I rarely get new questions I haven’t written about before in this column – as I approach my 11th year as a ClickZ columnist. Yet, at SES Chicago this week, one of the attendees asked me how you go about building out a marketing optimization team. What kind of people do you need? What kind of backgrounds should they have? I know I’ve discussed this with clients but I haven’t written about it before. First, please notice that, I did…
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…
Building an optimization culture is hard and it seems that it might be getting harder. My friend Avinash Kaushik, the analytics evangelist at Google, recently shared an important stat and his observation on Google+: Only 22% of companies have a strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives. Down from 25% last year. [Source: Econsultancy Online Measurement & Strategy report http://goo.gl/OGscu] The problem is not the tool. The problem is you and me and our management. Think of it…
There are a finite number of ways to stand out and capture significant market share in any marketing category. You can be lowest price driven (a dangerous path), operationally excellent, channel dominant, or focused on customer intimacy. Many companies excel at two or three but it is nearly impossible to excel at all of them. Can you name the company that does? Here are 5 strategies companies use to become market leaders. They have efficient operations – Operations that let…
Being able to share a great success you have is a nice thing, but it is even better when you have the opportunity to share your students’ successes. Over the last couple of years I have seen my students shine writing for publications such as ClickZ, speaking at conferences, generating and publishing interesting research about personas, and of course getting remarkable results for themselves or for clients. I am sure you would love to know the secret to their success? I went back…
Last column I shared the following test, which I found “in the wild” and asked readers to identify the variables. Hoping that instead of testing all the variables you could narrow it down to the most meaningful variables so that you minimize the time and resources needed to complete the test. Depending on how you want to define your variables, these two pages have around a dozen changes. Here is my list: Layout orientation. As I mentioned last time,…
Is yours the typical company launching 2-5 tests a month, struggling to eke out more from your marketing optimization program, and wasting critical marketing resources of your team and website traffic? That’s the result of not focusing in on the Big Idea! How much should you be testing? A mid-size company can easily handle 30-50 tests a month. The reason most companies never get there is because they waste so many cycles on what I call “slice & dice” optimization…
Let’s play a little game of what if… You have the choice in building your organization; you can: A. Recruit and hire some of the world’s best analytics, customer insight, marketing and testing team members. B. Recruit average team members but provide them with superb technology and processes. Many industry pundits would agree (including myself) that you must invest in people before tools. But is it just talent that is required or having the man hours available to get things…