5 Tips to Creating an Unbeatable Facebook Ad Campaign

Are you sick and tired of losing money on Facebook Ads?

Many advertisers just like you take a swing at a new ad campaign every day, hoping to finally hit the ball out of the park and win the game. They test a myriad of demographics and interests, use a lot of different images, and even tweak their copy over, and over, and over again.

But for some weird, unfair reason, they can’t create a profitable ad. It seems like they are just throwing money out to Facebook’s hands.

It kind of sucks, right?

Now, what if I told you that, with a few tweaks here and there, you could create your first successful ad today?

Because you can.

In this blog post, I will give you three tips that will dramatically change the way you approach Facebook Advertising forever, especially if you’re just starting.

Are you game? Great! Let’s dive right in:

Tip #1: Your Offer Will Make or Break Your Campaign

Let me start by citing the words of the late Gary Halbert—one of the best advertisers of the 20th century.

“Strong copy will not overcome a weak offer but…in many cases, a strong offer will succeed in spite of weak copy written by marketing morons.”

Gary was talking about direct response copywriting, but this principle applies to any advertising. If you have a good offer in place, you have more chances to create an ad that pays off. That’s a fact.

Just think about it.

Which offer is more attractive?

Offer #1

Offer #2

Both are great offers. I agree on that. But only one of them appeals to the right emotion.

Can you guess what offer I’m talking about?

You’re right. The second one.

Even though a 50% OFF deal is great, it doesn’t compare to the implied mechanism used by the second offer. The simple fact of feeding seven dogs will entice you to buy the shirt, especially if you are dog lover. You won’t even think you’re buying a shirt. That’s just a plus. In your mind, you’ll be helping seven poor dogs to survive.

And that’s what great offers do.

They sell without selling.

Now, I’m not saying you should start a charity to start selling on Facebook. No. What I’m saying is that you need to find a way to sweeten your offer—and do it in a way people don’t feel you’re selling them something. As Brian Clark says, “great copy doesn’t seem like an ad, it seems like a favor”.

Remember, people don’t like being sold, but they love to buy stuff.

So your mission is to make them feel that buying whatever you’re selling is their idea, not yours. That’s the basic concept I want you to understand.

Think outside the box and go beyond the typical “free shipping on orders over $50” kind of offers.

SaaS companies and information marketing businesses know this (at least the good ones.) They never sell you something. Instead, they offer free trials or give away information and create systems to build trust and entice you to buy the product without even doing any direct selling.

Of course, you can’t take the same approach in e-commerce. But, as an aspiring successful advertiser, your task is to find that compelling offer.

That said, here are a couple tips to do it:

• Read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D. — in this book, Cialdini will guide you through the six weapons of influence (reciprocation, commitment, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity) and will show you how advertisers use them to persuade you into doing some things you wouldn’t normally do. This information will help you create more persuasive ads and identify the strategy behind the ad campaigns of your competition.
• Read as many books on psychology as you can — marketing is simply human psychology in action. The more you know about it, the most effective your offers will be. And though there’s plenty of psychology books in the marketplace, these three will definitely help you start off on the right foot: Made to Stick, The Social Animal, and — of course — How to Win Friends & Influence People.
• Look at what your competitors are doing and outsmart them — more often than not, you can create an irresistible offer by just analyzing what your competitors are doing, and then offering a “sexier” deal. Burger King, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s are famous for doing this. They continually spy on their competitors’ social media to find their most popular offers, and then create something better.

Wendy’s offer:

The 4 for $4 Meal: a trayful of mouth-filling glory. http://pic.twitter.com/JjDOFZVXuP

— Wendy's (@Wendys) January 20, 2016

Burger King’s offer:

5 for $4, because 5 is better than 4. http://pic.twitter.com/BZe8JFbKjm

— Burger King (@BurgerKing) January 21, 2016

Tip #2: Track Sales, Not Vanity Metrics

Listen:

Clicks and social engagement are important, but what really matters is how much money you make, not how many people share your ad.

Here’s what I mean:

If you’re getting a lot of clicks, it’s easy to get false expectations because your ad is apparently “working.” This is a big mistake – clicks do not necessarily mean it’s a high-performing ad (unless your only goal is to get clicks).

I can’t remember how much money I’ve lost because of this.

I used to think: “I just need to be patient, and I will see the sales coming in. After all, people are engaging, aren’t they?”

Or “I will increase the daily budget. I just need more exposure.”

But those sales never materialized, and I ended up losing money.

Now, you may think this is something silly or that there’s no way it can happen to you, but I say, don’t be so sure.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter if you’re getting thousands of shares and clicks. If you are not getting sales, something is not working. It may be your ad. It may be your landing page. It may be your audience. But whatever the case is, you need to stop the campaign and figure out what’s going on. Otherwise, you’ll keep losing money.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that clicks and engagement aren’t important. To some degree, they are. What I’m trying to say is that you should always keep track of your sales, scale what works, and get rid of what doesn’t work.

This way, you’ll always have a point of reference for your next ad or campaign.

In words of Jon Loomer, Founder of The Power Hitters Club, a private community for advanced Facebook marketers:

If you don’t use Conversion Tracking, you’re going to have a hard time determining which ad is actually leading to revenue. As a result, it’s very easy to make the wrong decisions when managing your ads.

This is extremely important information. Even if you’re making sales, if you don’t track which ad is leading to revenue, you’ll lose money.

Now, take a look at this screenshot:

What you’re looking at is a screenshot of an ad I ran a long time ago.

I was selling a product for $199 and, as you can see, it cost me $128.99 to get a purchase. Apparently, I was profiting $70 per sale.

The problem is that when calculating my results, I didn’t take into account some expenses—like contribution to overhead and the product cost—so instead of making $70 per sale, I was losing around $21 per purchase.

I was so excited with my “successful” ad that I didn’t notice the leak until I was already $20,000+ down.

I know, I know. It was a DUMB mistake. And it’s not directly related to Facebook Advertising.

But it’s a very common one.

That’s why you need to track everything, especially revenue.

The bottom line is this:

Sales first. Clicks and engagement, second.

If you take this approach, I guarantee you’ll learn faster and save a ton of advertising money.

Tip #3: You Don’t “Create” Successful Ads, You Build Them

Many people believe that successful campaigns are “created,” but they are not.

I mean, you can’t produce a winner ad out of thin air. No. You need to find the right information about your audience, so that you can build a campaign based on those findings.

And here’s a keyword: “Build.”

If you were to build a building, how would you go about it?

First of all, you’d start with a solid foundation, right? Then, you’d start putting together a series of building blocks to give shape to your building.

Finally, once the entire building is done, you’d start taking care of the less-important details — like painting and decoration.

My point here is, if you skipped the first steps, your building would fall really quickly. And you know what? When it comes to Facebook marketing, you need to take the same approach. You need to build your campaigns exactly as you’d build a building. Step by step, you’re collecting and putting together key data points that, eventually, will give shape to your winner ad.

These key data points are the foundation of your campaign. But, how can you find these data points? The answer is very simple, of course. You find them through testing and optimization.

Now, optimization is a simple (yet often over-complicated) concept. According to Neil Patel, optimization boils down to two things:

• Do more of what works.
• Quit doing what doesn’t work.

That’s all there is to it.

And it’s the key to building a successful campaign.

Now, here are some tips that will help you start off on the right foot:

1. Split your ad into different categories

You need to categorize the elements of an ad to simplify the testing process. Breaking down your ads into elements will help you visualize the different things you can test and optimize.

Here are the different elements you can test:

Ad Design

• Image
• Text
• Headline
• Call to action
• Value proposition

Targeting

• Country
• Gender
• Interests
• Age
• Custom Audiences
• Relationship Status
• Purchase Behaviors
• Education Level

Miscellaneous

• Landing Page/Product Page
• Ad Placement
• Campaign Objective
• Ad Type

If you’d like to learn more about targeting and categorization, Content Harmony produced an excellent guide to Facebook Ad Targeting options that is worth reading.

2. Optimize every element of your ad creative

Naturally, your ad creative will have a direct impact on your conversions. Here is where your main idea (value proposition) is expressed, and you need to take the time to optimize every element that supports that idea.

It’s surprising how many advertisers neglect this step and design an ad that simply doesn’t harmonize with the market.

Below you’ll find a simple cheat sheet that breaks down the different elements of a Facebook ad, and gives you some tips on how to optimize them for higher conversions.

Now, if you want to dig deeper into ad creative optimization, marketing writer Brad Smith has put together a comprehensive guide that will show you everything you need to know about the topic. Make sure to read it.

3. Avoid the “spaghetti-against-the-wall” approach

If you throw a bunch of spaghetti against a wall, some of it will stick.

When it comes to Facebook Ads Optimization, you can’t take the same approach.

Of course, testing is crucial for your success, but it doesn’t mean that you should create a ton of different ads just to see which of them work.

Instead, you need a strategy.

But, how can you find this strategy?

Well, you can start by reading this guide from Social Media Examiner. You’ll learn 15 optimization strategies you can apply to your business right now. Also, BigCommerce produced an excellent roundup of Facebook Ads tips focused on ecommerce and conversions. These two posts will help you find the right angle for your business and industry.

4. Assume nothing, test everything

Take a look at the image below:

Image Source

Let’s say you’re about to run the ads above.

How could you know which ad will perform best?

Some of you would say that comparing the emotional angles of each ad is the best method.

Others would say that you need to analyze the correlation between the offer and the imagery.

And another small group of smart folks would say that you only need to “Google it” (just kidding…bad joke.)

Anyways, these are insightful answers, don’t you think?

But none of them are right.

The truth is that you couldn’t possibly know which ad will give you better results until you test them.

When Adespresso ran those ads, they thought the first ad would outperform the second one. But the results were surprising:

The moral of the story?

When it comes to testing, your opinion doesn’t matter.

So remember, assume nothing. Test everything.

Tip #4: LTV Is More Important Than You Think

I love this quote from Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first outside investor:

“Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.”

How does this apply to Facebook marketing?

The answer is simple: In a bid to make a quick buck, many advertisers are missing on the tremendous opportunity that long-term planning can bring to their businesses.

Let me explain:

Assume you’re selling a $50 product, and it costs you $80 to acquire a new customer. At first glance, this doesn’t seem correct. If you’re spending $80 for every new customer, and you’re only making $50, it’s clear that you’re losing money, right?

Well, it depends…

Let’s also assume that you discovered that your LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) is $700. In this case, $80 per acquisition is not only acceptable, but utterly fantastic. You can afford to lose $30 per customer on the “front-end” of the relationship because you know that you’ll make far more money in the long run.

One of the primary reasons people fail at Facebook advertising is they don’t consider LTV when planning their strategy. They just focus on the quick sale. And the truth is until you calculate LTV and build your campaigns around it, you won’t take full advantage of your Facebook advertising.

Now, in case you’re wondering how to calculate LTV, this infographic will guide you step by step through the entire process.

Tip #5: Set Clear Goals (But Do It This Way)

This last one will sound kind of repetitive or dull. I was even tempted to exclude it from this guide. However, setting goals is crucial, and with so many people overlooking this step, I decided to talk a bit about it.

From an advertising standpoint, setting goals is vital because it helps you measure results and discover whether or not your ads and campaigns are following the right direction. Without a clear path to follow, you’ll never get tangible results.

Sure, chances are you already know all that. But how do you set the right goals?

Well, you need to start at the end…

Let’s say you want to increase your sales this year. How would you go about it? If I guess right, you’d set a goal like “40,000 units sold within 12 months” or “30,000 product sales by 2018.”

Now, setting “end” goals like these is advisable. They help you visualize the big picture and follow a clear path. The problem starts when you only set this type of goals. I mean, “40,000” can be a really discouraging number when you’ve never made that amount of sales before.

Worse yet, with “big picture” goals like these, it’s hard to measure results in the short run. Instead, you need to break them down into smaller goals. This way, you can analyze data with more speed and modify your strategy along the way, if necessary.

Getting back to the “40,000 units” example, how many sales would you need to make each month to reach your annual goal? The answer is 3,333 sales per month. And how many sales would you need to make each day to reach your monthly goal? Just 111 a day.

In this case, instead of trying to make 40,000 annual sales, you should aim for just 111 per day. By taking this approach, you can evaluate your campaigns on a daily basis, and therefore, pinpoint possible leaks in your strategy much faster.

The bottom line? When setting your advertising goals, remember to start at the end and break down your “big picture” goals into smaller goals.

I know, I know. It’s a simple concept. But it will make your life way easier.

More Facebook Articles From the Kissmetrics Blog:

• A Cheat Sheet to High-Converting Facebook Ad Creative — choosing the right ad creative for your campaigns can be tricky, but in this guide, marketing writer Brad Smith simplifies the process and shows you not only how to choose the right image, but how to optimize your headlines, value proposition, and even call-to-actions for higher conversions.
• 10 Must-Know Facebook Ads Tips & Features — as you may know, Facebook has one of the most complete advertising platforms available today, and if you want to discover some of its greatest features, and how to use them, this guide has you covered.
• Why Your Facebook Ads Don’t Perform Like AdWords (And Why They Never Will) — if you’re wondering why your Facebook Ads suck while your Google Adwords campaigns are crushing it, this article has the answer.
• A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights — it’s not a big secret that the more you know about your audience, the better you can sell to them. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Facebook Insights to understand your audience at a whole new level.
• Facebook Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners — new to Facebook Ads? No problem. In this post, Zach Bulygo, Kissmetrics’ blog manager, covers the very basics to start marketing on “The Social Network.”
• How to Build Your Facebook Customer Acquisition Machine — the key to Facebook Ads success lies in understanding the three stages of the Facebook funnel: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. And this 18-page report will show you the steps you need to take at each stage to get the best results.

It’s Time to Create Your First Unbeatable Ad

Look, I get it.

You’re skeptical.

You’ve spent so much money on different strategies and methods, and you’re afraid of failing again. But the only way to succeed is to move forward and try different things.

And I want to be completely blunt with you. Even if you implement this information, I can’t guarantee you’ll create a profitable ad.

Why? Because there’s way too many factors that can influence your results—like your industry, budget, experience, and even your country. But I can guarantee one thing: this information will put you on the right path to a more profitable, successful campaign.

But you need to give it a shot, don’t you think?

Anyways, it’s up to you.

I’d love to know your thoughts, brutal or otherwise.

About the Author: Josue Valles is a freelance copywriter, professional blogger, and business writing coach. He’s on a lifelong mission to help businesses find their voice and to turn boring ideas into brilliant stories. If you’re interested in working with Josue, you can email him at josuevallesp@gmail.com

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5 Steps to Growing Your Marketing Performance

The path to better marketing performance is a lot like to taking a wild patch of land and transforming it into a manicured garden lawn. Like a garden, you can’t grow your marketing performance overnight but you can begin to make an impact this quarter taking one step at a time.

For mature organizations, you might feel like you’re standing on the edge of the Amazon trying to simply gain visibility into growth, let alone accelerate it towards your corporate objectives. For others, you might be facing the Mojave Desert wondering how to initiate growth. Regardless of your outlook, the goal for today’s CMO is the same – to demonstrate impact and drive revenue.

And the stakes for marketers are high. Without being able to answer tough questions from Leadership about the impact Marketing is having on the business, you risk losing control, strategic power and marketing dollars.

Exponentially Increasing Scope

Meanwhile, the scope of Marketing’s role and responsibility has increased exponentially. Long gone are the Mad Men days of brand and agency. Today’s marketers have transitioned to communications, demand gen and are now responsible for the full customer experience. We have more channels available, more data to comb through, higher customer expectations and, according to Scott Brinker, over 4,000 martech vendors to choose from to help us make that lasting impact.

Our landscape is unrulier than ever before but at the end of the day, for marketers to win, we must understand what’s working and what’s not.

Check out our infographic  below or via this link. You'll see where we’ve broken down the steps to growing your marketing performance into 5 incremental stages. Take the first step by gaining control of your marketing organization, get better visibility into your marketing investments and grow your marketing performance by making data-driven decisions. 

Making Data Driven Decisions

A solid data management platform (DMP) and strategy are imperative if marketers want to create audience communications that deliver quality engagements. Download Maximize Your Marketing: Eight Questions to Ask as You Introduce a Data Management Strategy and discover how to use data to drive real results.  

Featured Image: Pixabay

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Using Link Targeting for Improved Inbox Personalization

For years now, email marketing has continued to defy the haters and provide a reliable, measurable channel for businesses. So far, the email world has survived being labeled as dead, the emergence of social media, the development of collaborative business tools like Slack, and continues to evolve as the marketing channel of choice for consumers all over the globe.

Currently, the email industry is undergoing another boom with real-time email content - bringing live content and personalization to the inbox. Email marketing has become more contextual and now has the power to personalize messaging as emails open in the inbox.

A big part of this new email experience is the ability to include targeted, device-specific urls in a campaign to drive openers to a particular page related to their hardware(link targeting/dynamic urls). Retailers and business-to-business companies are adopting these web-like linking and conversion experiences due to the massive shift in desktop-to-mobile inbox engagement. Today, some retailers see up to a 70%+ saturation of mobile opens vs. desktop at -30% share.

The consumer market is shifting to a mobile-centric buying experience, slowly removing the desktop from the process entirely. This migration in hardware changes the way email marketing is consumed or rejected. Marketers who ignore updating email campaigns for mobile recipients may not only lose revenue but potentially mobile-heavy subscribers as well.

What’s Device Targeting?

Device targeting is the ability to identify the device and email client as the email opens to render specifically targeted content for each device used. Companies are currently using this technology to drive “tap-to-text” functionality. DIRECTV expanded subscription sales by allowing current customers to upgrade their services with a single text message from its email campaign.

This tactic doubled the subscriptions comparatively year-over-year by decreasing the barrier to entry for account upgrades from mobile devices. Users on a desktop saw an alternate message from the mobile text to upgrade offer.

Targeting a device for dynamic linking like DIRECTV is different from deep linking; deep linking is the ability to link to a screen within a mobile application directly from the inbox on a mobile device, removing the need to open a browser to view a page on the internet. Most likely deep links will take a specific page within an application.

An excellent example of this could be an abandon cart email that brings the consumer back to the purchase page in the company’s mobile application instead of sending them to a generic mobile web page or login screen. As an example, theCHIVE sends about 40% of their email recipients to its mobile application to ensure email revenues stay consistent.

High-Level Reasons To Target Links In Your Email Campaigns

• Create a richer, web-like experience for subscribers clicking from a mobile inbox
• Quicken email conversions with personalized linking to mobile applications
• More than 50% of all emails open on a mobile device (up to 70%)
• Optimizes mobile engagement
• Heighten contextual capacity of existing email campaigns

What Happens After The Click?

What happens after the recipient clicks a link in an email? Do they have to make multiple steps to accomplish the campaign goal? Shortening these steps is too often forgotten. For many marketers, trying to target links in an email has been too difficult to do repetitively. One recipient can open the same email on 3 or four devices, each a different operating system and email client.

This hurdle causes emails to contain generic logo links to app stores or a lengthy list of different apps in the same email. Real-time targeted links identify the device as the email opens, renders the proper image and link automatically, removing the need for pre-segmented lists. (Shameless plug: Liveclicker specializes in this targeting technology)

Don’t let the goal of creating the email distract from the purpose of the overall email campaign. The importance of establishing the click in the email is just as important as where the recipient lands after. Keeping the customer journey as clear and concise as possible helps the user retain the context of the email and complete the desired action.

Link Targeting From A Conversational Perspective

I know creative linking isn’t the snazziest email marketing idea out there, but think about how a conversation would go if you were talking to your customer in a typical conversation. That’s how an email campaign should feel to the consumer; like the company is listening to and responding to conversational context. For years, too many email campaigns have lacked personalization and context, making messaging seem disjointed and corporate.

Using targeted links, email marketing can become much more cohesive with its recipients. Imagine a mobile game maker is marketing it’s new game to a list of 200,000 gamers around the world. Each subscriber has the potential to open this email up on any number of tablets and smartphones.

By adding contextual email technology to its game release email, the game maker could target each device type and serve the appropriate link to every email that’s opened with 100% accuracy on each open. Rules would be set up before the send to add the link logic and image creative per device - carrying on a relevant conversation with the recipient, not blasting a static, generic message.

Personalization is the key to providing long-term value; contextual email technology is the next step in content personalization. Real-time, forward-facing segmentation is highly accurate and delivers much-needed relevance to a traditionally static marketing medium. 

None Of This Matters If...

Your emails never arrive, right? Download Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers to find out how to achieve email deliverability that really delivers. 

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How to Boost Conversions With the Right Customer Insights

Today’s marketers are inundated with data.

To stay ahead of the competition, your SaaS company must focus on customer insights to boost conversions. Push the limits to discover gaps in your customer data.

“By measuring, interpreting, and applying knowledge from customer experiences, and using this information to fuel decisions, companies can elevate their customer insight function—and their own position in the marketplace,” writes Christine Barton, senior partner and managing director of The Boston Consulting Group.

It’s time to find out what matters to your customers. Let’s explore how your SaaS team can gain more knowledge.

On-Site Behavior

For some businesses, the website is sometimes the only interaction a consumer will have with a brand. Therefore, it’s essential for companies to understand how buyers engage with their sites.

On-site behavior refers to consumers’ actions on your website. This engagement ranges from what page of content they visit to what calls-to-actions they click.

By observing visitors, you’ll learn what interests the potential buyer and what issues arise that cause them to cease engagement .

This data is especially important when it comes to moving consumers down the sales funnel. On-site behavior can uncover friction points hindering buyers from completing a transaction.

A Sitecore whitepaper noted that “these [on-site] interactions are most fruitful when they include behavior in real time. Think of this as ‘implicit profiling.’ It is a prime source for understanding in-the-moment intent.”

Knowing the buyer’s intent helps your team predict future behavior and prepare marketing efforts to persuade consumers.

For instance, if you know buyers prefer downloading your content to read later, your team can include a PDF content upgrade in relevant posts. Here’s an example from Backlinko.

Monitor consumer behavior on your website, and then, use that newfound knowledge to improve the customer experience.

Forms and Surveys

Everything on your site serves a purpose. Forms and surveys give your team a chance to ask consumers for pertinent information.

However, most companies view forms as a way to gain every single detail about a buyer. And honestly, this is an impossible feat to accomplish, which often annoys the visitor.

According to the 2015 B2B Web Usability Report, 69% of respondents indicated that “excessive form field requirements” would deter them from completing a general inquiry form, with 65% stating they wouldn’t submit a form if “too much personal information” was required.

Consumers don’t want to waste their precious time answering a 20-question form to receive your free ebook. They would rather fill in a few form fields and possibly give you more details later.

Image Source

But there is a dilemma facing marketers between quantity and quality when collecting data from forms and surveys. Shorter forms often generate lower quality leads since people can quickly complete them.

On the other hand, if a consumer takes the time to finish more form fields, it’s likely they are more interested in your products.

Run your own tests to learn what works best for your business. Research will help your team determine the balance between acquiring information and earning conversions.

Use forms and surveys as a tool to gather data about your target audience, and generate the best leads by experimenting with the number of form fields.

Product Usage

Earning a sale is only the beginning of really understanding your consumers’ needs. Usage data reshapes how your team tweaks the product.

This type of data is necessary to find the true value of the product. SaaS teams must know the actual and perceived benefits from the customer’s perspective.

By following patterns, you’ll learn which customer types use the product, the frequency of the customer’s use, and how the customer navigates through the application. Customers possess different reasons for using your product, and usage data can reveal their real intentions.

“From the lens of Customer Success, it’s the trends in the usage data that are really important. What happened today, or this week, are vaguely interesting by themselves. But what happened this week, compared to the last 30 weeks, becomes extremely valuable,” states Dan Steinman, head of Gainsight EMEA.

Usage data also helps determine which features customers value the most. You may need to discontinue outdated features or even provide more user training for newer ones.

Image Source

Let your product usage patterns highlight growth opportunities, underline competitive advantages, and point out new markets to pursue.

Customer Complaints

Your SaaS business isn’t immune from unsatisfied customers. Not everyone will be pleased with your products and customer service.

Nevertheless, don’t consider customer complaints as a scarlet letter for your company. Listening to your buyers’ grievances is an opportunity to improve your brand’s services.

Be proactive about receiving your customers’ opinions by soliciting feedback on your website and in email campaigns. Give consumers the option to rate your service on a scale of 1-10 after a support call.

Work with your team to interview a select group of disgruntled customers. When doing so, make it a point to just listen to their concerns and not rebut with a quick answer. And be prepared to ask questions that get to the root of the problem.

“Probing questions are essential to get at the deeper meaning behind what the person says. This is how you get insights that surveys can’t provide. The trick is to gently ‘probe’ for more information on a topic without coming across as aggressive or pushy,” says Dustin Walker, Chief Creative at Good Funnel.

Also, train your staff to engage with upset customers. Give them scenarios to practice, and observe their responses. How would you respond to the email below?

Deriving knowledge directly from the customer is a major win for increasing conversions.

Taking Real Action

Customer insight is useless if it’s not integrated into your business strategy. So while learning all the techniques above is commendable, the real work begins when you implement them.

“If you want your consumer insights team to make bold recommendations and stop inundating you with endless charts, tables, and data points, then don’t focus on their methods over their message, and don’t demand statistical significance when it really doesn’t matter,” states Julie Wittes Schlack, SVP of innovation and design of C Space.

Too often companies get paralyzed by wanting to do everything at once and that’s not realistic. If you operate a small SaaS team, focus on executing strategies that will result in big wins. A team concentrating on a single issue is better than a team doing none.

Promote a culture of experimentation within your company. Because innovation sprouts from failures, your staff must feel comfortable with making mistakes and know that their blunders will be seen as lessons.

After taking action, push your team to continue that momentum. Question the results of your tests and always seek input from your consumers.

Actively engage your strategic plans to transform visitors into customers.

Converting With Data

If conversions are what you seek, data is helpful for attaining your goal. Concentrate on customer data that will enhance the experience.

Monitor on-site behavior to know exactly how your buyers interact with your content. Gain direct knowledge by asking customers questions via forms and surveys, and give your team the space to take real action.

Boost your conversions with customer insights.

Did you know? With Kissmetrics, you can track the effectiveness of your online advertising. Optimize your marketing by knowing which campaigns perform and which don’t. Check out our infographic to learn more.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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Gartner Names Oracle Marketing Cloud a Leader in Digital Marketing Hubs - for the 3rd ...

Gartner recently released its 2017 Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, and honored Oracle Marketing Cloud as a leader in this crucial customer experience category for the third consecutive report. We appreciate the recognition for our capabilities in the identity management space in particular, which we believe is a foundational element of a successful Digital Marketing Hub.  Our consistently high performance in the assessment serves as confirmation that our vision, defined by our strategic investments in the marketing space, uniquely aligns with the complicated needs of today’s digital marketer. 

These needs have never been more complicated, which is why we agree with Gartner’s recommendation that marketers deploy solutions that cut across organizational and operational boundaries, and share common resources and data.

Oracle and other vendors who had the foresight and resources to invest in a true Digital Marketing Hub solution have been able to build solutions that are varied in approach yet share this common set of customer-focused goals. 

Emergence of The ‘Marketing Cloud’

Historically, discussions of the ‘Digital Marketing Hub’ had always been more aspirational and future looking versus an honest appraisal of the current state of offerings. That has changed significantly in the past few years for a few reasons.

For one, organizations have started to demand greater performance, coordination and accountability from both advertising and marketing. In turn, those demands landed on the door steps of vendors, with the question: how can we use technology to be more efficient with our spend, and in turn, demonstrate its effectiveness? Secondly, increasing budgets for both digital marketing and advertising made choosing of a ‘Digital Marketing Hub’ a more strategic endeavor and thus required involvement from company executives. More strategic and demanding decision makers pushed vendors to adopt a grander vision.

And finally, a third significant driver has emerged over the last year or so – how well can vendors execute on the vision they promised. This last driver is the critical ‘moment of truth’ where evaluations on performance are far less subjective than judging a company’s ability to innovate or the vibrancy of their vision.  

The Oracle Marketing Cloud has thrived in this environment. The Oracle Marketing Cloud has grown from a single B2B Marketing Automation Platform into a cohesive set of modular, but integrated best in class solutions, made to empower marketers of all stripes. In terms of vision, the Oracle Marketing Cloud’s heritage is grounded in being the first to market with industry defining products and concepts like the Data Management Platform, the Orchestration Canvas, and the Data Exchange to name a few. In terms of execution, our enterprise-focused legacy mandates that all our products are engineered to perform at unprecedented scale, with 100% availability.

Oracle Marketing Cloud – What’s next?

We are honored to be recognized by Gartner as a leader in the Digital Marketing industry, but we aren’t resting on our laurels. Instead, we are focused on how we can extend the reach of the Digital Marketing Hub beyond organizational boundaries of the marketing organization, and into all customer facing functions of an organization. While marketing departments are traditionally charged with owning the customer experience, there are still so many interactions that live outside the marketer’s purview. Until all these touch points, and the resulting customer data, can be centralized on a unified customer experience platform, true customer centricity will be an unattainable goal for most organizations. This is a big, complex, difficult problem and we couldn’t be more excited to help our customers solve it. 

Click to read the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs report today.

 

 

 

 

 

Feature Image Source: Gartner

The graphic in the feature image was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Oracle.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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The MECLABS Conversion Heuristic Applied: How a single-product ecommerce site can optimize its sales with a tested methodology

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After testing more than 10,000 sales paths over the past 20 years, MarketingExperiments and our parent company, MECLABS, have developed a thinking tool anyone can use for optimization.

We call it the Conversion Sequence Heuristic.

While it looks complicated, it’s simply a way of looking at a sales path and going through elements of the customer’s experience of a particular page or process.

In this Quick Win Clinic, Flint McGlaughlin, our CEO and managing director, walks through Axess Wallets’ home page and applies the Conversion Heuristic to show how easy it is to think about conversion in a sales path using the tool.

You might also like:

Download the free 30 Minute Marketer: Value Proposition

Participate in a MECLABS Institute research project and drive conversion increases

Best Practices Are Often Just Pooled Ignorance: How to avoid this mistake by mapping your customer’s thought sequence

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3 Content Marketing Mysteries Solved

OK, confession time — when I was a kid, I was a complete Nancy Drew junkie. “Sleuth” sounded like just about the best way ever to spend one’s time. (Of course, that’s before I knew what a Chief Content Officer was …)

This week, rather than figuring out Irene Adler’s cell phone password or who stole the missing emeralds, we’re working on “Why isn’t this content working? and “How can I get a whole lot better at what I do?”

On Monday, Brian gave us three rhetorical tools that can help build trust with your audience — then asks if you should consider putting all of them aside for another option. And on the podcast, I snagged the very nice Bryce Bladon from Clients from Hell to get his ideas on how to stay out of some less-than-heavenly situations.

On Tuesday, Kelly Exeter found a couple of critical elements missing from a lot of content — hooks and big ideas. Now, you and I both know that the reason we often lack a hook and a big idea is that … good hooks and ideas are really hard to come up with. Luckily, Kelly has some actual specific advice that can help.

Brian also has a nice interview on Unemployable with Emily Thompson of Indie Shopography and the Being Boss project. She shares one of those great, twisty-turny stories that show you how varied the entrepreneurial path can sometimes be.

And on Wednesday, Robert Bruce channeled the greatest consulting detective of all time to help us make the decision to move toward mastery.

That’s this week’s mysterious (or just plain useful) content … catch you next week!

— Sonia Simone
Chief Content Officer, Rainmaker Digital

Catch up on this week’s content

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How to Build Trust and Enhance Your Influence with Content Marketing

by Brian Clark

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Two Vital Elements that Might Be Missing from Your Content (and Precisely Where to Add Them)

by Kelly Exeter

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Sherlock Holmes and Mastery of the Craft of Writing

by Robert Bruce

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6 Business Insights that Could Radically Increase Your Online Engagement in 2017

by Sean Jackson and Jessica Frick

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Thriving Freelancers and Clients from Hell

by Sonia Simone

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Succeed by Serving an Audience, with Emily Thompson

by Brian Clark

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How Journalist and Author of ‘The Power of Meaning’ Emily Esfahani Smith Writes: Part One

by Kelton Reid

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Podcasting: The Stand-Up Comedy of Content Creation

by Jerod Morris & Jon Nastor

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