Want to get the most out of your online prospecting and data collection initiatives? Test, test—and then test again.
“Everything should be decided by metrics and constantly questioned,” says David Rodnitzky, CEO of the San Mateo, CA-based digital marketing agency 3QDigital, which works with a variety of clients including FaceBook, SurveyMonkey, EventBrite, Wine.com and Warby Parker.
Rodnitzky will moderate the session “Buyers and Sellers on Maximizing Lead Conversion: Best Practices for Measuring, Qualifying and Attributing Leads” at LeadsCon New York, August 14-15 at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.
The number one mistake that Rodnitzky sees over and over again is marketers not taking the time to test. This could of course be because they don’t have the internal resources or time to make it happen, but it is worth the effort.
“The hardest part is starting from a point of doing no testing,” he conceded. “But we’ve had clients who have embarked on aggressive testing programs and increased performance quickly over the course of a year.
“The beauty of the Internet is that everything is testable, and people still don’t take advantage of that,” he says, noting that the days of spending tens of thousands on a print campaign, and then wait weeks for the results are a thing of the past. “For $500, in a few hours, you can figure out what people are thinking.”
When marketers are looking at their landing pages, it’s easy to become myopic and think too much about yourself, rather than the customer’s needs. But marketers can’t fall in love with their existing creative and refuse to try something new, he stresses.
On a landing page, for example, he says, “People don’t put the right information above the fold—you might have what you want there, but not what you need.”
One important thing you need to consider is how much information you’re trying to ask prospects for at the beginning, Rodnitzky adds. There might be data points prospects don’t want to share, particularly at the beginning of a relationship when all they want to do is download a white paper or watch a video.
B2B marketers understand that they’re not going to get a purchase right away, so they’re willing to invest in marketing that will generate interest and help qualify prospects and solid potential leads.
“And this is generally a good thing,” he says. “I think B2B marketing is harder than B2C, because there’s so many ‘squishy’ metrics involved. In B2B there’s an expectation of a more sophisticated user.”
In contrast, B2C marketers often don’t have the patience to sit through a long sales funnel, and discussions of things like lifetime value and cohort analysis often fall on deaf ears.
For more information about LeadsCon New York, Aug. 14-15, click here. For information on the B2B LeadsCon Summit, with content powered by Chief Marketer, click here.
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