since they heard that every business worth its salt these days had to have social media accounts—but rarely have the time to post.
The results of their digital marketing efforts have been lackluster. Their site gets some traffic, but most deals are still made via the same old outbound techniques their salespeople have been using for years, cold calling chief among them. Their newsletters don’t seem to have much of an effect, unless they announce a sale or deal, and their social media accounts sit mostly idle. Their blog is popular with its writer’s friends and family, but doesn’t seem to attract many other visitors—or more importantly, any leads.
Basically, they are online because you have to be in order to be taken seriously. And with a pretty much nonexistent ROI from their inbound marketing, they felt they couldn’t really justify the amount of resources it would take to keep up with everything on a regular basis.
When Business X took a good look at their current strategy, they realized that they didn’t really have a solid “why” behind most of the things they did. They also admitted to themselves that they had been checking analytics only sporadically, and certainly not taking any action based on the data, other than growing frustrated with the few resources they were putting towards marketing.
A COMPANY GETTING IT RIGHT
Business operations and customer relations software company SAP is a multinational behemoth that’s been known and respected the world over for more than forty years—and is a great example of a large enterprise fully embracing the concept of agility and establishing a robust testing and optimization program.
In 2009 SAP VP Shawn Burns set about creating enterprise web analytics at the company to replace a disparate set of analytics tools then in use in various divisions of the very large organization. Six months into the process of getting all of SAP’s business data and analytics “under one roof,” so to speak, Burns had a realization—he understood that just having all that data in one place wasn’t maximizing its value. What SAP needed was to, as Burns put it, get “a process and dedicated team” that would focus on the data “to squeeze the value out of it.”
The result of Burns’s epiphany was the creation of SAP’s Test Lab, a dedicated testing and optimization team that, since its creation, has run tests and optimized elements across SAP’s marketing efforts in different channels and even different global marketplaces.
SAP’s Test Lab keeps an organized queue of tests to be performed that are ranked by value to the company, knowing that the Test Lab is a finite corporate resource. The team also keeps documentation to preserve institutional knowledge gained from every test. Now the team runs around twenty-five tests each quarter.
Why such a limited number of tests? The Test Lab’s goal is continual improvement and optimization, and their team is willing to run multiple iterations on specific testing areas, such as visual imagery in marketing material, to fully optimize results for each element in a given test.
2. Identify your business goals.
Of course you’re already aware of your company’s overall goals. But listing them out on paper puts them in the forefront of your mind, and will allow you to refer back to them easily while working on your marketing plan. Every aspect of your marketing strategy should be directly traceable back to your overall goals as a business—otherwise, you’re wasting resources.
» Business X’s list of overall goals: To increase sales by a specific percentage each year. To reach more prospects, create brand awareness, and establish themselves as industry leaders. To boost the number of clients who enter into long-term consultative contracts, rather just buying a solution in a one-time transaction.
3. Identify your conversion goals.
What exactly does “conversion” mean to you—in the context of your overall marketing strategy, as well as in the context of each channel and campaign you plan to use? Maybe you want sales—okay, good. But maybe you’re after email addresses instead (or also!), or likes on Facebook, or something entirely different. That’s fine, too—the important thing is that you define what you want up front and make sure these goals are measurable and trackable. Email addresses and Facebook likes can be counted; “brand awareness” is a more nebulous goal.
» Business X’s old marketing strategy had a vague focus on brand awareness and attracting leads, but nothing really quantifiable. Instead of actively targeting specific conversions, they had simply been going through the motions—doing the blog, doing social media—without any concrete purpose in mind.
They set a new conversion goal: gathering email addresses to market to. Now, all digital marketing efforts would be aimed at reaching a wider audience through thought leadership, and then gathering as many email addresses from that new audience as possible, in order to add prospects to their email subscriber list. That way, they could begin moving them through the sales funnel, directing them towards the specific relationship Business X wanted to have with them.
4. Quick Check: Do your conversion goals correspond with the stated goals of your business?
Take a look at what you’re striving for online and whether it matches up with your real-world goals for your company. Getting Facebook likes is all well and good, but if it’s not leading to more sales of your gadgets, and that’s your goal, then you need to rethink what you consider a conversion online. If your real-world goal is building a larger audience of warm leads to market to, then collecting email addresses should be first and foremost.
» For Business X, email marketing was the digital marketing channel that they felt would be most effective at helping them reach their overall business goal of lead nurturing. Therefore, all other efforts would now ultimately be geared towards persuading people to share their email addresses.
5. Define your target profiles.
Next, you want to figure out who it is you’re targeting with your online marketing efforts. Get specific—not just “women,” but “married women with kids, between the ages of thirty and forty-five, who make more than $50,000 a year and like animals.” Come up with at least three different customer personas for your ideal customers, focusing on demographics, interests, and pain points, then research where those people hang out online and what speaks to them there.
» Business X already had a very in-depth understanding of the kinds of business customers it wanted to target. What it didn’t know, however, was how to reach those people online. So the marketing department did some research into which social media platforms their customers used most heavily—Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Instagram? Pinterest?—and what sort of content they engaged with while there. They looked at what sorts of blog posts and email newsletters truly interested their target audience, and what kind of resources they wanted to see on an IT solutions provider’s website. They polled their current customers, asked prospects, searched for industry conversations happening on social media, and drew up complete profiles that detailed where and how to reach the exact people they wanted to reach online.
They found that their target audience mostly hung out on LinkedIn and Twitter, and appreciated industry-related information—tips for choosing an IT solution, for example, or explanations of how various solutions could help with different issues.
6. Create an overall digital marketing strategy.
Based on the above goals and information, develop your new strategy. It may be similar to your existing one, or it may be completely different. The key is that you
