Staying ahead in the marketing game through research and experimentation

Rob at “Software by Rob” wrote very recently: “Your traffic sources have a half-life“. In other words, your much coveted traffic sources often come in rapid spikes that go as quickly as they come, as surely as the decaying of natural radioactive elements that give rise to the term “half-life”. This is very true – Rob demonstrated the fleeting nature of these traffic sources through an in-depth study of his own website’s traffic sources.
Marketing Circle – from www.nald.ca
To every expansion stage marketing manager: the truth is that all temporary boosts in traffic will go away eventually, be it a TechCrunch mention, a chance mention in the Wall Street Journal’s technology section, or a feature article in Inc.com. The same holds true in my experience with analyzing a prospect’s marketing performance as part of our due diligence, or with assisting portfolio company managers in identifying marketing channels and attractive traffic sources.

However, this is often forgotten in most online marketing channels reviews processes. Many times, an inexperienced manager will become enamored with past viral successes and try in vain to replicate those instances. In other cases, a marketing team will focus solely on their competitor’s marketing sources and try to replicate their outstanding performance while not realizing that their success was achieved by a more comprehensive marketing strategy, of which the traffic boosts were just the superficial outcomes.

Indeed, we encourage our companies to implement a regular process for reviewing and re-prioritizing their marketing channels. Furthermore, they have to be constantly on the market for new marketing channels and marketing opportunities. In order to evaluate new marketing channels or mediums, they will need to experiment with them in rapid iterations so they can arrive at a conclusion quickly.

A marketing mix for a predominantly online software company should be reviewed and adjusted very regularly. For example, keyword groups, which are effectively traffic sources for search engine marketing, should be adjusted at least on a weekly basis. Paid advertising should be reviewed monthly or more often if possible. In the new, wonderful world of influence marketing, companies should always be looking for new influencers, and re-examine its existing list of influencers and their engagement with them.

Rob also sensibly pointed out that the key to sustainable success is to turn this short term, high volume traffic into stable, long term sources such as the traffic gained from an email list or RSS subscription, or even those who turn into users. Interestingly, based on this information, I would argue that one should not rely on short term spikes for business growth, but one should definitely view them as input into building and expanding the perception of the “brand”. I would submit that having your brand in people’s consciousness is almost as good as acquiring their names for your email list. Of course, it is still better if you can eventually convert these brand conscious prospects into subscribed readers, but at least ephemeral traffic can lead to something more substantial.

Seems like, then, a marketer’s life is a constant uphill battle against diminishing returns and fleeting prospect’s attention. However, there is a lot of resources out there to help the aspiring online marketers through the continuing process of research and experimentation on all types of marketing channels.

Experts like those Conversion Rates Experts at conversion–rate–experts.com, Marketing Experiments, marketing analytics luminaries such as Avinash Kaushik who wrote Web Analytics 2.0, David Cancel at Performable and Hiten Shah at KISSMetrics, are always sharing great ideas, insights and practical advice on this process. We are big fans of those experts here at OpenView, and we try to apply the same paradigm to our work and to our own resource site, labs.openviewpartners.com. We have a weekly review of our key marketing statistics to inform our adjustments in our ongoing content marketing, influence marketing and brand building activities.

We still have a lot to learn and would love to hear from your own experience in managing, experimenting and adjusting your marketing mix as well.