Good Marketing People vs Bad Marketing People

I have been reading Ben Horowitz's book, "The Hard Thing about Hard Things" and have been inspired by a section where he describes what a good product manager does versus what a bad product manager does.  As such, I am taking my crack at what a good online marketing professional does versus what a bad online marketing professional does.

A good online marketing professional:

• Constantly looks for ways to do his or her job more efficiently without anyone ever telling him to do so.  S/he aggressively tests out new tools and implements them as they make sense.  S/he has a strong bias toward automating rote tasks.
• Presents conclusions and recommendations instead of just presenting a mountain of data, thereby making the receiver interpret all the data.
• Is fluent in analytics and can back up his/her conclusions and recommendations.  As the saying goes, "In God we trust - all others bring data."
• Is passionate about technology - s/he is always reading about new technologies that could impact his/her job, his/her product, and the world around him/her.  S/he never waits for someone to tell him to read up on a subject.
• Recognizes that the online marketing world doesn't fit neatly in a 9-5 world.  Sometimes the most interesting thing of the week will happen on Sunday morning, whereas things can be quiet  during normal business hours.  When it is quiet, go for the long bike ride you have wanted to go on.  When you strike gold on a Sunday morning, sometimes you have to buckle down and start digging right then.
• A/B tests everything in life down to how s/he makes his/her coffee in the morning. 
• Is intellectually curious.  When s/he spots some interesting data, s/he always digs into it to see if it could improve his/her performance.

A bad online marketing professional:

• Blindly follows what has been done in the past.  S/he never asks why it was done that way before.
• Acts like math is like cooties.
• Doesn't know how to lead people to conclusions.  S/he usually presents no data or enough data to overwhelm a mathematician.
• Is afraid to take risks.  S/he doesn't understand that what you do in online marketing this year cannot be what you did last year.
• Is scared of technology.  Let's face it.  Some parts of this job are technical - deal with it.

Improving Things One Step at a Time

Online marketing can be overwhelming at times because there are so many vehicles and each one requires flawless execution of many, many details.  If you join a company that has little online marketing infrastructure (or perhaps worse, a very disorganized marketing program), it can be a daunting task to put everything in place.  The best approach - take one vehicle and improve it methodically step by step.

For example, let's assume that this company you have joined has no formalized email newsletter to its customers.  You would love to have a robust newsletter program using email best practices.  However, you will never get there in one giant leap; you need to make regular, incremental progress.  For example, the steps you take could be something like this:

1. Set up a hosted email service with a one-time email list (ensuring opt-out data is retained) and custom newsletter content
2. Create an HTML template that you will use for each newsletter
3. Create an automated or semi-automated program to populate the newsletter member database
4. Master whatever tracking tools are in your email program
5. Implement Google Analytics UTM tracking links
6. Personalize the name in the email
7. Personalize big chunks of content in the email based on data from your customer database
8. Incorporate A/B testing of headlines
9. Incorporate A/B testing of content
10. Incorporate an ad server (even if you are just using it to target internal ads to your customers)

Each time you send an email you try to bite off the next step in your email improvement program.  If you send 1-2 newsletters a month, it won't take long before you have gone from a rudimentary email program to a state-of-the-art program.  At the same time, because each new newsletter is incorporating just one new change, you minimize the chances of things going wrong.

Being state-of-the-art requires constant forward motion.  You won't get there over night, but you will get there quickly if you keep improving.

Portfolio Management in Digital Marketing

Years ago I seriously contemplated taking a job in the finance industry, but eventually decided to pursue a career in technology instead.  These days I have come to the conclusion that being an executive in digital marketing is a lot like being a portfolio manager in the finance industry.

When you run a digital marketing department, you have countless experiments going at any time.  You are running parallel programs in SEO, paid search, banner ads, social media, content creation, PR, etc. In each of these areas you can be testing dozens or hundreds of different concepts.  Add this up and it can easily mean thousands or tens of thousands of things going at once.

With this many experiments running at any one time, overseeing a digital marketing department really becomes portfolio management.  You need to constantly compute the ROI of your investments and move your money into the initiatives with the best returns.

On the surface that sounds simple, but the reality is that some marketing activities are harder to measure than others.  That is why digital marketing executives have to be experts at analytics.  Sure they should have an outstanding analytics department behind them, but at the end of the day they need to be analytical experts themselves.

I spend 3 to 4 hours a day in Google Analytics, SQL, Tableau, Optimizely and other analytical tools.   Sure I am an analytics fanatic, but more and more digital marketing execs are putting a considerable amount of their time into analytics so they can focus their team’s marketing efforts on the most valuable areas.

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.

Where to Start with A/B Testing

I am astonished by how often I run into Internet entrepreneurs who have an Internet business but have yet to build A/B testing into their culture.  By using A/B tests, you can quickly improve how parts of your business operate.  You can A/B test the web site, emails, and many other facets of your business.  Each time you are measuring the effectiveness of one approach versus another. 

The benefits can be huge.  At TeamSnap we made one relatively minor change to our home page that immediately increased trial signups by over 30%.  That test required just a couple hours of a designer's time plus an A/B test tool which cost us about $300/month at the time.  If we tried to buy 30% more trials through customer acquisition methods, it would have cost us a fortune.

The first place to start with A/B testing is to agree on what you want to optimize. Yes, this sounds obvious but sometimes not everyone on the team might agree.  For a typical SaaS business, you might look at things like trial sign-up rate and conversion from trial to paid plans.  For an e-commerce business you probably want to focus on revenue per visit or a similar metric.

Next you need to put in place a testing system.  We use Optimizely because it is super easy to use and allows designers and marketing professionals to launch tests with little to no involvement by development. That allows us to iterate very quickly.

From there you need to decide where to start testing.  There are a couple approaches you might consider:

• High traffic pages are the most obvious choices.  If you focus on pages that are seen by lots of people, you get two benefits.  First, your tests will complete more quickly because you collect a lot of data in a short period of time.  Second, as a general rule, high traffic pages will impact your key metrics more than low traffic pages.
• "Broken" pages are another logical place to start.  Everyone has a few pages on their site that they know they would like to blow up and re-do.  A/B testing can help guide you through that process.  Run an A/B test with a new design that you have been itching to roll out and see if it improves performance.
• High "page value" pages are a more scientific way of approaching things.  Google Analytics computes a page value for each page on your site using a formula that links that page to transactions and goals on your site.  This is a more systematic way of identifying pages that are likely to impact your key metrics (assuming you are using Google Analytics goals and advanced e-commerce capabilities).

One final thing to consider is that you need to have some basic understanding of the math behind A/B testing before you start drawing too many conclusions from them.  Remember what a confidence interval is from your college probability class?  If not, time to brush up.  Here is a very common mistake.  Let's say that your test shows that variant A was better than variant B at a 95% confidence interval.  A on average was 10% better at whatever goal you defined.  The test is saying that you can be 95% certain that A is better than B, but you cannot be 95% certain that the improvement is actually 10%.  Brush up on your math and you'll understand why.

The most important thing with A/B testing is to build it into the culture.  Every time you approach a problem and every time you consider a change to your site, ask whether you can use A/B testing to help guide you.

Not Using RLSA with AdWords? Shame on You

A couple months back Google quietly rolled out a new feature that completely changes how advertisers think about paid search.  The new feature is called RLSA. If you are running AdWords campaigns, and you don’t have RLSA enabled, stop what you are doing and go check it out now.

In the past we couldn’t incorporate what we knew about customers into what we showed them when they were searching on Google.  In other words, we largely were serving up the same ads to everyone on paid search.  Sure, we could vary the ads by region or device or language, but those are fairly blunt targeting objects.

RLSA essentially combines re-marketing with paid search.  In other words, when someone visits your website, you can tag them and put them into customer segments.  You then show them different search results in Google depending on what they have done on your website. 

One of the easiest ways to get started with RLSA is to tune your branded campaign.  For example, you can decide that you don’t need to pay for branded ads for existing customers.  With RLSA you tag existing customers (e.g., visitors who come to your website and log in).  In AdWords you then specify that visitors with that tag don’t see your branded ads. You can greatly reduce your branded search spend with this technique.  Why burn your marketing budget on paid ads for existing users who can just as easily log in by clicking on your natural search results.

Once you have tuned your branded search, it is time to think about visitors who are in key stages of the conversion funnel.  For example, let’s say a customer has put something in their shopping basket.  You might be willing to bid higher for those folks if you see them searching again.  Alternately, you might want to show them a different ad.  With RLSA, you segment out the customers who have something in their shopping cart and then run different campaigns for them.

Those are just two simple examples of how RLSA can be used.  It truly is a rethinking of what paid search means.

Pssst, What Is Your Secret (to Online Marketing)?

I get several calls a day from people who want to know my secret formula for online marketing.  These are business acquaintances who look at how we are doing at TeamSnap and want to replicate our growth at their company.   So far this month we have added five times as many customers as last June, and last June was a great month in terms of customer acquisition.

We have a great product that people find easy to use and incredibly handy.  In addition, our customer service is excellent.  As a result, the service is extremely viral.  Having said that, we definitely have greatly increased our usage through online marketing.

When I tell these acquaintances our online marketing "secret" they blink and say, "Really?  That is it?"  My answer is so, well, pedestrian that they are always surprised.  They are expecting some super secret Google Ad Words trick or a SEO tool that no one knows about.  I have a few of those too, but I require a good bribe before giving those out.  (Hint, I love sweets.) At the same time, when I ask these acquaintances if they are following my "secret," they almost always say no.

So what is this "secret"?  It is analytics, analytics, analytics.  As simple as it sounds, you need to figure out what action you want to increase and find an easy way to measure it.  Are you trying to increase trial sign-ups?  Then measure what the sources are of trial sign-ups.  Are you trying to increase leads?  Then measure what sites, ads, emails, keywords, geographies, devices, etc. send you the most leads.  While I am partial to e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics (even for companies that are not in e-commerce), there are many ways to measure these things.

The key is to set up a regular process for reviewing the sources that drive this action that you are trying to increase.  On my marketing team we religiously review trials by source at our weekly marketing meeting.  It is the core report that determines where we focus our time.  If a source delivers a lot of trials, we put more time and effort into it.  If it doesn't deliver many new trials, we cut back or turn the program off.  It is that simple.  It is a simple but highly effective time management exercise.

Once you have this process down, it is critical that you run lots of experiments.  When I am evaluating a new marketing source (e.g., a new advertising venue or even a business development partner) I try to start with the smallest commitment that will allow me to effectively test that channel. If it is a test of a new advertising channel, I often find that spending $10,000 or even far less is plenty to prove whether that vehicle works or not. 

Don't overthink it - test, measure, tweak, and repeat.