Archives

Good marketing and branding have always been about creating word-of-mouth, stories, and legend. Today with word-of-mouth spread so quickly and easily it’s more powerful than ever. Companies with the marketing gene, like Apple, have elevated WOM to an art form. The trick is, there has to “there” there. Your brand’s underlying value proposition, especially in B2B marketing, has to consist of a product benefit greater than the sum of the product’s adoption cost plus its price. The bigger the delta, the more compelling the value proposition.

Still, just as every generation wants to believe that it invented sex, new marketers assume that a brand “identity” or brand promise is something you can go out and buy and put on like trendy shoes. They soon discover that their brand is not their shoes. It’s their feet. It’s not the belt, it’s the waistline. It’s not what you put on your head, it’s what’s inside.

A brand’s value proposition isn’t a pitch, it is whatever is most relevant and compelling to a buyer. Think of a brand as a product’s or a company’s character. It has to stand for something. Which means that it cannot stand for everything. If it tries to, it will stand for nothing. This is part of the reason why great, leading brands, not unlike great people, are rare. There’s a natural inclination of the heart to be liked. To be everybody’s everything so as not to offend or alienate anybody. Your brand must stand for something…or nothing at all. What does your brand stand for? How do you know? How you convey it?

Testing and measuring the content you put online is faster and easier than ever today.  And budget-friendlier.  Which headline will draw a bigger response?  Which approach will visitors prefer?  Which offer?  Which tone?  Here are 20 tips on how to perform basic A/B testing:

1.  Don’t test a page you already suspect is weak.  Test something you believe is doing a good job.  You may be surprised.

2.  Use an overlay page (one that shows up when a respondent does something) when the visitor chooses the leave an “offer” page.  The overlay should remind the visitor of something that will entice them not to leave and get them to think “What the hell, I’ll fill out the form”.

3.  Get up and stand away from your screen. Take a look at your page(s) from five or six feet away.  What jumps out?  What attracts the eye?

4.  Make the “Download Now” words big and clear.

5.  Use separate buttons for different demographics or different categories of customer.

6.  The word “enterprise” is stronger than “corporate”.  People don’t think of themselves as corporate.  They identify with working in an enterprise.  Don’t you?

7.  Begin your order forms on the page that first mentions them.  Don’t make visitors go somewhere else.

8.  Use images of people, not products.

9.  Test all images of people for positive responses.

10. Don’t spend money on testing.  There are plenty of free tools out there.

11.  If you hire a vendor, remember that the best ones will guarantee results.

12. Your test should run three weeks (15 business days).

13. Measure all ongoing traffic simultaneously.

14. Start by testing something small.  A page, a portion of a page, a few lines, a small campaign.

15. Seek to drive down your cost-per-visitor and your cost-per-conversion.

16. Determine your most important metrics as dictated by your business model, business plan, sales and marketing objectives.  Your particular business mission.

17. Test pages that are politically “neutral”, at least at first, before you test your boss’s pet page to show how lame it actually is.

18. Work closely with your IT people.  Make sure that something you set up to test doesn’t bring down your site or cause a sudden, prolonged downturn in traffic.  Make sure there is a quick fix at hand.

19. Test early and often.  Google does (and they’re pretty smart).

20. Test one or two things at a time.

What are you doing to ensure you’re content is the best it can be?