Online Marketing: Plug that hole!
- Stephen Murphy
- 24 September 2008
To most of us it seems logical to get the facts before you make a decision. The old saying “marry in haste and repent at leisure” is also a concept that lends itself to many areas of business, including online marketing. We try to encourage our clients to make balanced decisions based on facts before making costly strategic decisions. Often this advice falls on deaf ears.
Marketing managers and business owners always seem to have strong opinions about some element of their campaigns whether it is the agency, software tool or marketing strategy. These opinions are often based on experience with a previous company or an old campaign and are no longer based on facts relevant to the current one. Let’s face it, marketing managers tend to change jobs as often as underwear – but how many drag around an agency or an old point of view?
The problem we find in working with both large and small businesses is that marketing is reviewed in isolation of the entire online sales process. This is particularly the case in large, segmented organisations where key performance indicators and responsibilities are separated between divisions. As a result, businesses fail to take a holistic view of their online sales process.
Small businesses tend to jump on a bandwagon based on a friend’s advice or something they saw on Sunrise. Overall, businesses are not using online to test and learn from their campaigns or to see which strategies convert best into sales.
In my opinion, businesses need to streamline their entire online sales processes before investing in large redesigns or expensive campaigns.
Clients ask us to do all sorts of things. Our favourite request is to ‘double the number of leads’ on a certain campaign. However, that can be a problem if we deliver on that request, but the client fails to invest in enough call centre staff to manage the calls.
Another example is a client who told us our online campaign did not convert to sales. We eventually identified the barrier to conversion: an error on the submit enquiry form, which the client didn’t fix even after we told them about it.
Online is no different from the real world – ironically, the users are still living and breathing humans. If your online form uses mandatory fields asking potential leads to divulge personal information, you are going to put some people off. Just like you hate getting cold calls on your home phone, a lot of people hate divulging birth dates and addresses when they enquire online about life insurance. You need to find where these barriers are and improve the entire sales experience.
Traffic is traffic, and often online marketing is so busy just counting and measuring metrics that it fails to view the entire online process.
One of the sexiest things about online marketing is the ability to track campaign and user performance to a very detailed level. So why do businesses fail to use these metrics to their advantage?
In our business we generate thousands of clicks, leads and a positive return on your advertising spend. But if your webpage functionality or call centre fails its core role, if you don’t monitor, assess and fix barriers, it will affect your bottom line – no matter how good our marketing campaign is.
It’s very true. We can lead a horse to water but we can’t make it drink. If your campaigns are leaking profit or underperforming, could your marketing manager be a very thirsty horse?
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