But there’s a bit of a twist. In this debate, we’re forcing our team to take the opposite opinion of what their day-to-day role would suggest. On Wednesday, Boris Grinkot, a technology (among many other things) guy wrote a blog post I intend to use in my annual review saying how vital high-quality content truly is. Today I dive into the bits and bytes to make my argument for the importance of technology.

Use our Twitter and comment features to tell us who (hint: not Boris) you think is right.

Here’s the problem with great content. I can’t find it. There’s simply too much of it.

Sure we have Google, Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, and Bing to help us hunt through the haystack and find that glorious hidden needle. But my argument is this. These technologies don’t help you find quality content; they help you find content that is good at gaming the system. To see why, let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine…

The first few thousand years of content

From “Lothar hunt well” to “And that’s the way it was,” great content has always been controlled by technology. In those days, content creation was limited to those that had access to the means of production – whether that be a cave and some pine tar, basic literacy and a quill pen, Guttenberg’s famed press, or a contract with CBS.

This was both a blessing and a curse, of course. We were not bombarded by endless Facebook status updates about the joy of eating grilled cheese sandwiches. At the same time, content was limited to what people with money could sell to an audience with at least some critical mass.

Creative destruction of creative endeavors

While we all know what has happened over the past few decades it’s still worth asking the question…what the heck just happened? Because it has happened so darned fast. As Joseph Schumpeter said, “Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.”

And turmoil is the right word. While Johann Gutenberg’s technology reigned supreme for hundreds of years, content distribution technology is lucky to last longer than Steve Guttenberg on “Dancing with the Stars.” Or even the viability of the previous reference. (Gutten who?)

Yet herein lies the opportunity. Throughout history, as one technology has overtaken the next, the content producers that have survived and thrived are not those that produced the best content, but rather were the most technologically savvy. To annotate Marshall McLuhan, “The technological medium is the message.”

From “All the News That’s Fit to Print” to “Pretty Much Anything that Pops in my Head”

As I started this post by saying, great content is everywhere. Of course, so is schlock. So in my argument for the centricity of technology for any content-generating company, let me make clear that content is still king. You need (to hire or be) a top-notch writer who provides compelling content.

But that’s just the beginning. Without savvy use of technology, that king has no empire over which to rule. In the music industry, savvy bands have adapted by going from producing albums to producing singles (Radiohead even made money by giving the music away for free).

The smart advertising agencies look past the thirty-second ad and big media commissions to integrated brand promotion – like Sally Hogshead creating a tropical island next to Manhattan’s Hudson River to generate $30 million of free publicity for the Fine Living Network. And the savvy media companies are already taking advantage of Apple’s iPad by developing content specifically for it. (Why must a sitcom that tells a story in three minutes and 12 second be forced to fit into a 22-minute window?)

More news, still paper

This doesn’t mean old media is dead. It means the launch of smart media. A traditional newspaper might be a great avenue for serious, in-depth analyses of news and business for high-net worth individuals. Yet that organization can repackage that same content in a different way with opinion pieces posted on a community-based website that drives sharing and comments among a tech-savvy, middle-income audience.

So don’t just rely on creating killer content for everything. Leverage technology:

• Shop around – Find the right technology to bring that great content to your audience – or as I said so flippantly before – make sure you’re gaming the system to get your killer content seen. I’m not going to give you specific advice here because it depends so heavily on your audience and objective and I’d be in way above my head. But there are a slew of resources on this subject – from niche magazines to entire Internet communities. Find your golden apple. Or perhaps red Apple iPod nano.
• Find 12 degrees of content reuse – Use the same piece in 12 different ways using many different technologies to reach people the way they want to be reached. Twelve, you say? How did you come up with that number? Extensive MarketingExperiments research? No, I just randomly pulled it out of my head (I like eggs). But to show you how possible it is, let’s see if I can come up with 12 possibilities for reuse right here and now.

Let’s say you’re an environmental organization and you interview the CEO of a new, organic laundry detergent company. You could post that interview to your website in the “news” section (1), include a quick synopsis in your email newsletter (2), include extra questions that didn’t make it into the official article on your blog (3), tweet the biggest lesson learned from the interview (4), include the interview in a quarterly printed newsletter you send to major donors and prospects (5), make a Scribd or Issuu version of that newsletter so everyone else can read it on their mobile device (6), podcast (7) and YouTube (8) recordings of the interview, start a discussion around the interview’s subjects on Facebook (9), add the audio files to the iPhone app that updates all of your members to the latest news (10), turn the interview into a press release that you distribute to broadcast and print media (11), and tell Kevin Bacon about it (12).

• Tie it all together – I use the above example part tongue-in-cheek, part seriously. With so many free and low-cost opportunities (not counting man hours, of course), it can certainly pay off to just throw your content onto as many technological media platforms as you can find and see what sticks.

The next level is to hone your use of different technologies into one go-to-market plan that guides your audience from capture to conversion using your content marketing funnel. For example, you might tweet a link to a blog post that promotes a website that has a sales message (keeping a close eye on the metrics all the way).

By doing so, you’re leveraging each technology for what it does best. Twitter offers a very low level of engagement but is a great way to promote content and grab new eyeballs. A blog offers a medium level of engagement and provides the chance to tell enough of a story to convince someone to invest an hour with you for a webinar. In that hour, you can provide valuable content to your audience that also illustrates your value proposition and drives prospective customers to the ultimate sales message – perhaps a phone call to a sales rep.

• Experiment. Refine. Experiment some more. – Perhaps you can tell from our name, but we’re into this kind of thing. Technology brings opportunity. And it also tends to bring real-time, measurable information. So run tests and see what works best for your audience.This is the excitement of a technology-centric future. There is not necessarily one right answer. I started my career writing print ads that ran in USA Today and Wall Street Journal. Now I’m writing blogs. Same skills…but finding the right use for them. Through testing, you can take the same basic content and gain measurable results to help you guide your investments based on ROI…not on some blog post some guy wrote.

This blog post would have never worked in a newsprint forum. It’s meant to be shared, reused, and built upon by the readers. So take advantage of the technology you have in your hands. Tweet and comment about this post. And show Boris, once and for all, that I’m right and he’s wrong.

Related Resources:

Debate Team (Part 1): Does the future of media companies, ad agencies, and content marketers lie in technology or content?

Online Marketing Optimization Technology: We have ways of making technology talk, Mr. Bond

Technology Blind Spots

But there’s a bit of a twist. In this debate, we’re forcing our team to take the opposite opinion of what their day-to-day role would suggest. On Friday I must hide my content-creating hat and make an argument for the centricity of technology. But first, read on as Boris Grinkot, a technology (among other things) guy, touts the merits of content. Use our Twitter and comment features to tell us who you think is right.

Executive summary (in three sentences)

The Internet is swarming with content. Technology helps make the content easier and quicker to digest by auto-summarizing, sorting, classifying, or repurposing it in various user-preferred formats. By enabling conversation, technology helps us choose content to consume based on deliberate recommendations or computed popularity. However, technology doesn’t impact content quality.

Shiny boxes sell faster

Technology for content is packaging, which can be visually appealing, convenient, and useful. If anything, it allows those who are bad at content, but good at gaming the system, to float the lousy content to the top, and pile on lots of it. Both owners of the systems being gamed, and increasingly incredulous consumers, are wising up to the games. Just as Mother Goose, or Honest Abe, or Santa Claus (I am sure it was one of these three) has taught us, it is what’s on the inside that counts.

How did we get into this predicament in the first place? Until the last decade of the 20th century, owning publishing technology to a large extent had meant controlling the content. The technology was localized, prohibitively expensive, and required extensive training. Furthermore, distribution channels also added barriers to entry.

In digital media, it’s almost exactly the opposite. The technology is largely distributed and free to users, requires little or no expertise, and provides access to billions of potential readers. However, this blog post is not about the paradigm shift in the publishing industry. The argument that Dan and I got into centered around the question of whether publishers (whether it’s their core business or part of marketing strategy) need to focus more resources on the quality of their content or on the technology. It’s not a rhetorical question, with the obvious answer “Both.”

What I’d like to communicate is that while technology certainly helps efficiently deliver and format content, it inevitably becomes a commodity. It does so at an increasing rate, as the proliferation of both new technologies and best practices associated with them (also traveling down the same content channels) is becoming near-instant. In other words, you need technology to compete, but it’s not enough to win.

Commoditization

There is a good parallel in SEO. For a good decade, the “secrets” behind SEO were known only to the initiated few. With search engine technology in its early stages, there were plenty of opportunities to exploit it, increasing the SERP position or even density of content that was less useful or relevant to the user than its rank implied.

Those practices were used both for spamming the searchers and for increasing the ranking of legitimately relevant content– even the “good” content had to employ black hat techniques to rise above the junk. This cat-and-mouse game is ongoing, but is fought more with resources than with unique know-how.

SEO has become to a large extent a commodity – a must-have, but not sufficient to beat your competition. Various technological tools make SEO management more efficient, but that enabling aspect doesn’t transpose well to content – we have a ways to go before typing becomes obsolete.*

The other spam

The SEO arms race had led to an explosion in the demand for writers, reaching so far as to create an entire industry of bloggers-for-hire and, at a lower quality level, of blog commenters for hire. The search technology that was supposed to help us focus in on what we need has been responsible for an avalanche of garbage that has flooded the Internet.

However, just as spam didn’t eliminate email as an efficient communication medium, this junk won’t eliminate the Web as the primary content platform. With spam, both technology and human auditing combined to continuously update white- and black list databases, as well as to improve algorithms to recognize spam that passes the latter. Finally, better-late-than-never legal restrictions took accountability to the next level.

So how are things looking for the content providers out there? Certainly the publishing industry is yet to find itself in the digital medium. I am anxiously awaiting how The Times and others in the newsprint industry will standardize a profitable way to monetize their online presence. I expect independent content providers are going to settle into their own profitable niches (whether combining forces to establish competing brands or continuing on their own), while others will simply drop off the radar, as they realize that the time they’ve spent ranting on blogs just doesn’t pay the bills.

Lawmakers might get involved to put a leash on content mills because they reek of mendacity, if not false advertising and conspiracy to commit fraud. The consumer is ultimately going to be the judge of quality, and technology is only going to be important in the sense that, for the consumer to judge, the consumer has to see the content first.

Bottom line: technology delivers, but content quality sells.

Content quality ROI

Now let’s get to the question the ROI-driven marketer is really concerned with: How should I invest my resources in a content-driven world?

• Use technology, but don’t rely on it to write the content for you. – Invest in research and editorial production and then do the same market research you would do in your product development cycle: understand who your audience [market] is, understand what information [product] needs they have, what communication and reading tools they prefer.

Use what you know already: the abundance of content has made us picky, so you cannot rely on brand name (unless you are Barron’s or The Economist) to get your content read. Just as we talk about conversion on landing pages, with content you need to provide a reason for your audience to give you their time. In other words, you need to “sell” your content. Powerful headlines and short summaries require little effort from your readers, but can efficiently trigger a decision to read on.

• Quality is essential, both in these summaries and in the content that follows. – You can fool your readers once with a promise in the headline that doesn’t deliver, but you will sacrifice return visits and/or email subscribers. This is another huge problem with thinking that technology can help you by getting your content in front of a large audience: if the content is poor, your one exposure will not likely net any results.

This strategy works well for fly-by-night affiliate marketing schemes, where the supply of unsophisticated site visitors is effectively unlimited for the duration of the enterprise. However, if you are a respectable business, especially in B2B, losing potential customers with poor content is not an option. It noticeably reduces your addressable market size.

• Find out where the conversation on your topic is taking place and engage with your audience. – The latter statement is not meant to guide your social media strategy – it’s far too trite for that. My point is that social media will help you get your content in front of people that are already interested in the topic, and likely have both ability and desire to provide meaningful feedback and pass it on to others.If you have quality content, then even if they may disagree with your particular message, it will generate discussion resulting in additional exposure (earned media). Obviously, feedback you receive becomes an essential part of your content “product development” cycle.
• Take stock of your resources and make decisions about scope. – Today, there are many technologies to help search, read, and store content. Ultimately, the same folks that deal with communication technology in your organization (whether in Marketing, PR, or IT) need to continue doing so. They can help you package, deliver, and market your content on the new platforms, test their performance, and ultimately advise the ideal channel mix.Engage only in the content channels you can afford to support. Spreading yourself too thin may gain short-term exposure at the expense of the brand. Whatever content categories you choose to maintain, ensure that you have dedicated resources, whether in-house or outside. Having a company blog can be a powerful tool for maintaining communication with your market, but a poorly maintained blog can reduce the credibility of the core offer.If you do have a blog, it doesn’t mean that you can automatically re-package the content for other channels – quality control must be maintained in transit. The content you produce, whether as part of your marketing strategy or as your core business, is going to be a part of your brand. Its quality can either increase or decrease your brand equity. Technology you use to deliver it has little to do it.

So tweet and comment about this issue and let us know which you think is more important – content or technology. And, if in the process, you think I’m right and Dan’s wrong, well…that sounds like the highest-quality content to me.

Related Resources

Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

Marketing Leader’s Perspective: No cogs allowed in social media and content marketing

Search Marketing: Tips on mastering the latest innovations in this mature category

So my description would be highly biased, full of hyperbole, and probably be along the lines of… “Our latest Journal includes four never-before-published marketing research articles featuring 12 experiments and…well…this Journal is the single most important piece of writing since the invention of the Internet!”

Out of control. That’s why you don’t need to hear from me. Instead, I’ll share what our readers have been telling us about the Journal through email and Twitter. But first, here is your free digital copy…

(click Full Screen to zoom in)

“Wonderful publication!!! Many compliments from Italy.” – Andrea Berselli, Partner and COO at Markeven srl

“Take some time to read this ebook: The @mktgexperiments Research Journal, 132 pages of marketing+science” – @Sparksheet

“Fusing online/offline campaigns for impact (and how not to do it!) – new insight from Marketing Experiments” – @eugenieverney

“This is full of good stuff – ‘The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q2 2010′” –@HomeportCrew

“@MktgExperiments new online journal out. Loads of great content, thorough and readable” – @dotpinkney

We’d love to hear what you think of the latest Research Journal. Share your comments below, email us, or fill out our seven-question survey.

Related Resources

Q2 2010 issue of the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

Q1 2010 issue of the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

Research Directory

Optimizing Landing Pages: The four key tactics that drove a 189% lift

To get some inside-the-ring advice, I turned to the demand generation experts at one of our strategic partners, Eloqua, to learn how they promote their own offerings.

Eloqua CMO Brian Kardon recently created a new role at the company – director of content marketing –  and filled it with an old face – Joe Chernov. Joe was the global director of communications and social media at Eloqua – where he was responsible for analyst relations, press relations, and social media.

In addition to being the marketing automation company’s newly named director of content marketing, Joe co-chairs the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s member ethics panel … so if you like this interview, please tell three friends.

One of your first decisions upon heading up content at Eloqua was to launch Eloqua’s new It’s All About Revenue blog.

When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, English mountaineer George Mallory simply stated… “Because it’s there.” Why did Eloqua start this blog? Simply because it wasn’t there?

Joe Chernov: Hall of Fame football coach John Madden once said, “If you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterback.”

We had three quasi-corporate Eloqua blogs – one thought-leader blog, one best practices blog, and one product “how-to” blog – in addition to several executive blogs. Each had its own voice, own look-and-feel, and own (desired) audience.

Early on in my lead communications role, I wanted to blog about the story behind a new social media product we were launching, yet none of the blog owners would accept my “commercial” content. That’s when I realized that we needed a central blog, a resource for Eloqua to talk more broadly about the industry, competition, and our plans for the future.

We launched the blog in April, and we’ve averaged about three posts per week, with the most popular post receiving about 6,000 views. Not a bad start.

Also, it’s become an outlet for news commentary by Eloqua. Within 24 hours of Oracle buying a competitor of ours, Eloqua CEO Joe Payne blogged his analysis. He picked up so much press that super-influencer David Meerman Scott himself blogged about Payne being an example of the importance of executive nimbleness, the value of being fast.

Even though Eloqua is an established company, launching a new blog from zero is an ambitious (and daunting) endeavor. How did you use social media to begin to build an audience? And how do you continue to use social media to promote content and deepen that engagement with your audience?

JC: Here’s an unpopular answer: You have to earn it. For the most part, our good posts generate lots of views, our not-so-good posts generate few views. Believe me, I know: I own the “least viewed” post award.

Now this isn’t to say you can’t effectively promote your own blog. There are a number of practical steps you can take to build an audience:

• Invite guest contributors or interview known figures in your industry – in other words, involve people that have a vested interest in promoting their post to their followers.
• Mix media – video, illustrations, and graphics tend to be hyper-consumable formats.
• Don’t be afraid to stir the pot – Sometimes controversy is a good way to attract new visitors. Everyone rubbernecks, even online. But market at the margins. Your central focus should remain on the quality of your content.

Sometimes content is about clever repurposing, and when you launched this blog you did just that. You took two internal documents and made them public.

Let’s talk about the first one – “The Content Grid.” This really shows how the blog is the hub of your content marketing, right there in the middle, next to Twitter. But how does this awareness and consideration get turned into revenue? After all, “It’s All About Revenue,” right?

JC: We have a long sales cycle. Most prospects that enter our database aren’t ready to convert immediately, so we nurture them over time. So it’s a little early for us to measure the ROI of this initiative.

But the indicators are strong. For example, we know that visitors to Eloqua.com who watch a product demo ultimately convert at a much higher rate than those who don’t. And we know that a disproportionate number of visitors who discover Eloqua.com through our blog view a product demo. We also know that the It’s All About Revenue blog is referring visitors to Eloqua.com at a much higher rate than all of our other blog assets combined. We are confident that in the next quarter or two, we’ll begin to see these leads convert.

There are a couple of media channels that we may inch in one direction or the other in our next rev of The Content Grid, but one change I cannot imagine making is to shift the location of the blog.

The blog is the hub of the content wheel. It allows for immediate posting, direct language, reader engagement, and it feeds traffic to the corporate site.

It’s also a medium that third parties are comfortable pointing to. Could you imagine someone like Jeremiah Owyang tweeting a link to a company’s website? No way. He’d never do it … and with good reason. Jeremiah’s loyalty is to his reader, and readers don’t want to be pushed to websites that are trying to sell them stuff.

A properly executed blog, however, is different. It’s the human voice of the company, and, as such, people are reasonably comfortable pointing their readers to that channel.

If all of your content marketing efforts eventually drive into Eloqua.com as the main place for lead conversion, how have you worked to test and optimize the website, and the entire process, to maximize lead conversion and reduce the potential for leaking leads and therefore revenue?

JC: Content marketing is leaky. We leak out a lot of leads. It’s literally a daily conversation I have with our demand generation director. It’s a Catch-22: You can’t capture leads if you don’t gate content, but your content won’t spread if you gate it. So what do you do? We are experimenting.

We set The Content Grid and Social Media Playbook free, completely ungated. If we sponsor an analyst report, we may gate that – after all, it’s a very specific, and highly valuable, piece of content and one that our audience is used to paying for.

We have some other content planned – topical guides, ebooks that we’ve written – and we may set them free for a finite period of time, after which we could introduce a small gate. Or perhaps we will embrace the channel: if the guide is distributed on the social Web, it’s ungated; if we send it to someone in our database, we may direct them to a landing page where we can collect more information.

We are trying different models. In the end, Eloqua is shifting to the school of thought espoused in the new David Meerman Scott/Brian Halligan book, “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.” In the long term, setting your knowledge free is the most direct route to success.

The second key piece of internal content you posted was the Social Media Playbook, and you weren’t shy about it either. The Abbie Hoffman-esque blog post you wrote to promote it is entitled, “Steal Eloqua’s Social Media Playbook.”

I was most interested in the ethical considerations you mention in the Playbook, which seem to be inspired by your role with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. It seems like everywhere you turn there is some flashy/shady social media “evangelist” using black hat tactics.

As you say in the Playbook, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But they can smell a marketer from a mile away.” So what are some key tips for being an ethical social media marketer…both to be a more effective marketer and also simply to be a decent human being?

JC: I am going to take that Abbie Hoffman comment to my grave with me. That made my day.

But the ethical component of social media marketing cannot be understated. The fact is there are federal guidelines designed to protect unwitting consumers from deceptive businesses.

But I think the social Web does a remarkable job at policing itself. I believe what the government has been good at is giving some fundamental ground rules.

For years, marketers struggled to distinguish cunning from deceptive, but now the FTC has done that for us. In their guidelines for testimonials and endorsements, they make it very clear that if there is a relationship between a company and a consumer, and that consumer “speaks” (blogs, tweets, etc.) about that company, then that testimonial is a form of advertising, and therefore must be disclosed.

I don’t think companies realize how far this directive reaches. Frankly, it means that if a staffer at your organization runs a personal blog in which he writes about your industry, then he must disclose his employment. I think many companies are in violation of this FTC rule, not out of malice, but ignorance. I wanted to include a larger section on ethics in the Playbook, but feared it’d come off as preachy.

To sum it all up, what are the main things companies should focus on to drive demand and leads with content.

JC: Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Use your blog as the hub of the content wheel
2. Stop thinking of Twitter as the goal, consumption is the goal…Twitter’s value is that it is a useful tool in directing people to points of consumption
3. Don’t expect the world to find you. Yes inbound marketing works, and your blog should be your hub. But of the 20,000 downloads (in the first month) of The Content Grid and Social Media Playbook, nearly half occurred “in the wild” (SlideShare, Scribd, Facebook).
4. Assume that 50% of your time will be spent in the dialogue phase of content marketing. Creating remarkable content, distributing it broadly and measuring the impact is, together, only half of the battle. Engaging in a dialogue everywhere you publish your content is vital for success. It’s also the best trigger for sustained interest and long-term word-of-mouth.
5. In the end, remember that this is a meritocracy. Good marketing isn’t going to turn bad content into a success.

Related resources:

Marketing Leader’s Perspective: No cogs allowed in social media and content marketing

Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

Social Media Marketing in Four Steps

Thanks to BMC Software for submitting this landing page for optimization…

Most technology company names are three letters followed by an IT noun (software, systems, etc), so the name BMC Software probably sounds vaguely familiar. If you’re not familiar with them, they provide a solution called Business Service Management, which they describe as “A unified platform that simplifies, standardizes, and automates IT.”

The intended audience of this campaign is IT management and help desk managers. And the objective for the landing page is to get that audience to sign up for free trial of BMC Service Desk.

OK, now that we’ve got our introductions out of the way, let’s roll up our sleeves and dive right in to some heavy-duty optimizing. First off, I’d like to comment that BMC has done a great job with the email-to-landing page continuity. The imagery and messaging are carried through seamlessly, which helps the prospect identify that they are indeed in the right location when they click through from the email to the landing page.

[click to enlarge]

[click to enlarge]

Alright, let’s look at the free trial sign-up page. We’ll diagnose some problem areas and offer solutions for increasing free trial sign-ups.

When I am analyzing a landing page, I always start off by asking three questions:

• Where am I?
• What can I do here?
• Why should I do it?

When trying to answer these questions on the BMC landing page, the first two questions are pretty easy to answer.

• Where am I? – Like I mentioned earlier, with the consistent imagery you can easily identify that you’re in the right place if you were motivated enough to click on the call to action in the email.
• What can I do here? – It’s pretty apparent, I have to fill out the fields to sign up for a free trial… everyone should be able to answer that.
• Why should I do it? – This is where I encounter some difficulty. Let’s look into to this a little deeper…

Supporting the Value Proposition

Images often help to support the value proposition. In this case, while the main image connects with the email, it does not emphasize the value proposition. Since it takes up a lot of real estate, I’d recommend that BMC test an image that better supports the product benefits.

I do like the screenshot of the BMC dashboard. I think this could be a great supporting feature, although it’s kind of small and difficult to see the specific details of the dashboard. I’d recommend making the image larger or at least offer an option to enlarge.

I’m assuming that the “consolidation of information” is the key selling point, so let’s highlight that with a better image and supporting copy.

Terms and Conditions

In the scroll box below the form, you can see the terms and conditions (T&Cs). The T&Cs look daunting. There are six pages of information condensed into a small embedded scrolling box. You’re already linking to the document, embedding it is overkill.

Test adding event tracking to see how many people are scrolling vs. clicking the text link. In making visitors scroll through the T&Cs, my initial thought is “what are they trying to hide?” Since this is one of the last items on the page before making the commitment to hit “submit,” this could really be a roadblock in the process.

Headline/Page Content

There are no real differentiators in the headline. The “free trial” offer and “risk free” guarantee are great benefits, but why should I choose BMC over another solution? Test a comparison chart or a features matrix. This could be in place of or in addition to the right-column content.

If you’re testing it in addition to the right column, I’d recommend adding a “Why BMC Software” text link that prompts a DHTML pop-up. This is always a good practice when including supplementary content without overwhelming the user.

Related Resources

Live Optimization: What we’ve learned from 200+ experiments each year distilled into three basic principles – plus live-optimization examples

Web Page Optimization: In search of a value proposition as fast and reliable as Verizon FiOS

Landing Page Optimization: Regions Bank opts for the information underload strategy

So, needless to say, we’ve discovered a thing or two about Web page optimization and have crafted complex heuristics and entire courses to help disseminate that information. But we realize that while it is essential for marketers to obtain a thorough understanding of the Offer/Response-Optimization process and the testing-optimization cycle to improve their overall campaigns and advance their career, sometimes you just need a few basic ideas to gain a quick boost right now.

So in Wednesday’s free Web clinic, Live Optimization: What we’ve learned from the last 200 experiments distilled into three basic principles – plus live-optimization examples, Flint McGlaughlin (the Director of MECLABS Group) will share three simple principles we’ve discovered in our experimentation to help you get a big, quick lift on your Web pages, offer pages, landing pages, heck, maybe even your homepage.

Plus, we’ll be conducting a full 40 minutes of live optimization on audience-submitted pages, so be sure to send us pages you need help on when you register. While we can’t optimize every page we receive, we’ll try to get to as many as we can on the Web clinic and right here on the blog.

OK, enough about us, let’s focus on you. While we’ve certainly discovered a lot about online marketing, we’re always learning. So in this blog post, we turn to you, our fellow evidence-based marketers, to get a sense for what basic principles you follow when optimizing a Web page. On Wednesday, we’ll share our findings, but first let’s take a look at some optimization advice from your peers…

Landing page optimization should be practical and flexible

The foundation is testing and targeting the content, then dynamically rendering it based on keywords. A best-case scenario situation includes using geo-location and geo-targeting to further tailor content to the audience in real time.

These tools, which should be built into a single on-demand direct digital marketing software platform, provide marketers with valuable insights about their customers that allows them to create the most engaging, relevant landing page experience possible – all in real time.

– Casey Barto, public relations manager at Knotice

Why visitors don’t become customers

Visitors:

• Have a short attention span
• Get lost easily without a single clear direction
• Get distracted, even when given good directions
• Crave a “human element” in their online experience
• Want to read about themselves and their problems, rather than your company’s
• Don’t want to feel bullied into making a decision
• Want to develop their relationship with you at their own speed
• Need to know they can trust you
• See even small errors on your website as unprofessional
• Need to see a compelling reason to choose you vs. your competitor.

I find that when these issues are addressed, conversion rate almost always skyrockets.

A big part of adding a “human element” to a visitor’s online experience is simply ditching the corporate speak. This is sometimes the most difficult part to overcome for site owners and contributors. Naturally, they want to sound impressive.

Visitors/customers on the other hand, want to be spoken to in their own language; in a way that’s comfortable for them.

Just think what happens when someone approaches you in real life and immediately begins to boast and exaggerate or use unnatural language. Bad news re: “converting” that person into a trusted new friend.

Beyond that, it’s then time for a round of Google Website Optimizer to address all of the unpredictable aspects of conversion – color, element placement, images, etc.

I hope that’s somewhat helpful and contributes to your Web clinic. (I’m signing up – thanks!)

– Al, site optimization & AdWords expert at Leadinglobal

Make the information easy to read and find

Web pages may have the best technologies supporting them and have the best functionality, but without utilizing effective Web writing, viewers will be quickly bored and will soon hit back and go to another site.

For this reason I suggest:

• Online Marketing should not be treated like traditional marketing. The Internet is interactive, so online marketing content should be engaging and contribute to the conversation between customer and business, the conversation that is started from the customer’s question that led them to the business’s website.
• Internet content should also not be written in the traditional sense. When people go online they are always searching with a purpose. If a site does not quickly satisfy them with what they need they will quickly hit back and go to the next site. The solution is to write in clear Anglo-Saxon words, avoid using Latin words and abbreviations, and cut all the information down to its simplest form. When this is done, break it down further with headings.

– Shaun Gurmin, founder of Charge

Related Resources

Live Optimization: What we’ve learned from the last 200 experiments distilled into three basic principles – plus live-optimization examples

Web Page Optimization: In search of a value proposition as fast and reliable as Verizon FiOS

Landing Page Optimization: Regions Bank opts for the information underload strategy

Photo Attribution: jurvetson