As companies are finalizing budgets for next year and marketers are fine-tuning their plans, it’s a popular time to look back at what worked and what didn’t. It’s also a critical opportunity to revisit your organizational strategy, realign your KPIs, and design a testing system that gives you actionable insights.
As marketers, we constantly strive to improve our results. And when it comes to learning – and proving – efficacy, something as simple as A/B testing is paramount. A/B testing, the process of using two versions of a marketing piece (web page, email, etc.) to see which one performs better, offers us the ability to tweak very small details in our programs to see incrementally larger results. But, like many marketing strategies, A/B testing can provide mixed, or even inaccurate results if not properly executed.
As marketers, we use web, video and mobile strategies to reach our customer base. But what if you’re the provider of one or even all these services? While most marketers are focused on leveraging these channels for consumer engagement, top cable and telecomm providers are out there selling the very platforms that marketers depend on.
As privacy has become more of a buzz word among consumers – from viral Facebook posts regarding privacy settings to full-on doomsday preppers – marketers need to be dialed in to make sure their messages resonate, while meeting client’s privacy concerns. In the end, marketers want to be the singing telegram that shows up at the start of the birthday party, not the roofing company who shows up asking for referrals at dinner time the day before the kid’s school vacation week. Here are a few things to consider:
With a lot of predictions pointing to an emphasis on ROI, 2013 stands to be the year that marketing analysis gets a facelift. CMOs are looking for more results and analytics to prove the value of their efforts. And the world is moving quickly so there’s pressure to keep up.
