This week, while working through CXL Institute’s Scholarship program where they have numerous minidegrees from Growth Marketing to Conversion Optimization, I was working through about four modules this week, A/B Testing, Optimizing for Business to Business, Customer Value Optimization, as well as starting out with Digital psychology & behavioral design training.
A/B Testing Foundation
A/B testing is when you’d like to see which campaign and its components perform the best. As the name suggests, it is a comparison between two, it does not only have to be campaigns. It can be more detailed than that and only be the artwork thereof. But, in essence, you’d like to test which one is working the best and creates the most traction within your target market.
Of course, there are a lot of ways to test and run A/B tests, but a broader range of questions also need to be asked before starting this journey and some of these questions are: How much traffic do we get to our website at the moment; this will determine for which duration you would need to run an A/B test to make sure you can really use the information and interpret its results as accurate and representative of your target market. Because you can also run the risk of running an A/B test for a duration too little for the required accuracy or representation of your target market. There are sample-size calculators out there and which CXL also makes available to help you define the number of components you need.
Don’t worry, you’d don’t need to be a Statistician to understand and deploy these strategies successfully. But, you do need to make sure that before starting that you ask the right questions, because you might even find that with your current setup and traffic that you won’t even be able to run a test at all!
Peep Laja himself will run you through the different tests you need to run at which times throughout your journey.
Optimizing for Business to Business
In this module, we have Bill Leake running us through optimizing your strategy for getting the best out of your Business to Business marketing.
As with any marketing strategy, you need to determine your goals. Metrics if you’d like. Which metrics determine your success. Most people in our industry will refer to these goals or metrics, vanity metrics; if they do not contribute towards success in our campaign. The question I ask myself the most is, will this have a positive effect on the bottom-line of this business? Because if so, things like Page Likes will not contribute heavily to that.
Furthermore, if you have determined the goals, you will hopefully, if done correctly, start getting leads from your website. This is great, but how does your entire process work after receiving a lead? Does your Sales Team know what to do? Do they have the capacity to even handle new leads? Because that is one of the worst things that can happen, is that you start receiving leads but they are not followed up on, in a timeous manner. Some examples hereof is where exactly will people mostly convert? Is it right after seeing the product, like in an e-commerce shop, or do they need more motivation to buy the product and it so, you can always make them part of a newsletter; a campaign that will focus on building trust and make sure that the visitor who might have been interested actually buys; maybe even after receiving a few newsletters, bringing more clarity and providing more motivation.
Something that Bill mentioned that I resonated a lot with, was a lot of people concentrating on webinars, which I mostly found productive, if done well, but Bill emphasized that Video is much more engaging, as also if you take a long-form video and you make shorter bite-sized videos thereof. Also, having in mind that people’s concentration span is much less than it used to be in the past. So, people do not have a lot of time or head-space to consume a whole webinar.
Customer Value Optimization
We’ve talked a lot about User Personas and identifying the right market to tackle, and here Justin Rondeau talks about finding the right fit within your market. Basically, asking yourself, do you really know who your ideal market is? Are you tracking these things? Because, you might think that you need to focus on the people who are visiting your website first, but in actually fact Justin actually said that you need to ask yourself this question, because you might not even be targeting the right people. He also explained that a new agency that takes an account over will start to market to the existing customer base or prospects, without asking, is this really the person you’d like to sell to?
Justin further continues to explain about creating Lead Magnets which need to be precise, needs to be simple and needs to add value, immediately. He also explained that elements like e-books and newsletters are not ideal lead magnets at all, but physical products might be a good choice, as far as it is possible for you because remember, people need to trust you first before buying something.
Have you ever heard of a Trip Wire? Now, Justin explains it as something you can use to shift your current visitor from a visitor to a customer. Basically convincing them why they need your product or service.
Something you need to look into and is also mentioned in this module is the return path. Because you’ve now gotten your foot in the door with something that might not have cost that much, but if you have a customer who is returning every month, you’d be better off making sure they are well taken care of and enable them to make another purchase.
Digital Psychology & Behavioral Design Training
We meet Brian Cugelman from one of the previous lessons again in this module where he teaches us a lot; from Emotional motivators, great relatable examples, and even touches on the designing process. So, make sure that you do not miss this and make a plan to enroll in this minidegree. It will help you tons, promise.
Conclusion
To whoever is reading this and is considering enrolling for this minidegree; It is worth every cent. What you learn here is pure gold and can only benefit you in your venture to become greater at what you do.
JD Koch is a full-time Agency Owner of DigiPlug in South Africa, a Internationally Certified Conversion Optimizer, LinkedIn Marketing Insider and Marketing Expert with customers across the country as well as in New Zealand. Join JD on in learning about software that could be useful to you as a Digital Marketer, Business Owner, Teams Leader, Manager, Freelancer, Agency Owner or just want to be more productive with your marketing.