I recently created a post on one of the online marketing boards, with the following complaint:

“There are too many snake-oil salesmen in our field. What can we do?”

This was reflecting my frustration with the amazing potential of the field of online marketing, but also the fact that there are so many phonies in the industry. I then suggested perhaps having a Marketing Designation, or some sort of central rating of ideas.

Within one hour, my post was deleted, with no explanation.

Far be it for me to analyze the psychology of forum moderators too much, but I do think this reflects the thinking out there. A kind of extreme positivity, that anyone who is looking at the work critically is not a true believer. I am tired of this.

I think our industry needs more skeptics. Yes, we do not want to squelch creativity, and I think this is one source of the lack of skepticism, but imagine what could be done with creative energies more usefully focused?

Another root of the problem is that everyone is selling something. Don’t question Social Media because Gartner says Social Media CRM is going to be a billion-dollar industry (billion… with a “B”). But – the reality is that Social Media is just not for everyone.

Finally, I think that Marketers just like shiny new things. It is in our natures. And, we are so excited to push forth with something new with a powerful burst of enthusiasm. Who wants a skeptic to get in the way of that?

But, the industry desperately needs it. And, for the next few posts I am going to be looking skeptically at some of the recent trends in Marketing. Don’t be afraid.

Call me naive, but I truly believe that no one goes out to build a website that is confusing to navigate, illogical, impossible to find or design-challenged. I think that the biggest reason why websites like these are built is because designers, developers, marketers and managers all make assumptions that negatively affect a website. It is not necessarily lack of talent, but it is a lack of awareness. When working with new clients, I often have to overcome these assumptions:

1. Users Think the Same Way I Do.

Unfortunately, I often see websites that reflect the values of the demographic that are building them, instead of reflecting that of the viewers. The classic example was when I worked with a major healthcare software firm. The (mostly male) management insisted on having beautiful perfect women representing the site since that was attractive to them, the decision makers. But, the user-base was mainly middle-aged-to-nearly-retired women – a demographic that does not necessarily want to be reminded about how beautiful a 20-something is.

After a quick discussion with some of the users, I realized they wanted to have a picture of a woman who they related to, not the dream-woman chosen by the management. In changing the image – still using a woman, but one who was in the healthcare environment and who looked more senior and in-charge. This image related more to what the user-base wanted to be. Now, this change may seem obvious to you – but think about the images on your site – do they appeal to you or your user-base? Do they reflect your values or theirs? In all decisions, the user-bases values should win.

2. I Can Be Creative with Navigation.

Another dangerous assumption is that people building a site can be creative with navigation. “About Us” and “Contact” for example, are navigational elements that you see on almost all sites, so why make a change? I was working on a technology site that wanted to call their online tour “snapshots”. Although this was a clever name for the tour, during usability testing all users had no idea what the button meant and therefore did not click on it while going through their tasks.

Now – building navigation is a huge topic, that I will get into more deeply in a later post. In general, the whole focus should be on figuring out how the user thinks, instead of creating something new. The whole goal of navigation is to allow users to move through the site effortlessly. If they have to think for a few seconds about navigation, you have failed.   Is the navigation on your site standard, or creative? Is there anything you can do to make it more clear? I am certainly not down on being creative – I am just saying that creativity should be used in other places on the project – not on the nav.

3. If I Build it They Will Come.

I find that a lot of site managers can be convinced that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a priority for their site. The people who convince them are usually web designers who are afraid that using SEO best practices will ruin their designs. First of all, I think this is completely untrue and I see examples all of the time of well optimized sites that are also beautiful. Second of all, every site should take SEO best practices because search is such an important traffic generator – for both consumer and B2B, reardless of your brand and audience.

Traffic is central to any marketing campaign and search is almost always a huge part of that. So selecting keywords that users actually employ, adding those keywords to the text and a limiting the use of Flash (Search Engine Land has an excellent article about this) are just the beginning of a successfully SEOd site. The decision should not be whether or not a site should be optimized. The decision should be: how should we go about it?

4. The Site Development Will Finish at the Go Live Date.

To me, a site is never really finished. When a site goes live, and campaigns start running, new learnings always take place. For example, when looking at analytic reports, you may learn that some products on your product page are simply not being viewed, so you want to take another run at it. Or, you may see in your site search reports that a lot of users are looking for something that you do not yet provide, so you could add a section on it. Or on your Google AdWords campaign you could find that the most popular search/conversion terms on your site are not what you thought they would be, so you can change the site focus.

I am not saying to scrap a site right after it has been released, but there are always tweaks and changes that can happen. Even small changes in navigational labels or changing the location of buttons have in my experience brought on big changes in conversions/navigation patterns. Also – sites that have a fresh look for different seasons (even if that includes tax season or trade show season) can make a big difference.

Conclusion

Moving away from these assumptions is not expensive in terms of site development cost. But ignoring them is expensive in terms of the cost of confounding or missing out on users. Being conscious about these decisions can go a long way to improving the user experience — and the bottom line. So to quote my old art teacher, to assume makes an ass of us !

Most marketers know to submit their new sites to the Yahoo directory and to DMOZ. Beyond that, it can sometimes be very overwhelming to find which directory is right, since there are an overwhelming amount of them.

The two main reasons to submit a site to a directory is to: a) get more traffic; b) rank better on search engines. Since there are a lot of blogs and forums that cover how to rank better on search engines, I am going to talk about the “getting more traffic” goal.

Where is the User?

When I am starting a marketing campaign, I put myself in the shoes of the consumer. I check search volumes on certain key terms in Google related to the industry, then I search on the ones with the most. I then go to major industry sites, to see if they make any recommendations. If possible, I also do interviews and surveys, finding out what sites prospects frequent during the decision-making process and I check them out.

While on my search, I imagine the demographics of the user and what kind of site would appeal to them. Unfortunately, there are a lot of link farms out there and also fake directories that don’t really get much traffic. You can get some idea about traffic by checking the PR of the site, and by looking at Alexa and other traffic estimating sites (the are just guides and not perfect tools).

Finding Good Directories

In certain industries, such as the vertical market software industry, directories such as Capterra are a very useful marketing tool. Although they have a “no follow” link, meaning it does not affect your PR for search engine rankings, it is still useful when it comes to getting direct traffic. A directory like Capterra does the online marketing for you, with high organic Google rankings and an exhaustive PPC campaign for each category that it represents. From the user point of view, it offers a comprehensive shopping experience where they can find the main vendors within their industry all in one place. They can also search by features, industry and more.

For one client (who will remain nameless so competitors do not copy their campaign) we set up a test in Capterra at a low dollar per click amount in several categories and checked clicks and conversions in Google Analytics. After a couple of months, it became clear that we were getting a much higher conversion rate in one of the categories than we did in all others. We decided to up our spend on Capterra in that category, and remove the other two.

Directories was such a successful strategy for this client, that we ended up pursuing more of them and found the cost-per-conversion beginning to fall significantly lower than it was in Google Adwords. In the end, based on the data, they decided to focus only on directories, and shut down the Adwords campaign altogether.

Lessons

In general, it is very worthwhile to add directories to your online marketing mix, but it is worthwhile to take a careful approach. This not only helps you spend your budget wisely, it also helps you understand the way your customers make decisions.

One trend that I have been following for the past few years is multivariate testing (MVT). In statistics, multivariate testing is a way to test a hypothesis on a complex, multivariable system. In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a way to test several different elements at once in a live environment. A webpage has many different elements to possibly test:

• Imagery: ie. using human vs. product imagery for example
• Headline: the text headline is often the most important element when it comes to conversions
• Navigation: there is a lot of debate about how navigation can be used in terms of increasing end-actions
• Themes: how do you state your products selling points?
• Offers: the quality and appropriateness of the offer can make or break a campaign.

My experience with MVT (while I worked on the client-side) has been where the content of the website is served up in equal amounts through a dynamically generated website.  By randomly generating different variations of the website, you can find out which iteration performs the best in terms of conversions. Some tests can be huge, with over 1,000 variants (if you remember from statistics, a half-dozen elements with a number of version shown in all possible iterations, can end up to have a very large number of total variants).

I like this type of testing, since it allows consumers to vote with their clicks. Seeing which variation produces the best end-action is often surprising for marketers. Some get their teams to bet on which elements will be most successful before the campaign starts, and they almost always get it wrong. Isn’t it better to let the consumers make the choices, instead of just making educated guesses? This information can then be used in other marketing methods as well.

Multivariate testing is just so exciting to me, since it uses the web to its full extent possible. Print brochures, or direct mail would not realistically allow 1,000 iterations, with such a clear view on what produces end-actions. The trend towards this shows that the web is coming into its own in terms of marketing, since instead of simply copying brochures or other traditional marketing methods, it is developing into something that has never happened before.

If you are interested in reading further on Johnathan Mendez has an excellent 5-part series.

Once I tell people what I do, one of the most popular questions I get, whether it be during cocktail small talk or at client presentations, is: “How to get a bunch of relevant traffic to their site quickly” and one of my answers is usually “market through deals sites”.

And, I get a surprised look on people’s faces. Maybe they expect something more complicated or intellectually taxing. Honestly, I can’t blame them with the way that some other online marketers make things seem tougher than they are by speaking in jargon or making technical matters seem like magic. But, I digress. In my experience, marketing deals, especially through deal sites, is an effective way to drive traffic to your site, and here are some tips.

First of all, you want to make sure that your offer is appealing, and will make people want to act. To find that out, I would rely on results from past campaigns (I usually just take the top two and ignore the rest) or test your idea through interviews or online focus groups with prospective clients. I’ve separated out my recommendations into the standard (VW) and the deluxe (BMW) models.

The VW

Deal Sites: These deal sites (such as RedFlagDeals.com and DealHunting.com) and the large number of travel deals blogs and more out there, add value by offering deals to their their readers. So – by simply finding the contact information and sending them an e-mail you can get your deal listed. If your deal is very relevant to the site (I tend to look at what is up there to see if the deal would fit in and may modify the copy a bit to make it work) then it can be an instant hit!

Internal Communications: Sending out news of the deal to your internal list and posting it on your website is a common strategy, but you can also look at other options, such as marketing your deal through a newsletter belonging to another internal department, a partner or a larger organization that you are part of. Personally, I have had success with marketing through partner organizations, and they also enjoy the benefits since usually I offer to present their deals in my internal communications as well.

Other Methods: Adwords Campaigns can also be used to market deals, and in my experience I get a slightly higher click-thru rate if I talk about a deal in an ad. Using Digg.com to promote a deal can also lead to success – but you have to make sure that the deal is highly relevant to the community. If you are already running display advertising, deal-based banners can increase click-through significantly. You can also use traditional marketing methods such as print advertising and direct mail.

The BMW

Another way to market through deal sites is to sponsor a section of the site. I set up this sponsorship with RedFlagDeals.com for Microsoft Small Business Canada over a year ago, and it was a success both in terms of traffic and end actions. You can see that there are both sponsored deals, which contributed the majority of traffic, but also a banner at the top and a button on the top right for branding.

Since there are a lot of technology lovers in the RedFlagDeals audience, Microsoft made a perfect match for the small business section of the site. In my experience deal site owners such as RedFlagDeals.com have a very entrepreneurial spirit, so you can work together to make the program successful for everyone. This is very different from other site sponsorships that I have created with more traditional sites that are not willing to implement anything even slightly out of the box (or out of the template ).

In general, I have had a lot of success with marketing deals. Usually at the beginning of the program, I hear a lot of skepticism around this, that they will simply attract tire-kickers that will not be willing to buy. But personally, the numbers on end-actions are always good, though the creative that I am working with doesn’t over-promise and under-deliver and I am very careful about targeting. Plus – I usually find a deal or two myself that I like while I am setting up the programs .

My Client, Career Counselor Michael Reddy, was looking to get more leads for his The Right Mountain career counseling program. The program is high-end, targeted towards professionals who are changing their careers. The program encourages people to look within themselves to find out what career path would be most appropriate for them.

Results: increased lead amount by 8x while only increasing budget by 28%

Adwords: The Right Mountain already had an adwords campaign going, getting a relatively low amount of leads. The keyword list was not too bad, and was in logical groups already (around career, employment, job etc), so I simply added a few more and modified bids. The text of the ads was less than compelling, so I changed it, giving it more appeal. I also used best practices, such as making the ad aligned and changed the display URL from www.therightmountain.com to TheRightMountain.com. Also, I used Google’s geotargeting tool – moving the targeting from all of Ontario, to the area surrounding Toronto (doing a custom shape in “target customers by location” was very handy for this).

Landing Pages: I created two landing pages. One was a generic message and one was a very personal message from Michael (I think of Michael as an inspirational guy, so I was betting that users would feel the same way). Banner design was provided by Viewpoint Interactive and development by PC Tantrums.

Testing:

Concept One: During my phone interviews with career seekers, they were less interested in the generic message than the personal message. They felt that this message was compelling, it was just like anything else that you might find on the web – which I interpreted as this message having less credibility since it did not focus on the personal – and career counseling is a very personal thing! One user during testing said that he would pay anything to get unstuck – so I added that to the headline.

Concept Two: This concept tested way better than the fish concept. People liked the personal message, and Michael’s own history added a lot of credibility for these professionals. I would have not released the fish concept at all, but there was one comment along the lines of “I don’t know his daughter, so I don’t really care if she can steer a boat!” This is the risk of a personal message – although some people will find it more compelling and touching, others might find it too sentimental. I decided to use both landing pages, and let the results from Adwords tell me what my next step should be.

Adwords Results:
For one month, we got the following results:
CTR: 0.89%
Conversion Rate: 9.04%

A conversion is either filling in a Contact Us form or joining the newsletter list. In general, I was happy with the conversion rates, especially since before it was under 1%. Since we are using up our budget every day, I am not too concerned about the CTR at this point. The cost per conversion was also very reasonable.

Since the landing pages were so different, I attached different ads to them. The map listing (at the top) the “Stuck” and the  “Unsatisfied” listing was linked to the first concept, and the “Need a Career Change” and “Toronto Career Counseling” was linked to the second concept.

As you can see, as a local service, the listing on Google Maps was the most favorable from a conversion standpoint. Other than that, the first concept was both the best and worst in terms of conversions (11.8% and 0%) with the second concept and more personal message in the middle. However, overall the more personal message fared slightly better when the total number of conversions is taken into account (this data is confidential).

So, the personal message has a bit more appeal but it doesn’t kill the other message in terms of results. I always find it interesting when my landing page testing is different from my qualitative interviews and what I think myself! I would have bet that the personal message would knock the generic message out of the ballpark in terms of conversions after the phone interviews, but that just isn’t the case.   However, the ad text is likely playing a role as well – so this campaign is a good candidate for a/b testing to be sure. I will do that as a next step and post results here when I get them! Constantly iterating will make the campaign a bigger and bigger success!