfect example of one of these new marketing vehicles available for a business to utilize. After a recent redesign, these pages are now very similar to standard user profile pages in looks as well as functionality. These pages include a Wall tab that publishes your news feed as well as user comment posts, an Info tab that is populated with nibbles of your company’s information, a self-explanatory Photos tab, and several other default tabs. Additionally, you can add your own custom set of application tabs, some of which are completely customizable.
If your business doesn’t have a Fan Page yet, you better be asking yourself why you don’t. These specialized Facebook pages offer a gaggle of benefits that would turn any entrepreneur, large business, or corporation’s head:
1. Community Building: The Fan Page is a great platform for your loyal followers to come together for your product or service by utilizing the Wall feature or other available modular applications. Users can submit text testimonials, post pictures, create and upload video, hold discussions with each other – all supporting the growth of your online community.
2. Search Engine Optimization: As discussed in one of our previous posts, the benefits of creating a Fan Page also give you more footing in search ranking. By publishing backlinks to your business’ pages as well as having a Facebook Fan Page with your name in the title, your business will be receiving some big bonus points in the SEO department.
3. Insights: Facebook Fan Pages are nicely equipped with a good amount of analytics tools accessible by page owners. You’ll be able to track the number of interactions your page has with fans, view key demographics like sex, age, and location, and more.
4. Communication: You have a variety of customization options when choosing to communicate with your fan base. You can send an update that appears as notifications on homepages, and you can target your message to match a specific age, gender, and location. Don’t forget – since you can publish to the “stream”, you’re able to communicate messages and posts directly into your fans’ homepages.
5. Price: Did I forget to mention that it’s completely free? All of these previous benefits are available for the low, low cost of zero dollars. You could have one up and running in just a smidge of time.
If you’re like me and are more of a visual learner, check out some examples of great Fan Pages on Facebook: Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and McDonalds.
Permalink: The Business Benefits Of A Facebook Fan Page
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In my last article on Writing For Conversions, part 1, I covered the structure of effective writing. In this article I will focus on the other key elements — tone and style.
Tone
As I discussed earlier, the reality for most Internet surfers is that they are constantly subjected to a barrage of promotional messages and advertising. As a basic defense mechanism, they have learned to tune out most hype. Perhaps you do have to be somewhat crass to get them to your landing page. For whatever reason, they have ended up there. But as I advised in the “Keys to Creating Awareness” section in Chapter 4, you should now stop screaming at your visitors. You are no longer (for the moment) competing for their attention with other websites. So you need to change the focus to the task that they are trying to accomplish.
Your visitors detest marketese. Unfortunately, your landing page was probably written in this kind of over-the-top promotional style. It usually involves a lot of boasting and unsubstantiated claims. If your company is the “world’s leading provider” of something, you are in good company. A recent search on Google turned up 8.58 million matching results for this phrase. Your claims are probably not true anyway, but even if they are you can use different language to make your point.
Marketese may be (barely) acceptable in your press releases when you are trying to puff up your company and accomplishments. But on your landing page it spells disaster. Marketese requires work on the part of your visitor. It saps their energy and attention, and forces them to spend time separating the content from the fluff. It also results in much longer word counts. You are missing an enormous opportunity by not creating a hype-free zone on your landing page.
How to Avoid Writing in “Marketese”
- Do not use any adjectives.
- Provide only objective information.
- Focus on the needs of your audience.
Save your visitors the aggravation and only tell them what they want to hear. Your editorial tone should have the following attributes:
Factual. Writing factually will take a little work. It is difficult to stop making subjective statements. You may catch yourself lapsing into marketese at unexpected moments. But stick with it. You will be amazed at how much more effective your writing will be. Remember, your visitor is not looking to be entertained, and certainly not to be marketed to. They are there to deal with a specific need or problem that they have. The best kind of information you can give them is objective in nature.
Task-oriented. Task-oriented writing is focused on the roles, tasks, and AIDA steps that are required to move your visitors through the conversion action. You should organize your text in the order that the visitor is likely to need it. For example, a big-ticket consumer product site might lay out the following high-level steps for the buying process: research, compare, customize, purchase. Once you have built The Matrix for your landing page, it should be clear where the gaps are.
Precise. It is critical to be clear in Web writing. The audience can be very diverse and can bring a variety of cultural backgrounds to their interpretation of your language. Be careful about your exact choice of words. Never try to be funny or clever. Do not use puns, metaphors, or colloquial expressions.
This is doubly true for link text or button text. Your visitors need to have a clear understanding of exactly what will happen when they take the action of clicking on something. Text links should describe the content on the target page. Unhelpful link labels such as “click here” are a wasted opportunity to focus the visitor’s awareness on an important available option. Also, link text is used by search engines to help people find information. If you use good link text, then you will be helping your own cause. Buttons should accurately describe the intended action. For example, many e-commerce sites mistakenly put “Buy It Now!” buttons next to products when the actual action is “Add to cart.” Another common mistake is to use the label “Order Now” when you really mean “Proceed to Checkout.” This causes unnecessary stress and anxiety for visitors as they try to figure out the threat or opportunity presented by your button. It is always best to remove the hesitation and assure them that taking the next step is a small and safe action
Concise. Become a word miser. Ask yourself, “How can I make this even shorter? Do I really need to communicate this at all?” Brevity has several advantages. It increases absorption and recall of information. It shortens the time that visitors spend reading it — minimizing the likelihood of increased frustration and impatience. It supports the goals of inverted pyramid writing, and the scannable text requirements described in the next section.
Format
Since people don’t read the Web, the format of your writing should support their opportunistic scanning behavior. Use the following guidelines to help you write scannable text:
- Write in fragments or short sentences (don’t worry about grammatical correctness if you have made yourself clear).
- Use digits instead of words to write out numbers (e.g. “47″ instead of “forty seven”)
- Highlight important information-carrying words (do not highlight whole sentences; stick to 2- or 3-word phrases).
- Use clear, emphasized titles for page headings and important subheads.
- Use ordinary language (avoid industry jargon and acronyms that are not widely understood).
- Use active voice, and action verbs.
- Use bullet lists instead of paragraphs.
- Keep lists between three and seven items (the limit of human short-term memory “chunking”).
- Do not use more than two levels for lists or headings.
- Use descriptive link text (describing the information on the target page).
- Use supporting links to maintain present supplemental information and “see also” cross-referenced information.
If you review your website or landing pages with a critical eye and faithfully implement the recommendations above, I can guarantee that you will make a better and more persuasive connection with your visitors. This in turn should make your cash register ring more often.
Tim Ash is the President & CEO of landing page optimization firm SiteTuners.com, and the author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization.
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Changing your approach to writing can often lead to a double-digit increase in conversion rates.
Our company routinely runs large scale landing page optimization tests to improve conversion rates. One of the most common components that we test is the sales copy on the page. We have found that changing your approach to writing can often lead to a double-digit increase in conversion rates.
| How Users Read on the Web: They don’t.– Jakob Nielsen, Web usability expert |
What I am going to share with you is a distillation of our hard-earned experience over the course of hundreds of landing page tests. But this is not an article about “persuasive” copywriting, or powerful magic words to use in your headline. Most of the problem with writing for the web lies at a much more fundamental level. There is a giant disconnect between how much we care about our sales copy, and how much our Internet visitors do.
“How users read on the Web: They don’t!” Even though these words were written in 1997, they still hold true. Jakob Nielsen’s pioneering work in this area has been confirmed by a lot of subsequent research. The vast majority of Internet users do not read a webpage word by word. They scan it and focus on individual words, phrases, or sentences. They are often seeing your company for the first time, and do not know how much trust to place in your information. They are used to being assaulted with promotional messages and will tune out most of your attempts to overtly market to them. They are task-oriented and are on your site to get something specific accomplished.
Most of the adaptations that you need to make to your writing have a single purpose: to reduce the visitor’s cognitive load. Instead of being forced to pay attention to how the information is presented, they can devote more focus to getting their intended task accomplished. By getting out of their way, you empower them to be faster, more efficient, and effective. This will lead to higher conversion rates for you, and higher satisfaction for them.
To increase the odds of a favorable outcome you need to consider the following areas of your writing:
- Structure
- Tone
- Format
Let’s take a look at each in turn.
Structure
Inverted Pyramid. The preferred structure for most Web writing is the inverted pyramid. It uses the principle of primacy (ordering) to control saliency (importance). In this style of writing, you put your conclusions and key points first. Less important and supporting information should be placed last. This is critical since most readers will choose not to read very far.
Most of this is probably not earth-shaking insight in the world of newspaper writing. Newspaper editors have a similar audience makeup: casual visitors who scan for information that competes for their attention, and consider the source as a transient and disposable resource. Because of this they have developed a very similar model. Headline size and prominent positioning indicate the importance of articles. The lead paragraph summarizes the whole story, and supporting detail is buried further down (or by following text hyperlink jumps to other pages).
Get to the point and let them decide if your content is relevant enough for them to stick around. By writing in this way you maximize the chances that they will come away with the information that you consider most valuable. The same structure should be used for creating online audio or video clips for your site.
Headlines and Page Titles. Remember that the visitor may have arrived from any number of different inbound links and may not have a lot of context about your page. Use clear and prominent headlines and page titles to tell them why each page is important.
One Main Idea Per Paragraph. Make sure that you only have one main idea per paragraph. If you bury a second idea lower in a block of text, it will probably be missed as the reader jumps down to scan the lead-in text of the subsequent paragraph.
The inverted pyramid approach should be used when creating bullet lists or lists of navigational links — put the important ones on top.
Short Pages. Keep your pages short. This will allow them to be digested in small, bite-sized chunks that correspond to a Web user’s attention span. There is evidence to show that significantly shorter text results in higher retention and recall of information, and is more likely to lead to conversion actions. Your page should only contain important information for its topic and level of detail. You can move longer supporting text to other pages, and create links for the dedicated reader.
However, at SiteTuners.com we have run across an occasional exception to the shorter-is-better guideline. Some single-product consumer websites have very long direct response pitch letters that outperform significantly shorter alternatives. They draw the reader in and encourage them to spend a lot of time on the page. After a certain point the visitor’s attention investment gets high enough to build momentum toward the conversion action. This is not to say that long sales letter pages cannot be made better. There is definitely a lot of bloat and deadwood on the ones that we routinely test and improve.
In part 2 of this article I will examine tone and format and their contribution to conversion.
Tim Ash is the President & CEO of landing page optimization firm SiteTuners.com, and the author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization.
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When FriendFeed launched new themes back in June, I wanted but one feature: The ability to create my own. Today, I got my wish.
Despite being purchased by Facebook for close to $50 million earlier this week, FriendFeed is still rolling out new features. Today brings customizable themes, which allow you to tweak your template to make it as pretty or as ugly as you would like. Naturally, I’m going for ugly, as I stated my desire to mimic the excellent “Eggplant Orange Juice With Blood” theme I created for Gmail when that service launched customizable themes.
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I want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. You want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. Everyone wants live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone – except for Apple. Though such applications have been available through unofficial means for over a year now, Apple remains mum on the matter. There they sit in Apple’s review queue, rotting away beneath an “In Review” label.
Looking to find some way onto the platform, developers have begun to scale back their applications until they reach a point Apple is willing to greenlight. We saw it earlier this month with Ustream’s streamless app, and now Qik has followed suit. Beginning today, Qik’s own sans-streaming app is available for the iPhone 3GS.
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No matter how fly or flashy modern scanners become, there’s no getting away from their page-by-page assembly line style of operation. Or so we thought. The Ishikawa Komuro Lab at Tokyo University has demonstrated a prototype scanner capable of recording the contents of pages as they turn. Using a laser range projector to estimate page geometry, the camera adjusts for light and movement distortion as necessary and retains faithful copies of the original. At present it’s more a proof of concept for the underlying vision processing unit than a commercial venture, but all it needs is one major manufacturer to pick it up and the paperless revolution can finally get started in earnest.
[Via Plastic Pals]
Book scanning gets a 1,000 fps turbo mode originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:46:00 EST.
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For many people, the term “Scavenger Hunt” conjures childhood memories of running around the neighborhood on a quest for knickknacks like thimbles and socks — an experience that loses its luster beyond the age of ten or so. But as it turns out, they’re big businesses: major corporations and universities have successfully used more elaborate scavenger hunts as team building exercises, and a well-designed course can be extremely fun. SCVNGR is one young startup that’s managed to tap into this niche market very successfully, and today it’s launching a new consumer platform that will allow anyone to build their own scavenger hunts, which will work with any mobile phone. The new platform, called XPLR, is now in private beta, and the first 100 TechCrunch readers to go here and enter the code ‘TECHCRUNCH’ will be able to sign up and build their own missions.
In conjunction with the news, the company is also announcing that it has closed a $750,000 funding round from Highland Capital.
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[Via PC World]
Continue reading CourseSmart releases eTextbook reader for iPhone
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video
CourseSmart releases eTextbook reader for iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Rotgutonix — the slightly paranoid, somewhat discerning drunk’s best friend originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:20:00 EST.
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