January 20, 2021
|
SUMMARY: “Experience
is simply the name we give our mistakes,” Oscar Wilde said. It’s
great to learn from your experience, yes, but far less painful to learn from
someone else’s mistakes. So
we asked about those experiences, and 83 marketers shared mistakes with us.
We culled those down into the most helpful lessons for you in this article
with examples from a fast-casual Italian restaurant concept, e-commerce
business selling flags, marketing agencies, CBD oil company, web development
agency, photographer, and online beef purveyor. |
by Daniel Burstein, Senior
Director, Content & Marketing, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute
This article was originally published in
the MarketingSherpa
email newsletter.
Mistake #1: Burying the gold
I’ve
seen many conversion optimization tests that get a big lift without necessarily
adding new information to the page. Oftentimes the important information to
help the customer make a conversion decision was right there on the page to
begin with…it was just buried.
For
example, the MECLABS
Institute helped a company capture 201% more email addresses by
changing the landing page’s headline from “Searching for the Most Accurate
Mailing Lists? Your Hunt is Over!” to “We Make 26 Million Phone Calls a Year to
Ensure You Get The Most Accurate Mailing Lists Available!” (MECLABS is the
parent organization of MarketingSherpa).
The
information about making 26 million phone calls a year was on the original
landing page, it was just buried.
As
Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS Institute said in Page Layout Optimization: A common mistake marketers and web
designers make, and how to avoid it, “Beware of this danger where
you have important content buried on your page.”
Mistake #2: Overlooking an opportunity to
build a direct relationship with customers
Unless
you have an exclusively direct sales model, it can be difficult to build a
relationship with your end customer. That relationship can be owned by a
brick-and-mortar retailer, online store, or third-party distributor.
But
it would be a mistake to overlook that direct relationship. Without it, the
retailer or distributor can all too easily drop your product for a competitor
leaving you out in the cold.
Here
is a great example that might spark your own ideas.
Trigg
Thorstenson owns an e-commerce business selling flags. They were looking for a
product insert that would generate interest and more importantly, get customers
to opt-in.
The
solution they came up with is a dog tag attached to the grommet of the flag.
There is a registration number on the dog tag so customers can register their
flags.
Creative Sample #1: Email opt-in mechanism for e-commerce business
selling flags
“This
has been very successful,” said Trigg Thorstenson, Owner, Fine
Line Flag. Since the program was launched on February 12,
2020, the company has added 947 opt-ins from a total of 8,000 dog tags, which
is close to a 12% conversion rate.
“The
average outdoor flag is only expected to last 90 days – which would shock most
consumers,” Thorstenson said. So the team plans to email registrants 90 days, 6
months, and 1 year after purchase, encouraging them to replace their flag. The
email program will also teach customers how to “retire” the flag and dispose of
it properly.
“The
majority of our sales come from Amazon. In their ecosystem we do not collect
buyer information. They are Amazon customers and not ours,” Thorstenson said.
“But this way they clearly opt-in to our ecosystem.”
Mistake #3: Creating content for peers rather
than customers
A
couple of years ago, web development agency Greenice launched a
blog. Its main goal was to generate leads.
“When
thinking about the topics the first thing that came to mind was to write about
technologies and programming. After all, that is what we are experts in and our
competitors were also doing it. So our initial content plan became filled with
articles that compare various technologies,” said Kateryna Reshetilo, Marketing
and Business Development Manager, Greenice.
The
old articles had topics like “Apache vs Nginx: How We Chose Nginx Over Apache
After 300 Users Case” and “Client Perspective on Symfony vs Yii: Which is
Better for Your Project?”
After
writing the first couple of articles on technical topics, the team quickly
realized that they were not attracting leads.
The
readers of such articles are programmers themselves, and although some of their
clients are also programmers, there were only a few. Secondly, the search intent
for such articles is purely informational. “Hardly anyone Googling the
differences between PHP frameworks is looking for developers,” Reshetilo said.
“Right
now it seems quite obvious, but back then it was a ‘palm-face’ revelation. And,
actually, I still see competitors, especially new ones, writing articles like
these,” she said.
Since
then, the team has taken a different approach and most of its articles are
detailed guides on how to go about developing different types of software or
online platforms.
Some
of the articles that have generated the most leads are topics like “How To
Create A Real Estate Website Like Zillow & Trulia,” “How to Build a Website
Like Upwork and Become The Leader of the Gig Economy,” and “How to Create a
Hotel Booking Website?”
Here
is an example of the difference in business results between these two types of
articles. The article “Elasticsearch vs. Solr vs. Sphinx: Best Open Source
Search Platform Comparison” – which compares three different types of on-site
search engines – has been the company’s top page in terms of traffic for more
than two years but has only brought in one lead.
In
contrast, the article “How To Create A Real Estate Website Like Zillow &
Trulia” has less traffic by almost 2.5 times but has attracted more than 30
highly-qualified leads in one year.
Mistake #4: Not defining correctly who you
want to target
“If
our audience is too broad our message will be too weak and won't speak to our
ideal client,” said Jesse Heredia, CEO & Founder, Ravecode
Solutions.
“When
starting Facebook ads to target immigration lawyers, we were seeing a cost per
lead of over $30.00. But when we narrowed down the audience by including
lawyers that liked the American Immigration Lawyers Association, we were able
to lower the cost per lead to $10.00,” Heredia said.
Mistake #5: Having the customer service team
doing what the website should be doing
In an
earlier iteration of their website, the team behind NuLeaf
Naturals focused mainly on having information categorized and
organized. “While this made us feel better and was neat and tidy, we found that
our customer service team and our info inbox kept getting inundated with
similar questions: how long does it take to ship? Can you ship to my state?”
said Ian Kelly, VP, Operations, NuLeaf Naturals.
The
team was wasting hours replying to these emails, until they came up with a
simple fix – adding shipping information to the header of every single page.
Creative Sample #2: Shipping info in header of CBD oil company
website
Having
the most frequently asked purchasing questions in the site header helped the
team reduce cart abandonment and increase sales because potential customers
instantly had the answer to their most pressing questions. It also freed up
time for the service team to focus on more rewarding and impactful tasks,
spending more meaningful time serving customers in depth rather than answering
dozens of basic queries each day.
“It
is a tricky balance to put all the information out there while not overcrowding
or overwhelming the potential customer, so having a sample of everything on our
home page makes it easy to find the information they are looking for. And as
explained in the video with Flint McGlaughlin, you want to be
starting a conversation, not just present labels and categories. On our home
page we have our products with essential info, review highlights, information
about CBD, and all of these lead to pages with more in-depth information. We
try to tell a story and pique the curiosity of website visitors to learn more
rather than blurting out all of our information at once,” Kelly said.
Helping
to better serve customers with their website is one tactic that has powered Nu
Leaf’s growth – 11,949% overall growth over the past three years earning the
company the #11 spot on the Inc. 5000.
Mistake #6: Wrong file type
“Far
too often, companies use the wrong logo file type in the top navigation bar and
footer of their websites. Using a PNG or JPG can cause the logo to appear
blurry compared to the rest of the website, even if the file is relatively
high-resolution. In order to ensure your logo is sharp and crisp on modern
retina screens, always use a .SVG file. It's a quick, simple, and easy way to
make sure your entire website experience is high-quality, demonstrating your
company's attention to detail!” said Chris Gorges, Founder & CEO, Thompson
& Prince.
Creative Sample #3: Example of JPEG/PNG logo in header
Creative Sample #4: Example of SVG logo in header
Mistake #7: Focusing on irrelevant metrics
Professional
photographer Paul Richardon spent hundreds of hours
creating his piece de resistance – a video combining all of his best work. He’d
developed a few techniques over the years to engineer virality and took the
video to more than 1.1 million views.
“That
sounds great, right? Unfortunately, it was a disaster,” Richardson said. “The
video brought me in no new work. Not a single commission.”
Richardson
had fretted over optimizing for view counts, when in reality he should have
been spending time getting his work in front of the people who might actually
hire him.
“A
million views sounds great, but when none of those people are my ideal client,
the numbers don’t matter,” he said. “In reality I should have asked the question
‘who hires me for this kind of work?’ and ‘how can I get my work in front of
them?’ I could have spent those months meeting with potential clients, figuring
out their pain points and building relationships. That would have brought in a
lot more work than gaining a meaningless view count.”
Mistake #8: An underperforming headline
The
primary headline on the homepage for Wagyu Beef used to
simply be “Wagyu Beef,” which is both the company name as well as the primary
product it sells.
Creative Sample #5: Old homepage headline for global retailer of
premium Wagyu beef
After
learning a bit more about website optimization, the team decided to A/B split
test several different headlines. The headline that yielded the lowest bounce
rate was “Authentic A5 Wagyu Beef.”
Creative Sample #6: New homepage headline for global retailer of
premium Wagyu beef
A
high bounce rate had been a major problem for the site in the past, and this
two-word change alone lowered it from 78% to 47%.
“My
hypothesis is that the word ‘Authentic’ is crucial because there are many
companies out there that sell ‘fake’ Wagyu beef, marketing their beef as Wagyu
when it really technically isn’t,” said Hayato Yoshida, Cofounder, Wagyu Beef.
“Furthermore, I hypothesize that the word ‘A5’ is also extremely critical
because A5 is a term used to signify the highest quality of Wagyu beef, and
quality is certainly very important for our customers who are willing to pay a
hefty premium for the very best.”
Mistake #9: Not trying something new
It
would be easy to name this mistake, “Not doing enough pre-planning.”
But I
think that is a little unfair. If you’re really going to push the envelope and
try something new, mistakes will be made. So don’t let all the mistakes in this
article scare you off from innovating. As Albert Einstein said, “Anyone who has
never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
In my
own career, working at an ad agency, we had a lot of success with carboard box
mailers for high-end real estate properties. But we were always trying to make
the next creative execution even better. I had an idea for wooden box mailers
and tested it out first with a smaller client. Worked great. So we moved onto doing
a custom wood box for a bigger client.
What
I did not know at the time was that different types of wood would perform
differently. And that cedar will not hold small screws for very long. We ended
up fixing it before it got to the client, but at the time it sure felt like a
major mistake. In the end, the client was very happy with the final product and
the campaign was wildly successful. So the bigger mistake would have been not
trying.
Here’s
a great example from David Eichler of Decibel Blue.
“We
had immense success with a mascot marketing program during our time opening 90+
Dunkin’ Donuts stores across the Southwest,” Eichler said. “When we were
retained to expand and refresh the NYPD Pizza brand, a fast-casual Italian
concept with 10+ Phoenix locations, no detail was too small for us to poke at.
One of our most important and expensive initiatives was to create a mascot.”
They
named the character Tommy the Tomato because fresh ingredients were a
cornerstone for the company and hired the best mascot designer and renderer in
the nation. Tommy even had a built-in AC/fan unit so the person in the suit
wouldn't overheat (this was in Phoenix, after all).
The
team’s vision was to make Tommy huge. They wanted him to stand out, head and
shoulders above the rest in a crowded parade, shopping mall, or festival.
Creative Sample #7: Mascot for pizza franchise
But
here’s the rub…
“Well,
Tommy turned out amazing, except for one thing. We had forgotten to measure the
amount of clearance there is between a normal car’s door frame and back seat.
He was way too big for any trunk and we couldn’t count on whoever was scheduled
to wear Tommy [would] have an SUV. Would we be able to stuff him into a Honda?
This was a big account for us and if this $5,000+ investment was a bust we
would have been in a lot of trouble at worst, and out a lot of money at best.
Well, we got lucky. Tommy squeezed into a typical car with literal millimeters
to spare and he proved to be very successful. A mistake saved by blind luck.
I'll take it,” Eichler said.
Don’t
make the mistake of failing to challenge the status quo with bold new
ideas. But when you do so, try to scenario plan with as big a team as possible
to try to uncover possible challenges. Who knows, someone on your team might be
a woodworking expert. Or drive a small car. And they can help you overcome your
blind spots and avoid mistakes.
And
on second thought, perhaps the best name for this mistake is, “Not realizing
everyone in marketing has a big head…especially the mascot.”
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