Chief Marketing Technologist

"The problem is very rarely data..."

"The problem is very rarely data, or that we don't have access to data." So said Avinash Kaushik, web analytics and marketing data guru, in his keynote at this week's SES conference in San Francisco.

In Avinash's view, business optimization in the digital world requires mastering three things:

1. Influence — reaching the right people at the right time with the right message
2. Experience — delivering remarkable customer experiences in all channels
3. Value — recognizing the economic value in all customer interactions

"Behind all of this is enormous amounts of data," he acknowledged. "But if you're not good at these three things, it is impossible for you to succeed, even if you have more data than God."

Well said.

I posted more reflections on Avinash's keynote on ion's blog earlier this morning, especially about recognizing economic value in top-of-funnel web experiences, with 100% of the People Who Visit Your Landing Pages.

Brand impact or conversion rate? Both, please!

From my latest article on Search Engine Land, 5 Colorful Sketches on Conversion Optimization:

The accompanying write-up in the article:

There can be a perceived tension between conversion rate optimization and brand impact, which dates back to the early rivalries of direct marketing vs. brand marketing.

But it's a false choice: you can — and should — do great on both dimensions.

Sure, there are cheesy used car salesman type tactics that you can use to squeeze short-term bumps to your conversion rate. ("I promise you the world, just give me your email address and click 'Boom!'") But such chicanery costs you brand equity.

On the other hand, great brand-building content is often published without any direction towards a "next step." It leaves visitors dangling like a sailboat in the middle of a lake with no wind. Sure, they can paddle their way to a conversion step. But paddling is hard work.

The sweet spot is pushing the Pareto frontier of brand and conversion to achieve both. That's brilliant post-click marketing.

Click through for the other 4 sketches (although you've seen another one on this blog before)

Why landing pages are awesome (a Venn diagram)

I picked up the new 53 Paper app for the iPad this weekend. Really a beautiful piece of software for sketching ideas without having to be an Illustrator jockey.

Inspired me to share why I find landing pages (and microsites, conversion paths, and other kinds of post-click marketing) — the focus of my company, ion interactive — so fascinating and rich with possibilities:

The intersection of performance marketing, content marketing, and technical wizardry. What's not to love?

3 takeaways on advertising and trust from Nielsen

Dave Chaffey curated a great graphic from Nielsen's most recent report on Trends in Advertising Spend and Effectiveness:

As a visualization of Nielsen's Global Online Survey of U.S. Internet consumers from Q1, there's a lot of insight embedded here.

Of course, recommendations from people I know leads by a mile — 76% of people trust those kind of "earned ads." Word-of-mouth and referrals remain the bedrock of building a brand.

And as Dave rightly pointed out, the high trust for consumer opinions posted online (49% trust them at least somewhat) is clear motivation for "social proof" — including recommendations and testimonials in your online advertising and post-click marketing.

But here are a few other remarkable takeaways:

40% of people trust emails they signed up for as compared to only 36% who trust editorial content such as newspaper articles. Permission marketing FTW. Email marketing may not be the sexiest tool in the marketing box, but it remains one of the most effective.

29% of people trust ads on TV, a considerably higher percentage than most online advertising (which range from 13% to 21%). Funny, because the phrase You can't trust everything you hear on TV predated You can't trust everything you read on the Internet. Some possible reasons for this relative abundance of trust worth thinking about:

• TV has been around longer
• TV is more expensive, and ad spend is a signal of credibility
• TV ads tend to be more successful at repeat exposures (in the absence of retargeting data)
• TV ads have more bandwidth — a full 30 seconds — to make their point than non-video ads
• TV watching is more frequently a "shared" experience than web surfing, offering an opportunity for immediate social feedback loops — if my wife likes an ad, I give it more attention
• and — perhaps a controversial hypothesis — TV ads tend to have better creative concepts and execution than most online advertising?

What can digital marketing learn from those dynamics?

But what I found most interesting...

On average, 50% of people neither trust nor distrust advertising regardless of the media/vehicle — search ads, banner ads, TV ads, radio ads, magazine ads, ads on social networks, online video ads, etc. These neutral responses all hover between 45% and 53%. On the Nielsen visualization above, the green circles dominate.

One has to be careful not to confound "trust" and "interest" in these results, but I interpret this as a motivating opportunity. Advertising is not how we win customers. But it is a way to introduce ourselves to them, from a largely neutral starting point — and it's the experiences we deliver after the ad that build trust.

For many consumer products, this is a function of the second moment of truth, how much they actually like the experience of using the product after they but it. But for more considered purchases, aspirational products, and possibly even B2B products and services, this may be much more of the Zero Moment of Truth achieved with great content marketing.

Marketing technologists: this post-ad digital experience is your opportunity to shine.

Google *finally* innovating with search ads

Maybe it's the Mad Men marketer in my hybrid DNA, but I've always been a little underwhelmed with Google AdWords.

The business model of pay-per-click (PPC) is great. The ability to scale to thousands of micro-targeted ads is great. The analytics and testing capabilities are pretty good. And, hey, major hats off to intercepting buyers at their moment of expressed "intent."

But the design canvas — trying to market to people with a maximum of 135 characters of plain text — always seemed really low-fidelity to me.

In essence, search advertising in Google (and Yahoo!, Bing) had only four levers to pull:

1. The keyword phrase on which the ad appeared (context)
2. The text of the ad — a mere 135 characters of plain text
3. The position of the ad on the page as a faint signal of quality
4. Any brand equity the advertiser had previously established

That was fine 10 years ago, but what's changed since then? Marketers have done a lot with very little, but compared to the other media where marketers ply their craft — such as the post-click marketing space, which I know and love — search marketing has been terribly constrained.

And although Google's spartan page design could be considered a feature — at least it originally was — I've increasingly doubted that those constraints truly serve the needs of users. It's really hard to tell which ads will deliver on a user's intent.

Google Instant Preview and Google +1

But recently, Google unveiled a couple of small features with big implications for search marketing: Instant Preview for Ads and Google +1 for Sites.

With Instant Preview, a little magnifying glass appears next to ads that lets users see a thumbnail and brief snippets of text from the landing page that the ad links to. Once a user clicks on a magnifying glass, they can zoom around the search results page — comparing the landing pages of all the ads and organic results — before they click through on any of them.

So instead of making a click choice based solely on a stack ads like this:

Users can take a look at the actual experiences these advertisers will deliver. Do they intrigue? Impress? Fulfill the promise implied (or stated outright) by the ad? If users aren't satisfied with the preview, they simply won't click.

In a recent Search Engine Land article, Google Instant Preview: A Game-Changer For Landing Pages, I observed that this raises the importance of several post-click marketing best practices:

• Design matters — a landing page that looks good can now send a signal of the quality of the advertiser (as can a page that looks like junk)
• Message match matters — the promise that the ad makes should be reflected in the copy and imagery of the landing page (even inadvertent bait-and-switch will be poorly received)
• Avoid long forms — especially on page one; instead use behavioral choices or multi-step experiences to do "progressive conversion" of respondents
• Do A/B testing carefully — to avoid unintended mismatch, pair ads and their landing pages in your A/B tests, so the preview always reflects the actual landing page

In the hands of a creative and enterprising advertiser, this opens up a huge opportunity for competitive advantage. Any competitor can copy the text of your ad. But it's much harder to imitate compelling and meaningful post-click marketing experiences. Imagination, daring, design values, and the operational capability to match ads and landing pages at scale are not easily copied.

Combined with the new Google +1 button — Google's equivalent to the Facebook Like buttons proliferating the web — users can now give a little "social love" to advertisers that deliver great post-click experiences. In turn, those +1's will register on the ads when other users in those social circles see them — a nice positive feedback loop. Are your landing pages +1 worthy?

Suddenly post-click marketing has moved from the middle of the funnel to the top.

Post-Click Marketing at MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Next week, I'll be speaking at MarketingProf's B2B Forum in Boston on the topic of post-click marketing — including up-to-date best practices arising from these new Google AdWords innovations.

I'll be in a session with Sally Lowery of iContact, who will be sharing a marketer's perspective of implementing post-click marketing strategy and tactics in an organization. Sally has amazing experience to share, so I'm thrilled to be presenting with her. If you're at the event, please come up and say "hi."

If you can't make it in person, you can attend online. (You can use the code POSTCLICK to save 30% on the online registration.)

A Few Good Marketers

Jessep: You want conversions?

Kaffee: I think I'm entitled to them.

Jessep: You want conversions?

Kaffee: I want the clicks.

Jessep: You can't handle the clicks! Son, we live in a world that has web pages. And those web pages have to be built for persuasion. Who's going to do it? You? You, IT manager?

I want greater usability than you can possibly fathom. You weep for FrontPage software and you curse user-centered design. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that those extra hours spent tailoring good pages saves customers. And my hypothesis-driven approach, while incomprehensible to you, saves customers.

You don't want the clicks because deep down, in places you don't talk about at staff meetings, you want me on that testing platform. You need me on that testing platform. We use words like design, message match, and segmentation. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent marketing something. You use them as a Powerpoint.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very revenue I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up an optimizer and write some tests. Either way, I don't give a darn what you think you're entitled to!

Kaffee: Did you order the post-click platform?

Jessep: I did the job you sent me to do.

Kaffee: Did you order the post-click platform?

Jessep: You're goshdarn right I did!!

Content marketing + conversion optimization

I'm a big believer in the power of "intersections," as described by Frans Johansson in his inspiring book on innovation, The Medici Effect.

The intersection of marketing and the-domain-formerly-known-as-IT is one, of course.

But recently I've also been exploring some fascinating ideas by mixing concepts from the 131 different kinds of marketing. Often, many of these subdisciplines of marketing grow independently of each other. Ultimately, however, they're all focused on building connections and bonds with customers — and they can learn a lot from each other.

Last week, I presented a session on The 5 Principles of Conversion Content Marketing at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, riffing on what content marketing can teach conversion optimization, and vice versa. Here are the slides:

Conversion Content Marketing

View more presentations from ion interactive, inc..

What are some of the intersections that have inspired you lately?

The Mother of All Post-Click Marketing Diagrams

For my latest column on Search Engine Land, I sketched out a post-click marketing heuristic to help visualize the different factors at work in conversion optimization.

Or, as I call it more informally, The Mother of All Post-Click Marketing Diagrams (click to enlarge):

To read the article that explains this diagram, click over to Search Engine Land.

P.S. If you're a professional designer and my PowerPoint-based illustration makes you cringe, I'd be thrilled to have a collaborator for version 2.0. :-)

3 big picture marketing themes from #ConvCon

Last week was the inaugural Conversion Conference (#ConvCon), a new event organized by landing page optimization expert Tim Ash and co-located with the eMetrics marketing optimization summit. While there were plenty of terrific sessions on landing pages and conversion optimization — my post-click marketing craft and trade at ion — three larger marketing themes emerged that I want to share with you.

Theme #1: Agile Marketing

In conversion optimization — what marketers do to increase lead generation or e-commerce sales on the web — there are two perennial secrets to success.

The first is the ability to test, for instance, to try two different landing pages in an A/B split test. You send half the respondents who click on an advertisement to page A and the other half to page B, and then measure which of those two groups has the highest conversion rate.

The second is the ability to deploy specific landing pages to match particular advertisements, emails, or social media promotions. So if I click on an ad for a romantic getaway in Tuscany, it works much better if I land on a page that talks specifically about a romantic getaway — with content and images and special offers tailored to that idea — rather than the generic home page of a hotel chain in Italy. (I've written before about the proliferation of such micromarketing in my post on landing pages as atomic marketing.)

Both depend on how quick and easy it is for you to deploy new tests and new pages. As a result, many speakers emphasized agile marketing practices — if not with that label, certainly with its essence.

The message: conversion optimization is all about agility.

As conversion optimization gains more executive recognition — which it is quickly doing, due to the ROI it delivers in the age of marketing accountability — it will help motivate broader adoption of agile methodologies in the marketing department. Agile-marketers-to-be: take advantage of this opportunity to start changing your organization's marketing metabolism.

Theme #2: Test-Driven Marketing

However, just because you can run tests doesn't make you test-driven.

Probably the biggest theme at the conference was developing a culture of testing in the marketing department. Marketers, perhaps more than anyone, have passionate and creative opinions about what will work in the market. In old-school marketing, the highest-paid person's opinion — the infamous HiPPO that Avinash Kaushik rails against — would take precedence. The boss would pick the winner.

(Imagining that bosses are inherently good at picking winners is a classic example of survivorship bias and being Fooled by Randomness.)

In a test-driven marketing environment though, such creative ideas are only the start of the decision-making process. Instead of one idea being picked by the loudest or highest ranked advocate, many ideas are tested to learn which one customers like best — and that's the empirical winner. Executives embrace the process, rather than the picking, as the mantle of their leadership.

But test-driven marketing goes further than merely arbitrating internal debate.

Test-driven marketing is about continuous improvement, iterating through experiments as a way of life, rather than a one-shot project. Chris Goward of WiderFunnel gave a fantastic presentation at the conference on applying the Kaizen method (popularized by the Toyota Production System) to conversion optimization. I think this is a brilliant cross-pollination of ideas from engineering and operations into digital marketing.

Chris and the team at WiderFunnel have also developed their own LIFT model for landing page improvement that demonstrates the power of a domain-specific framework for managing the direction of such continuous improvement.

Brooks Bell, the founder and president of Brooks Bell Interactive, presented on the power of A/B split testing and recounted her company's start with optimizing banner advertisements for AOL. She described how AOL was obsessed with testing — a company worldview that in no small part contributed to their one-time domination of the market through massive customer acquisition. AOL may have eventually been eclipsed by The Innovator's Dilemma, but their culture of testing was pioneering.

One of the anecdotes that Brooks relayed was how AOL built a technology team directly in the marketing department as a way to accelerate testing and push the boundaries of new ideas. Is it possible that they were the first company to prefigure the rise of the marketing technologist?

Theme #3: Insight vs. Automation

One of the most interesting debates in this next decade of new marketing will be the tension between human insight and software automation. On one extreme will be fully "black box" computational marketing, where computer algorithms take over the entire decision process of what marketing to present prospects and customers at every contextual opportunity. The other extreme, which will no doubt be driven by a blacklash to problems with pure algorithmic marketing, will keep people directly in charge of most marketing execution, relying on their judgement and creativity, albeit at the cost of more limited scale.

Of course, the most compelling solutions will be those that thrive in between the two extremes, seamlessly entwining the capabilities of people and machines. Think of the bionic man more than The Terminator.

Conversion Conference offered a sneak preview of that debate. Some vendors who have specialized in highly technical fractional factorial multivariate testing (MVT) continued to emphasize their ability to test thousands and thousands of possible page variations of a web page to (theoretically) find the most optional combination.

But most other speakers, who had real-world experience implementing such approaches, championed simpler but more meaningful tests. They argued passionately for intuitive and well-hypothesized A/B split tests, maybe followed by smaller full factorial MVT experiments that properly identified interaction effects.

Bryan Eisenberg, the wonderfully opinionated author of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, showed outright disdain for the notion of throwing millions of combinations against the wall, hoping for a miracle somewhere in the jumble. He called it slice and dice optimization and claimed that all it did was burn people out on testing without achieving real results.

Lance Loveday, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing and co-author of Web Design for ROI, made a strong case for not just testing, but testing among good options (TAGO). What is "good?" That's where human insight and creativity come into play.

Neither Bryan nor Lance are Luddites by any stretch of the imagination — they're all for using every tool they can find to help with their conversion optimization mission. But they're fervent advocates for leveraging such tools with human intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

The battle lines in this debate are in flux though, so it will be exciting to see how it evolves.

Intrigued? There will be another Conversion Conference in Washington, D.C. in early October. Hope to see you there!

Landing pages as atomic marketing

This is one of those rare, cross-over posts related to my work at ion, but the concept at play is something that I think you'll find relevant in many contexts.

The recent popularity of two posts of mine — 8 dimensions of excellent landing pages on Search Engine Land and the 7 levels of landing page optimization on ion's own Post-Click Marketing Blog — made me realize a common theme between them: sophisticated marketing arising from simple executional tactics.

Atomic marketing has nothing to do with energy policy or national defense. Instead, atomic marketing is about how simple components — search engine ads, Twitter messages, emails, landing pages — can, in quantity, collectively grow into major marketing programs.

This is a recurring pattern in digital marketing, where the economics of producing individual marketing elements — such as a new PPC ad or promotional email — are asymptotically approaching zero. It's the management of the entire ecosystem of all these tiny parts that constitutes the big picture of new marketing.

Landing pages are a great example.

3 atomic revelations from landing pages

Broadly speaking, a landing page is a specially-crafted web page that a marketer creates for respondents to a particular ad, affiliate link, or email promotion. It might actually be more than one page — such as a microsite or conversion path — but its scale is intentionally small and very focused.

In the sprawling rainforest of online marketing, any single landing page is a tiny and simple worker ant, humbly carrying its piece of respondent sugar back to the larger enterprise. Per my original metaphor, it's merely an atom.

Yet hidden in that simplicity is a much richer universe than first meets the eye.

Having been working on landing pages intensely for the past 4 years — see the story of post-click marketing for a bit of background — I continue to be amazed by how many layers of opportunity arise from such a simple concept.

The sophistication that arises from these simple landing pages falls into three categories — and I think they're applicable to many other kinds of atomic marketing as well:

1. When you think creatively, there's a lot you can do on a small canvas.

In art and engineering, constraints can actually be inspiring — think of the CO2 filter improvised from spare parts for Apollo 13 or the brilliant back-of-business-card art of gapingvoid.com.

By limiting ourselves to constructing great experiences within the form factor of a landing page, we've pioneered landing page ideas with behavioral segmentation, Flash, video, social media, dynamic rules, conditional forms, widgets and more. Things that would be unpleasantly complicated to implement on large web sites end up being quite feasible — and immensely effective — at the scale of a landing page.

Things that would otherwise be restrictions become the genesis of innovation.

Actually, this revelation of the infinite creative potential on a small canvas struck me at the various search marketing shows I've attended (SES, SMX, Search Insider Summit), where I've heard panels go on and on about the approaches for writing great search engine PPC ads — all within the constraints of a 25 character headline, two 35 character description lines, and a 35 character friendly URL. If an entire advertising sub-industry can be built around 130 characters of plain text, suddenly landing pages seem like gigantic canvases in comparison, wide open for imagination.

Meta-lesson: treat the small canvas of atomic marketing elements as an opportunity, not a handicap.

2. Context matters tremendously.

Landing pages don't exist in a vacuum. People arrive at them from particular ads, via particular placements and keyword queries. And often — if you've done a good job — people move from the landing page deeper into your marketing funnel. While the pieces of this end-to-end experience may be assembled by several different parties within your marketing team, from the perspective of a respondent it is — or should be — one continuous, linear flow.

What often differentiates excellent landing pages from mediocre ones is tight continuity along each step of that flow. Consecutively setting expectations and meeting them with each subsequent click. My colleague Anna Talerico calls it "message match" — or "message mismatch" when it fails — and it has a huge impact on the outcome.

But now you see the next level of sophistication. It's not just about having a good landing page. It's about coordinating the production, content, and ongoing lifecycle of that page to maintain continuity upstream and downstream in the marketing funnel.

Meta-lesson: the "neighbors" of atomic marketing elements are a source of powerful synergy, even when they're only loosely-coupled.

3. Many atoms together make an elephant. Or a tiger. Or an amorphous pile of goo.

The breakthrough we had at ion was the realization that landing page optimization is most effective when you're not just optimizing a single page ad infinitum to diminishing returns, but rather when you optimize the systematic process by which your organization produces, tests, and analyzes all its landing pages.

With a single page, you optimize its content and audience — but it represents only a sliver of your overall marketing. Any one landing page usually has a pretty low upper bound on how much impact it can have on your business, even when it's a spectacular success. With landing page process optimization, however, you can impact your entire post-click marketing universe. You reap dividends across your whole portfolio, all of your campaigns. This is landing page management, a high-level marketing operations capability.

A single landing page is a tactic. Your entire universe of landing pages — and how they're entwined with the rest of your marketing — constitutes a strategy. Is that strategy deliberate, emergent, or unattended and left to random chance? If you can proactively take control of the sum of these atomic elements, and shape and orchestrate them as a cohesive whole, then you can turn a pile of unrelated atoms into a living, breathing multicellular organism. Like a tiger, rather than a puddle of primordial glop.

In the context of search marketing, it's not an individual ad or keyword — it's your portfolio of 10,000 keywords. In email marketing, it's not a single message, it's your overall operations for hundreds of messages and nurturing subscription streams.

Meta-lesson: take a higher view of how atomic marketing elements fit together into a larger mission and optimize for the collective structure and results.