3 Rules for Marketing Success- Test Test Test
Friday, February 25, 2005
I'd like to share some useful information from running a marketing and design firm as well as from being a high tech consultant.
Let's start off with a recent experience that punches home the importance of targetted marketing.
Everyone knows that marketing should be targetted. Everyone knows it. I have found that few actually will do the research neccessary to really take advantage of that marketing fact; those that do reap a far greater return on their investment (ROI).
With one of our recent clients we had thought that we had had our 'public' pretty well identified. The site was converting at a rate of about 5%, which is incredibly well as anyone with experience in web marketing will tell you. 1-3% is considered pretty darn good.
As most marketing firms do, we use a variety of ways to measure our client's site productiveness. For general information, we use several common web log analysis tools such as Awstats, Webalizer and Statomatic. These are what I would call, aggregate log analysis tools, in that they provide summary statistics in a generalized way.
When you get into attempting to tie a specific ad to a specific visitor to a specific action (eg. a web conversion) you're going to need better tracking than these log tools will provide.
We searched around and couldn't find exactly what we were looking at, so we decided to write our own custom tool that allowed us to track this information easily.
The results have been fantasitic and have allowed us to see patterns and trends that weren't otherwise obvious or available. What it has really done is made it easier to further qualify and IDENTIFY with greater precision, exactly who the target market is. I anticipate that as a result that our ROI will double but it's too early to tell. I will keep this updated.
The moral of the story is that one must continually look at identifying and qualifying your market. And when you think you have it pretty well identified, take a step back and see how you can analyze it a little closer. You have to get it down as precisely as possible.
For example if you were selling 'baseballs' you may have been targetting 'people who play baseball'. This may be producing results. Now, on further research you might find that this gets a little more precise and your top sales might be coming from perhaps 'baseball coaches'. So you re-tool your campaign around 'baseball coaches' and re-evalautate. Some time passes and you re-analyze. You may find now that your best conversions are coming from 'little league coaches' and so it goes.
This is a ridiculous example but the best I could do off the top of my head!
Again, test, measure and re-test again and then do it all again. This isn't going to happen over night and it will take some time but the results and success are well worth the effort!
posted by Scott D'Ambra at 7:11 PM
Scott
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