Let’s get right to that list….
1. Online Marketing budgets aren’t allocated to enable you do to the job right.
2. Because of #1, I am sure you could list 98+ more reasons!
Too often the C-Suite has not figured out that your digital marketing (I include web, email, mobile & social here) activity is the glue that binds their brand together. They miss that online is that initial first impression before most people even decide to step into your physical store. So it demands that online live by the metrics but rarely gets the benefit of those squishy soft “brand” dollars. It’s 2011 and digital marketing and digital experiences are still way too often treated like the red-headed step child of traditional marketers. These digital marketers are expected to perform at incredible efficiencies which are never expected nor demanded from their traditional marketing counterparts.
As I stated in my last column, Conversions: Who’s Job is it Anyway; in the offline world there is a VP of Marketing and their counterpart the VP of Sales, but no such thing exists online. That column elicited a comment from a reader stating that you can’t “really offer an employee 8 hours per day 5 days per week and a good paycheck just for conversion optimization (CRO).” He went on to babble about how he would rather see a PPC manager or an SEO manager do CRO as part of their job.
Let me start by sharing the ugly truth! Most PPC accounts are a mess. We’ve audited many of them looking for conversion optimization. At best they need tons of work just to get them to a satisfactory level . Nevertheless, at least they seem to hit most of the core metrics at least in part because the media has still been wildly misattributed. Most of the PPC managers don’t have the additional bandwidth to simply maintain their account efficiently but yet you want them to have the time and learn the vast range of multi-disciplinary skills needed to do conversion optimization? Huh? Digital marketing is pretty complex work.
Most SEO managers are in the same boat. Just ask any consultant or Search Marketing platform vendor who has worked across enough accounts and they’ll tell you how 95%+ of all accounts are a mess. Oh yeah! The same is true of web analytics analysts as well.
These aren’t simply my opinions – go talk to them.
Now ask anyone who has ever been in the online optimization business and you’ll learn the same thing for each one. The budget to launch new websites or new campaigns tend to be healthy but what might be left over to improving the campaign or website after launch is worse than anemic.
To wring out significant returns on your investment, optimization must be an ongoing part of your daily marketing activities. It has to be a habit. So if you’re aiming to come to a point where you’re “finished” with optimization, you’re missing the point. Optimization is not a project, it is something you do daily to maximize the revenue of your marketing efforts.
Over the last few years the job of the conversion optimizer has been aided by the explosion of applications and services to help you improve your website or marketing efforts. Many of these services are low cost or even free! I often recommend that companies should get good at free first, then pay for a more robust solution once you have adoption.
A big excuse for the lack of optimization was the lack of access and resources to the tools. Web analytics, A/B & MVT testing tools, personalization tools and even usability studies were expensive, that is no longer a valid excuse.
For years I have blogged a yearly list of these tools. Three years ago I published my first blog post listing 33 free tools to improve your website, the following year it grew to 69 tools, last year it mushroomed to 99 free & low cost tools to improve websites and marketing efforts. This year I wanted to publish over 120 tools when Jeffrey asked me if I was out of my mind! That was my clue that it was time to launch a website dedicated to online marketing tools. You can check out the website at http://www.WebsiteTestingTools.com.
These tools allow a CRO specialist to spend his day gathering insights about your customers and your campaigns, identifying opportunities for creating new landing pages, developing new hypothesis for tests, figuring out how to segment and target your customers effectively and how to improve each and every one of your marketing campaigns. If you only have a handful of campaigns you may not need a full time employee but any business doing more than a couple of million dollars in online revenue probably does and the larger the company the more resources that will be needed.
The only excuse for not optimizing vigorously now is just being too lazy, ignorant or worse to prioritize the optimization of your efforts. I know that this column might hit a nerve. So if you’re a CEO or a senior executive who has been sent this then I have one question – when will you take optimization seriously?
