How do you approach and prioritize optimizing your web activities? With several existing and new fastgrowing marketing channels most website owners find themselves in a harder and harder struggle to keep up pace with the new possibilities on the web and still keep optimizing their existing activites. You can’t spend the optimal time of attention to all your activities so where to start?
The traditional marketer focus
Most optimizing efforts go into optimizing the different online marketing channels to generate higher conversion like this example.
Optimizing this channel would hopefully generate higher conversions which is great. But could you place your optimizing efforts elsewhere and get a higher effect?
Let’s look at the big picture
If we have a look at the big picture on how the marketing channels typically are connected to your website and conversions you will see that the critical “hub” for your conversions is your website/landingpages and not the marketing channels. The conversion is seldom in the actual marketing creative but the user converts through a landingpage, which can contain multiple holes in the conversion funnel (usability, credibility, signup process etc.). If you would optimize this hub instead of the separate marketing channel the result would be that a lift in conversion would be a lift in conversion for all your marketing channels going through this hub.
These findings suggest that when prioritizing your effort in optimizing your web sphere, focus should be concentrated in optimizing your website or landing pages using for example A/B split testing or more advanced Multi variate testing (MVT). With this example I don’t imply you should not be doing any optimization of your marketing channels. If you don’t have any traffic to your website, optimizing it will have no effect . Our experience tells us however that most weborganizations spend 95% of their time focusing on the external marketing channels and only 5% on content optimization. I would argue that in many cases flipping this priority would increase your overall ROI on your website.
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I like your conclusion. I still believe that content is king. Thanks for sharing your insights.
Content is really king, in so many ways – value for your users aswell as other bonuses like Google love, word-of-mouth marketing and so on.
Great post and I totally agree with you Kristian
Many companies are literally flushing down marketing money since their web sites are not optimized to increase the relevance or the engagement with the visitor when he/she hits the site from a paid source. Reduced bounce rate and increased conversion rates is defiantly something companies will see when they start focusing more on optimizing “on-site” activates linked to a certain marketing creative or channel. By enforcing the message of a specific product/service can really help drive conversions, simply by delivering a consistent message on key site areas that the visitor responded too in the first place. The end result will of course be more effective marketing campaigns and greater overall ROI.
Segmenting visitors and targeting content based on existing relationship with a customer or what you know about them will also make the visitor journey more relevant and personalized. Grouping visitors based on source, behaviour, location, time of day, etc. can really make a big difference not to mention using demographics and type of customer information.
Content will continue to be king and queen, without content nothing of this would be possible
Cheers,
B
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