The key to making data-driven decisions about your business is analytics. The problem however for many businesses is that they don’t have the right analytics information or they don’t use it effectively to make data-driven decisions about their marketing.
This means that they’re making marketing decisions based upon hunches, gut feelings, or the latest marketing trend. This common marketing mistake always yields an ineffective result.
One of the biggest most common mistakes that companies make when it comes to their marketing is simply not testing effectively. When we start to talk about testing, we need to know that there’s a variety of different types of testing.
Types of testing
Number one is A/B testing. A/B testing means that you have 2 pages, page A and page B. This can be a homepage and a landing page. When I want to optimize my content, effectively, I’m going to create two versions and measure both versions.
It’s important to figure out which one outperforms the other, which brings a lot of value to advertising. It also brings value to landing pages, home pages, and content that is lower on the funnel in the decision level stage.
This is the time when we want to measure all the little details to figure out what’s converting and what is not.
The next form of testing is called multi variant testing. With multi variant testing, we are looking at the small little details that affect conversion. Sometimes you can do them in conjunction with each other.
For example, you can A/B test two pages against each other, to try to figure out which page performs the best. In multi variant testing, you’re looking at little nuances of the page that won the competition in stage one. We’re going to look at the little nuances, wording, pictures, and micro ingredients that can be identified to optimize for conversion.
How to fix the common marketing mistake
Usually what happens is we have really big intentions. Then we wake up one day, and we’ve developed a content mill where we don’t measure what’s working and what’s not. We look at our analytics and we say that we want to create more content that’s going to outperform this existing content that we’ve already developed.
What great marketers do is they go back and look at their content, and start to make tweaks and adjustments to their content so that the spear gets sharper and sharper.
In this graphic you can see that this is a traditional marketing digital marketing approach. The circles represent creating a new website and a couple years later, creating another website. A couple years later we’re going to create a piece of marketing content, and so on and so forth.
A couple years later, you’re going to test that, and you’re going to try to take some of the lessons you learn to make better content. And while you did improve, you didn’t improve incrementally. What you did is you tried to just make up for it in your next major global revision, and we continue this process of making these huge, global revisions to our marketing.
Stop reinventing the wheel
What I would rather you do is be in a position where you stop reinventing the wheel. It is not smart marketing strategy to reinvent a wheel that already has proven to work.
It is preferred that you do A/B testing. What we do is we develop a really strong foundation and then we make micro tweaks to our copy, pictures, how we build our landing pages, what the conversion and user experience is like. We also apply things like heat mapping and other forms of testing to figure out what’s working and what’s not.
We’re constantly making pivots over and over again, to make the best possible user experience. These marketing efforts are what connect your ideal customer with your content.
One of the analogies I like to talk about is a story we use in micro marketing quite a bit. And essentially, what it says is, it is estimated that the Apollo moon rockets were off course nearly 97% of the time. That was 97% of the time that they were in flight, they were off course, yet they still reached their chosen destination and returned to Earth with pinpoint precision and timing.
So what do I mean by that? Well, essentially what we did in the 70s is that we shot a rocket towards the moon and then we measured and we course corrected and course corrected repeatedly.
Best practices to deliver successful marketing campaigns
That is how really great marketing works as well. We have really big aspirations where we want to try to knock it out of the park. But the reality is that that happens very infrequently.
What we need to be able to do is use best practices to try and identify what’s going to work. Then we push that marketing campaign out into the world. After it is out, we measure and tweak to make adjustments.
We use A/B testing, multi variant testing, and heat mapping. We learn as much as possible to make consistent tweaks so that the marketing campaign that you built over time gets better and better. That’s how you’re able to measure and get really great results.
It’s also how you can figure out what your cost per acquisition is. Over time, ideally, your cost per acquisition gets lower and lower as you make more and more refinements to your marketing messaging.
Review of what we covered
We talked about how the data shows that a large majority of company’s biggest mistake that they make is they don’t create marketing materials, connected with metrics. To fix this, they get A/B tests or multivariate testing.
The next problem discussed was the cadence in which traditional marketing happens. What happens here is that we build a new website and new content and a couple years later, we build it again. This cadence isn’t effective enough to lower your cost per acquisition.
To make more effective marketing materials that deliver higher rates of conversion, you must pivot and make micro tweaks to your content so it suits the needs of your target audience.
Finally, we talked about a growth driven marketing approach, versus the traditional marketing approach. The idea of developing a real strong foundation and making micro tweaks along the way.
If you have any questions or concerns about the topics discussed today, please contact us. We would love to help you! We look forward to hearing from you.
