Friday, December 20, 2013

Slow and Steady Wins the Online Marketing Race

Back in June I wrote a piece called, "Pssst, What Is Your Secret to Online Marketing?"  In that post I laid out the case that analytics were the most critical component to an online marketing strategy.  However, months later I continue to get people who ask me for the silver bullet to online marketing.  I guess that post wasn't too convincing so this month I am going to lay out another overarching principle in good online marketing - being slow and steady.

Am I really suggesting that you should move slowly in online marketing?  No, move slowly in the Internet business and you will get left behind. However, success in online marketing often comes from paying attention to a million and one details, and you cannot pay attention to details if you are moving too quickly.  Even those companies that really break through and create a nice buzz often do so by doing many little things right.  Customers see the company over and over in a positive light and build a great impression of the company.

What sort of details matter in online marketing?  Quite frankly because all these pieces build on each other, the answer is pretty much everything does.  Here are examples of details that I often see companies overlook:

  • SEO - are you creating good title tags, creating alt tags for your images, writing good page copy, etc.?
  • Website hygiene - do you have dead links, old content and other major mistakes on your site?
  • Retargeting - do you have a re-targeting program that puts customers into all the appropriate segments and hits them with the right follow-up messages?
  • Triggered emails - are your targeted messages crisp, well designed and regularly revised based on data?
  • Paid search - are you constantly reviewing your campaigns, allocating more budget to the good ones and tweaking or killing off the dogs?
  • A/B testing - are you A/B testing, well, everything?  No, I really mean everything
  • Cross marketing - are you actively looking for good cross-marketing partners?  Do you regularly see who already sends you a lot of traffic and then reach out to them?
  • Relationships with key customers - do you look to build deeper relationships with key customers?  Do you thank them in any way for their support?

This isn't an exhaustive list by any means but it should give you a taste of all the little details that any online marketing teams needs to pay careful attention to. 

What do I mean when I say these things build on each other?  If you can double the number of people coming to the front door of your site through a lot of little things and then double the conversion rate to trial and then double the conversion from trial to paid, you are talking about an 8x improvement in revenue!  Now we are talking about some big results.

Folks, it is time to stop looking for silver bullets and focus on the blocking and tackling.  Put enough blocking and tackling together and you will see big results.