5 Ways To Inspire Your Marketing With Gratitude

How does gratitude help us become better marketers and in our professional and personal lives? The world B2B marketers face today is rife with a variety of new and unexpected challenges, and meeting these often daunting twists and turns head-on with a mega-dose of gratitude creates not only better marketing, but also makes us stronger and more compassionate. To inspire your own marketing process let’s explore five examples of infusing the power of gratitude into your work efforts, from five memorable people.

1 — Infuse the Goodness of Fred Rogers in Your Marketing

via GIPHY “Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given,” Fred Rogers once said in an observation that applies especially well to the best marketing efforts. Bringing goodness in any of its many forms to our marketing efforts is a worthwhile pursuit, as work can only benefit when authenticity is incorporated — a characteristic that goodness has in spades. With goodness comes the gratitude that can bring our marketing to newfound levels of authenticity, and which provides us a way to reach out and thank the people in our professional and personal lives who help us daily and who have made it possible to get to where we are today. “Anyone who has ever been able to sustain good work has had at least one person — and often many — who have believed in him or her. We just don’t get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others,” Rogers also wisely observed. Whether it’s through leaving a recommendation on as associate’s LinkedIn (client) profile, taking the time to write an email expressing your gratitude, or recording a video or audio message of thanks, letting the important people in your life know that you are grateful for them is an investment that pays dividends on many levels — not only in marketing. [bctt tweet="“Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.” — Fred Rogers @FredRogersCtr" username="toprank"]

2 — Get Grand Ambitions and Aim For The Stars With Burnett & Ogilvy

via GIPHY “When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either,” marketing stalwart Leo Burnett was famously quoted as saying in David Ogilvy's Ogilvy on Advertising, encouraging us to strive for the astonishing with our marketing rather than the mundane. Part of gratitude is realizing that not every effort will succeed, and recognizing and embracing the fact that you’ve gone beyond the safest run-of-the-mill solutions when we reach for our own marketing stars. [bctt tweet="“When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.” — Leo Burnett" username="toprank"]

3 — Keep Every Day's Canvas Fresh With Maya Angelou & Bob Ross

via GIPHY "This is a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before," poet Maya Angelou wrote in an observation that certainly has parallels in the marketing world. Our marketing efforts each present us the opportunity to create wonder and delight among our brand audiences, if we recognize the powerful potential of a blank campaign canvas, as I wrote about in "Content Marveling: Wonder and Astonishment in Marketing." Gratitude also involves being thankful for simply having another blank marketing canvas of opportunity, and envisioning your best work inspiring others — as is the very nature of best-answer content. Unforgettable marketing and best-answer marketing often go hand-in-hand, both filled with the kind of authenticity and genuine emotion that builds especially strong brand affinity. [bctt tweet="“People will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou" username="toprank"]

4 — Cultivate Marketing Authenticity  With Brené Brown

via GIPHY “Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen,” author Brené Brown has observed. Showing up and being real in our marketing can make it easier to produce work that we can truly be grateful for, not only for ourselves but for those we have helped by our creation of genuine content that’s true to ourselves and the mission of our brands. [bctt tweet="“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” @BreneBrown" username="toprank"]

5 — Seek Empathy & Optimize Using Love With Ann Handley

via GIPHY “Empathy — like writing — isn't a gift. It's a discipline. It takes some intentional effort and diligence to develop enormous empathy so that you can apply it to your writing,” Ann Handley, speaker and chief content officer at MarketingProfs, has explained. Other pieces of life and business’ gratitude puzzle include empathy and even love. Marketing that delivers on these accounts is possible when you have them in mind from the very first step of a new project, no matter how small that initial forward motion may be. “Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love,” Ann has wisely suggested — advice that will well-serve marketers looking to embrace gratitude. [bctt tweet="“Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love.” — Ann Handley @MarketingProfs" username="toprank"]

Get Your Own Marketing Gratitude Groove On

via GIPHY Whether it's through infusing the goodness of Fred Rogers, aiming for the stars with Leo Burnett and David Ogilvy, looking anew at every day with Maya Angelou and Bob Ross, cultivating authenticity with Brené Brown, or seeking empathy with Ann Handley, your marketing efforts are poised to reach new levels of greatness if you take the time to consider the importance of gratitude in your work. If you're looking for professional B2B marketing services infused with gratitude, contact us and find out why firms from Abode and Dell to LinkedIn and 3M have chosen TopRank Marketing.

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Building Good Relationships Is the Goal of Great Networking

Building Good Relationships Is the Goal of Great Networking written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Dr. Ivan Misner

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Dr. Ivan Misner who is the founder and chairman of the business networking organization BNI. BNI was founded in 1985, the organization now has over 9,400 chapters throughout every populated continent of the world. Last year alone, BNI generated almost 12.3 million referrals resulting in $16.7 billion dollars worth of business for its members.

Dr. Misner’s Ph.D. is from the University of Southern California. He is a New York Times Bestselling author who has written 24 books including one of his latest books – Who’s in Your Room? He is also a columnist for Entrepreneur.com and has been a university professor as well as a member of the Board of Trustees for the University of La Verne.

Called the “Father of Modern Networking” by CNN and one of the “Top Networking Experts” by Forbes, Dr. Misner is considered to be one of the world’s leading experts on business networking.

Questions I ask Dr. Ivan Misner:

• Networking gets a bad wrap sometimes, how have you been able to make it an intentional practice?
• Part of the BNI model is weekly in-person meetings, how has BNI evolved during the time of no meetings?
• You wrote a book about a year ago with your wife, Healing Can Be Easy: How I Healed Cancer with the Bodymind. Obviously there was a physical journey in there but then to take it to the mind as well; I wonder if you could share some thoughts on that experience.

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• How the BNI model can assist in relationship building during networking
• How building relationships is better during networking than being transactional
• The significant benefit your network and referrals can bring when they are your support network

More about Dr. Ivan Misner:

• For more about BNI
• For more about Dr. Ivan Misner

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

 

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you’re looking to grow your business there is only one way: by building real, quality customer relationships. That’s where Klaviyo comes in.

Klaviyo helps you build meaningful relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers, allowing you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages.

Want to learn more? Head to Klaviyo.com/ducttape to schedule a demo.

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No one can tell you how to feel right now.

No one can tell you how to feel right now. written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Well, the last few months have thrown us all for a loop; that’s for sure.

And now this, another chapter, one of unrest, undoubtedly related to the fear, hopelessness, and divisiveness brought on by heightened overwhelm of a pandemic.

Yes, riots and protests, sparked by another senseless death of a black man at the hands of a white police officer, are the logical boiling reaction to so many pent-up feelings and emotions.

And now, once again, as has been the case over the last few months, everyone wants to tell us how we should feel.

You can log on to Facebook and jump on one of the countless live broadcasts telling you how to feel. You can microdose on the news telling you how to feel, or you can overdose on the headlines and amplify those feelings beyond rational capacity.

So, what are you feeling?

Maybe it’s anger or frustration. Perhaps it’s fear and uncertainty. Maybe it’s turned to guilt because, you know, you’ve stayed silent for too long.

Don’t worry if you’re confused; people will tell you how to feel.

People will tell you to rise up, people will tell you to chill out, people will tell you that whatever you do, whatever you are thinking, it’s not enough.

But here’s the thing – only you can find and understand your truth.

I don’t know what you’re dealing with because:

• See, I had two loving parents who provided me with a fantastic childhood – maybe you didn’t
• I never wondered once where my next meal was coming from – maybe you did
• I never had to work so my parents could keep the lights on – maybe you had to
• I always felt incredibly safe in my home and my neighborhood – maybe you didn’t
• I assumed I could go to any school I wanted – maybe you couldn’t
• I can’t ever remember feeling unwelcome somewhere – maybe you can
• I’ve never been pulled over by a police officer to see if I had a gun in the car – perhaps you have

The point is that our feelings are our feelings, our actions are our actions, and we must deal with them – we must own them and act accordingly.

The only thing we cannot do is feel nothing at all.

We are all in a big fat storm in an untamed sea, granted we are in many different boats in that storm, but navigate with our entire being we must.

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Google’s New Algorithm: Page Experience

Don’t worry… your traffic hasn’t gone down (or up) because of the Page Experience algorithm update hasn’t rolled out yet.

But it will in 2021 according to Google.

Due to the coronavirus, they decided to give us all a heads up on the future algorithm update and what it entails… that way you can adjust your website so your traffic doesn’t tank.

So, what’s the Page Experience update and how can you prepare for it?

Page Experience

In Google’s own words, here is what it means…

The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.

In other words, they are looking for how usable your website is.

Here’s an example of what they don’t want…

As you can see from the graphic above, the user was trying to click on “No, go back”, but because an install bar popup up at the top, it pushed the whole page down and caused the user to accidentally click on “Yes, place my order.”

The purpose of this update is to make sure that sites that rank at the top aren’t creating experiences that users hate.

The simplest way to think about this update is that user-friendly sites will rank higher than sites that aren’t user friendly.

But this change is the start of a big shift in SEO.

Why is this update so important?

What sites do you think that Google wants to rank at the top?

Take a guess…

Maybe sites with the best backlinks?

Or sites with the buttoned up on page code?

It’s actually none of those.

Google wants to rank the sites at the top that users love the most.

Here’s what I mean…

When you want to buy athletic shoes, what brand comes to mind?

If I had to guess, I bet you’ll say Nike.

And if you were to get a credit card… I bet Visa, American Express, or Mastercard will come to mind.

This is why brand queries (the number of users who search for your brand name on Google and click on your website) impact rankings, which I’ve broken down as one of the most important SEO lessons I learned.

Just look at how the Neil Patel brand has grown over time… the graph below shows the number of people searching for my name over time:

And here is my SEO traffic over time:

As your brand grows so will your SEO traffic.

But that is old news, that’s been part of Google’s algorithm for years now.

Here is the thing though, most sites don’t have large brands and Google knows that. So, if you don’t have one, you can still rank.

At my ad agency, when we look at our clients and their growth over time, only 4% have large well-known brands. The other 96% are still seeing traffic growth.

What Google is doing is adapting its algorithm to more closely align with the mission of showing the sites first that users love the most.

And yes, brand queries are one of the ways they can do this, but user experience is another metric.

Over the next few years, I bet you will see many algorithm updates focusing on user experience.

So how do you optimize your user experience?

It’s starts with each page

If you look at the original article Google posted about the future algorithm change, they emphasize “page experience” or “website experience.”

It doesn’t mean that your whole website shouldn’t have a good user experience, but instead, I bet they are going to focus on their algorithm from a page-level basis.

Because if you have a few pages on your websites that have a poor experience, but the rest are good, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to reduce the rankings of your whole site, especially if many of your pages provide a much better experience than your competition.

Here’s how you optimize your user experience:

Step #1: Optimize your speed and reduce 400 errors

The faster your website loads, the better experience you’ll have.

Go to this page and enter in your URL.

You’ll then see a report that looks like this:

You’ll notice two important aspects of that report that impact user experience that I’ve highlighted in the screenshot above.

In the health checkbox, you’ll want to make sure there are no broken pages. Broken pages create bad experiences.

In the site speed box, you’ll see the load time of your site. The faster your site loads the better. Try to get your website load time for both desktop and mobile under 3 seconds.

Ideally you should be in the 1-second range if possible.

Step #2: Compare your experience to your competitions’

You may think you have an amazing user experience, but how does it stake up to your competition?

So go here and type in your biggest competitor.

I want you to go into the navigation and click on “Top Pages.”

You should see a report like this:

The Top Pages report shows the most popular pages on your competition’s site from an SEO perspective. The pages at the top are the ones with the most SEO traffic, which means they are doing something right.

I want you to go through their top 50 pages. Seriously, their top 50 pages, and look at the user experience of each of those pages.

What is it that they are doing? How does their content quality compare to yours? What are the differences between their website compared to yours?

For each page that ranks, I also want you to click on “View All” under the “Est. Visits” heading. This will show you all of the keywords each page ranks for.

When evaluating your competition’s user experience, keep in mind how they are delighting people who search for any of those keywords. This will give you an idea of what you need to do as well.

But your goal shouldn’t be to match your competition, it should be to beat your competition.

Step #3: Analyze your design

Remember the graphic I showed above of what Google doesn’t want? Where the user tried to click on “No, go back” instead of “Yes, place my order” due to design issues.

In most cases you won’t have that issue, but you will have other usability issues.

The way you find usability issues is through heatmaps. Just like this one:

What you can do to find usability issues is run a Crazy Egg test on your site.

Once you log into Crazy Egg, you’ll see a dashboard that looks like this:

On the top right, I want you to click on “Create New” and select “Snapshot.”

Then select “Multiple Snapshots.”

From there, you’ll want to add at least 3 popular URLs on your site. Over time you’ll want to do this with all of your popular pages.

Then you’ll see settings like the image below, you don’t need to do anything here. Just click “Next.”

You’ll then be able to review everything. If it looks good, you can click the “Create Snapshots” button in the bottom right.

Last but not least, you’ll have to install your tracking script.

So, click on “Install Tracking Script.”

Select the option that works for you and then you are off and to the races. For example, for NeilPatel.com I use WordPress so I would select the WordPress option.

Once you are setup, it will take at least a day to see results, if not a bit longer. It depends on your traffic.

If you get thousands of visitors to your site each day you’ll see results within a few hours.

After you set up your test and it has been a few days, log back into Crazy Egg and click on Snapshots in the sidebar.

Once you are there you will see a list of snapshots you have created.

Click on any of your snapshots and you’ll see a heatmap of how people are engaging with your web page.

What’s cool about snapshots is they show you every single click, or even scroll that people take. Just look at this example from the NeilPatel.com site.

As you can see, people are clicking on those images above the text. But there is an issue… can you guess what it is?

If you click those images, nothing happens. But for all of those people to click on those images, it means that they believe they are clickable and that something should happen when they click on them.

An easy fix for me is to make them clickable and when a user clicks maybe I would take them to a page that goes into detail on each of those features. Or maybe I could expand upon each feature right there on that page.

Once you make the fixes to your page, you will want to re-run a new Crazy Egg snapshot on the same page to see if the changes helped improve the user experience.

Step #4: Install the Ubersuggest Chrome extension

If you haven’t already, install the Ubersuggest Chrome extension.

Here’s why…

When you do a Google search, you’ll see data on each ranking URL.

When you are naturally using Google throughout your day and searching for keywords related to your industry, I want you to look at 2 main metrics in Ubersuggest:

1. Domain score – the higher the number, the more authority a website has.
2. Links – the more links a website has, usually the higher it will rank.

So, when you are doing searches, look for sites that have a lower domain score and fewer backlinks than the competition, but yet still rank high.

Chances are, they rank high because of things like user experience. Maybe their text is more appealing than the competition, maybe their bounce rate is lower… it could be a wide variety of reasons, but these are the sites you want to look at and analyze.

In the image above, you see that the result from the AMA ranks higher than Hubspot yet they have fewer links and a lower domain score. So, if you were trying to rank for that keyword, you would want to spend more time analyzing AMA because they are doing something right.

Conclusion

User experience is going to be more and more important over time.

If you love a site and everyone else loves that site, Google will eventually want to make sure that the site ranks high.

On the flip side, if everyone feels a website has a terrible user experience, then Google won’t rank that website as high in the long run.

Just like any algorithm update Google does, expect to see multiple revisions over time. As they learn, they adapt to make their algorithms more effective over time.

But what is unique about this update is you have advanced notice, which is nice. So, take the opportunity and fix any usability issues you may have.

What other ways can you make your website more usable?

The post Google’s New Algorithm: Page Experience appeared first on Neil Patel.

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Break Free B2B Marketing: Julie Brown of Johnson Controls on Proving the EBIT of Your Marketing

For decades, marketers have measured success differently than the rest of the organization. We raise awareness, increase share of voice, generate impressions, deliver MQLs to sales.  Meanwhile, the success of the business itself is measured in....well, money. Revenue. Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT).  But this disparity is changing as marketers are becoming more data-driven — and being increasingly accountable for their direct contribution to revenue. It’s not enough to show a return on investment; it’s not enough for marketing to not be a cost center. The marketing department needs to be a powerful engine for generating revenue. Our latest episode of Break Free features a marketer who is exceptional at generating value for her company, and proving that value to the bottom line. Julie Brown, Institutional Market Leader at Johnson Controls, is using data to flip marketing upside down. Instead of creating demand for the company’s products, she’s measuring the existing demand in her target audiences. Then she uses that data to advise the company on how to develop products that best suit their audiences’ needs. With the right reporting in place, Julie’s team is able to show exactly how much its efforts are contributing to Johnson Controls’ EBIT.  This was a fascinating interview about a side of marketing you don’t hear much about, and I’m grateful that Julie shared her expertise with me. And with all of you, of course. You can watch the video and check out the podcast version below, or scroll down for some highlights.

B2B Marketing Interview with Julie Brown

:58 Institutional marketing defined 1:57 Upstream marketing — where to play and how to win 5:08 Three big challenges in institutional marketing 7:18 Marketing as a revenue center 8:39 How do we get to the ‘why?’ 10:40 Staying centered on the customer 13:12 The next evolution of marketing 17:21 Can marketers predict revenue with certainty? 20:03 How leaders can reorganize teams around revenue 20:45 The revenue-focused marketing tech stack 22:04 Forming a “Voltron of Meeting Customer Needs” 24:00 Meeting the needs of the new B2B buying committee Josh:  So we were talking about upstream marketing. Can you explain that term for our listeners and what exactly that entails for your day-to-day? Julie: When we think of marketing at Johnson Controls, there's the old — I believe it goes back to Procter & Gamble — the concept of where to play and how to win. So upstream marketing is the “where to play.” Understanding customer needs, segmentation, targeting, product innovation. Once you've defined a new offering, then the “how to win” is how you connect with sales, whether you do account-based marketing, or you do content, lead generation. All of that is: Now I've got something, how do I get so the market is aware and purchases it or goes through their buying process? Josh:  So this is research to drive the right audience for our product or the right product for an audience, or a little bit of both? Julie: A little bit of both. It really starts with understanding what customer needs are, where are their pain points, and looking at what we do. And are there new and creative ways that we can help address those needs and pain points? Josh: It feels like in those verticals, you're in education and health care. You're going to have some pretty unique challenges to doing that research and to even executing on the marketing. What are you encountering? Julie: I'd say there's three big challenges that we're facing. One, the markets themselves are really in a state of flux. Healthcare continues to evolve and adjust, based on the outcomes for the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. We're watching demographic changes, so the youngest millennials might be a senior in college. So that's changing the demographics of who's in college, they're establishing families and so that's creating growth in K through 12. And you've got really persistent hard problems around security and active shooter that everyone's trying to figure out around a very, very hard problem. So that would be the first one. Probably not surprising to a lot of companies is how we use data and what the data is and how you align that around customer needs. There are lots of great opportunities, but some days, you work hard on what you've got and see how you can get it to come farther. And then the last one is this evolution of marketing from being something that participates as a function in a business to actually being a measured driver of growth that the business can count on. Julie: So, we look at our programs very much from a financial standpoint. So it's not good enough to just have ROI. I've got a couple of programs where we're looking for the EBIT, the actual earnings before interest and taxes that the program is going to contribute. It's not just how much revenue we track within marketing, things like clicks and opens and stuff like that, but the respect that comes to marketing comes when you can present the work you're doing in terms the CFO recognizes and understands. And those are the terms of business, not the terms of marketing. Josh: There's that whole idea historically that marketing is a cost center that you put money in and you get marketing out the other side. And that we're looking at trying to change that model to where you put marketing in and you get money out of the other side. Does that make sense? Julie: Absolutely, that's what we're driving towards and evolving towards every day. Julie: I think there's an evolution happening in marketing more broadly around, as you said, the validating what marketing's bringing to the table. And if you think about it, it creates a powerful opportunity for companies that are early movers, but we're not the first ones to go through this. If you think back to the late 1980s and early '90s and you looked at, manufacturing companies are like, you know what? We can probably do better. And brought in things like Six Sigma and Lean. And so now, companies — if you look at manufacturing in a company — they know pretty well, if they're going to expand a plant or if they're going to invest to build a new plant, the CEO of the company knows, how much it's going to cost, what the payoff is going to be and how long they have to wait for it. They know how much waste they can predict will come out of the system through continuous improvement every single year. You get to the late '90s and the early aughts they did the same thing with IT. The CFO sitting here going, it seems like I'm spending a whole lot of money with IT, not sure what I'm getting for it. Companies have gone through things with SAP and other IT transformation so that today they really have often a seat at the table as an engine for driving any B2B business. And again, the CEO and the CFO know, if we're going to invest in data centers, or roll out this new version of office, or new equipment. They know what productivity they're going to get. They know what risks they're avoiding by making that investment. What we see is that's coming to marketing. And what's encouraging about that is both from a manufacturing or an operational excellence standpoint, and IT — they adapted. They figured out how to start talking about what they did in financial terms that the CFO understands. And on the flip side, every company is looking to grow. A lot of companies don't look to marketing because they don't trust and respect marketing enough to deliver that. It's financial terms, it's EBIT, it's operational ROI, it's revenue, it's earnings per share. Those are the things that they understand and when marketing can say, listen, if you give me this much within this period of time, I'll deliver this much back. [bctt tweet="“It's EBIT, operational ROI, revenue, & earnings per share. When marketing can say, if you give me this much within this period of time, I'll deliver this much back.” — Julie Brown of @johnsoncontrols" username="toprank"] When you're president of a business, if you hire 200 more sales reps, you know what you're going to get. You know, whatever your cycle is. In 18 months they will be productive — 200 sales reps are going to drive this much revenue and this much profit. If for whatever reason you've got to take 50 out, you know it's going to be painful, but you understand what that pain is and you know about how big it's going to be. They don't know how to do that with marketing, and that's the opportunity. And doing that is what we're working really hard on. The flip side of it is, it's kind of the last function where you can get a big strategic competitive advantage. I mean, think about the companies who were early adopters of Six Sigma and manufacturing, they had huge systemic growth in the market and in their industry. Companies who are early adopters around that IT transformation got huge market share and transforming their business. The companies that can leverage marketing for growth have first-mover advantage available to them. It's just going to take marketing to explain in business terms — financial terms — how to be that player. Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Mark Bornstein on Digital Experience

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Sruthi Kumar on Creating Memorable Experiences

• Break Free B2B Series: Hal Werner on the Intersection of Marketing Creativity and Analytics

• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

   

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How to Build a Web Optimization Dream Team: Who Are Your Key Players?

Where to start

Are you thinking about building out a team to foster continuous optimization in your organization? If so, you might know the basics to testing and optimization, but you might need help in knowing where to start and what the right resources are to drive your optimization program. As you know, optimization is vital in providing unique, tailored personalized experiences to users across all digital touchpoints. But behind every successful testing and personalization program is a dream team of resources innovating, collaborating, and spearheading the optimization journey for their businesses. Once you understand the importance of optimization and are ready to start on your optimization journey, you can begin to think about how to build out the team that will make continuous optimization a reality.

When starting to build out your optimization team, it’s important to understand the lifecycle of a campaign from infancy to completion. By utilizing your campaign lifecycle as a preliminary guideline, you’re able to outline all phases of a test and identify the resources needed to successfully complete each phase.

Identifying a digital optimization lead

To start, identify a resource who will lead and coordinate all optimization initiatives (and down the line you may find yourself needing more than one!). This person will be the lead for all things optimization – a project manager of sorts – to be the internal testing expert and go-to for optimization related tasks. This person is responsible for hypothesis creation after collaborating with other team members to ensure that the hypothesis is well-written. Once you have your internal testing expert, who I’ll for now call the digital optimization lead, he/she can start to collaborate with other required optimization team members, such as the product owner, the designer, the developer, the quality controller, and the analyst.

The role of the product owner

When it comes to optimization, the product owner plays a vital role. As someone who’s a product expert, knows all the ins and outs of the user experience, and owns the roadmap, the product owner brings a great deal of value to a testing and optimization program. Often, the product owner is already in place, and it’s simply a matter of being brought into the optimization team by the digital optimization lead. The product owner is responsible for being the ultimate go-to resource for the page(s) and journeys being tested. This person can provide insight into test strategy for:

• The product

• Key performance metrics (KPIs)

• Page traffic

• Potential experiences and user journeys

• Current pain points and areas of opportunity

This person, along with the digital optimization lead, should come together to outline valid hypotheses, as well as prioritize tests based on impact and likelihood to implement. Once the digital optimization lead and product owner have fleshed out the details of a campaign, it’s time to start looping in the remainder of the team.

The role of the designer

The role of the designer involves maintaining brand consistency and creates pages from a user experience perspective are:

• Responsive

• Seamless

• Appealing to the eye

The designer, along with the digital optimization lead and product owner, can put together different versions of experiences based on the information already available regarding personas, user behavior, and engagement on the page(s) of interest.

The role of the developer

The role of the developer, is of course, to develop the tests! In other words, this person handles all the coding and configuration necessary within the campaign. The developer should familiarize himself/herself with the pages or products being tested, as well as be familiar with the Oracle Maxymiser platform. The developer is responsible for coding not only the campaign-specific experiences, but also the metrics tied to the campaign so that in-depth analytics can be performed accurately and efficiently. Ideally, the developer in this position will feel comfortable providing feedback around test concepts and metric tracking.

The role of the quality controller

While the developer is responsible for coding the experiences and metrics, the quality controller is responsible for verifying that everything is working as expected. This person is briefed on the test requirements and metrics, and dedicates their time to walking through each experience to ensure everything renders properly on the device types included in the campaign, and that all metrics are being tracked properly for analytics. This person works hand in hand with the developer throughout the testing phase, raising issues as needed for the developer to implement fixes for. Once all testing has been completed, the quality controller can sign off the campaign as ready for go-live!

The role of the analyst

The analyst holds one of the most important roles on the optimization team. Without proper analysis, it’s impossible to determine which experiences can be considered successful. Analysts help tell the story behind campaigns – they help identify behavior and engagement and inform whether or not specific KPIs have been met or exceeded. Dedicating a resource to analyze test performance allows for consistent monitoring and benchmarking to be done to help make analytics clean and actionable. In the early stages of testing, however, the digital optimization lead often takes on this responsibility until the program grows large enough to warrant a dedicated analyst. You can also use Oracle Maxymiser to help you with test analysis as you begin to ramp up your program.

In conclusion

Building out an optimization team takes time, training, and a lot of resources. By beginning to identify all your key players, you can begin to determine how many resources you need and any gaps you may need to fill. Before you know it, you’ll be a self-operating optimization team ready to crush your goals!

                                                                                               

Want to learn more about how the Oracle Maxymiser Consulting team can take your optimization program to new heights?  The Oracle Maxymiser Consulting team is made up of passionate strategists, designers, developers, quality assurance professionals, trainers, analysts, and platform experts. We’re excited to understand your business needs and work with you to drive ROI.

Contact us here or find out more information about Oracle Maxymiser here.

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How Social Should the CMO Be? 3 Guidelines for Success

Senior executive social media participation is often associated with better leadership, brand transparency and helps build better connections with customers, employees, and investors. For most companies, the CMO is one of the most visible executives and as a public facing marketing role, there is an expectation that the chief marketing officer will be active on social networks. But how many tweets, likes, shares and stories is enough? It is tempting for senior marketing executives to hold themselves up in comparison to professional marketing influencers who spend virtually all of their time keynoting conferences, writing books and being interviewed by the media – aka “brandividuals”. A review of the latest list of the most influential CMOs will reveal a number of executives that have been able to achieve a unicorn-like duality of maintaining their organizational responsibilities as well as an active social media presence, but that is certainly not the norm. Many senior marketing executives and CMOs are still working out what an appropriate level of social engagement looks like. A commitment to being active on social networks is imperative, if not a practical function of marketing leadership. If faced with some uncertainty about how to find the right balance, CMOs and senior marketing executives can follow these three guidelines for meaningful and manageable social media success.

Set a goal: Be specific

There are myriad possibilities with social media but even the thought of that can paralyze one’s effort to start. Begin with a singular goal. What is one thing you hope to accomplish by being visible and connected on the social web? Focus on that one thing and even go so far as to make a goal statement articulating what you hope to accomplish and how you plan to achieve it. The goal might simply be to reinforce your thought leadership on a specific topic or it might be to make yourself available to customers, prospects and the media. Just decide and commit.

Curate: Be useful

Leverage a social monitoring tool like BuzzSumo, the search feature on Twitter or your normal digital news sources to find interesting articles, posts, videos and other kinds of content to share with your social network. Add some of your perspective to curated information that consistently follows the theme that supports your goal. Share your own content as well. Become the “best answer” for what it is you want to be known for by building thought leadership with useful curation plus insight.

Interact and instigate

Be engaging. Much of social media’s value is in engagement and exchanges of ideas with your community. Use a social media listening tool to surface mentions of your name, brand and social content. Interact, show appreciation for the behaviors and messages that align with your goal. Ask your community questions that would lead to discussion and conversation around topics that can lead to your messaging and social media goals. Listen for questions being asked where your helpful answer can help lead that person to a positive experience. Being specific in your goal, sharing useful content from other sources as well as from your brand and engaging with your community are three of the fundamental things a senior executive can do on social networks. Make these core activities part of a process and a daily habit. Identify the tools you’ll need and set up alerts so you can spend a small, consistent amount of time building your social presence on a regular basis. With a little planning and tools, you can accomplish important visibility, thought leadership and customer engagement goals in just a few minutes a day. A version of this post originally published here.

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