In an age of immediate access and increasingly complex buying processes, businesses are pushed to find new and creative ways to effectively get in front of consumers.
However, the crucial mistake many marketers make is in optimizing the initial message, but not managing the end-to-end customer experience throughout the buying process. Media dollars are spent filling the top of the funnel, but holes in the funnel are letting transactions slip away. The good news is that by managing the consumer experience through testing and conversion optimization, marketers can achieve more with the money spent on media, and seal up these undesirable holes.
Here are five applicable tips on how to maximize your media spending:
1. Segmentation & Targeting
The success of any campaign is entirely dictated by the ability to get in front of the right user at the right time with the right message. To capitalize on your media spend, it is critical that media-centered conversion optimization efforts account for where the user is in the customer journey. The goal is to address these users appropriately via capabilities such as retargeting and geolocation, and then direct them to content tailored specifically for the purpose of moving them further down the path.
2. Message & Theme Continuity
With media campaigns set up to segment and expose targeted messaging to users, it’s important to maintain the theme of the creative used in the ad throughout the customer journey. Essentially, the user has already “voted” for the theme with a click— they’re ready to see more! Complementary website creative and messaging that carries the same theme as the ad creative can pay large dividends and make every media dollar go exponentially further. Leverage testing and behavior-targeting tools to ensure that these hand-raisers are best served once they arrive at your site.
3. Planning & Prioritizing
Often the most obvious test areas are those on homepages or further down the funnel on lead forms, these are the easiest sell to stakeholders and the simplest option for determining a winner. However, effective media and conversion rate optimization programs are about filling the funnel and getting users to take the next step, whatever that may be. In media planning, the biggest wins can be found by prioritizing landing-page tests that get users to explore more. For just a fraction of the dollars that might be needed to acquire users through direct-response campaigns, companies can optimize the landing pages—the first impression for users—and maximize every dollar.
4. Defining Success & Learning from Failure
Every test executed in a conversion optimization program should have a success metric stated clearly before the test has begun. Not every test is about generating a lead or sale, however; some, as discussed earlier, are about getting users to take the next action down the desired path. On media landing pages, successful actions might simply be non-bounce behaviors (more than 1 page view), or users clicking to learn more about your company. Knowing and communicating the primary goals before the test will help greatly in managing expectations. Further, while tests might have primary goals/success metrics, deliberately selecting variations and therefore establishing anticipated learnings from the test are key. Understanding why a test variation did not win (and what that means) is nearly as valuable as having found a winning variation. In all of these learnings and “failed” tests, you gain knowledge about how to build your messaging and experience.
5. Collaborating on Ideas, Big & Small
Although it is important that conversion optimization programs incorporate web experience expertise into developing tests and variations, this does not mean that all ideas need to arise from one team. The best ideas come from evaluating the shared learning and perspective of other stakeholders, from incorporating data gathered through clickstream data (analytics), and from qualitative data gathered by surveys or other means. Encouraging thoughts and feedback from multiple groups not only brings out the best ideas, but also gives others a sense of ownership in what you’re testing.
Andy Batten is the Director of Digital Analytics & Optimization at Red Door.
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