The Digital Marketing Road: 12 Trends for 2012
Written by Martin Wong on January 31, 2012
It’s the start of a new year, so we’re looking down the digital marketing road to see what lies ahead for 2012. Last year we saw marketing departments begin to integrate online campaigns into marketing operations. This year, we expect to see a shift in marketing budgets, with significant investments in digital marketing skills and infrastructure that will allow teams to respond in a more agile manner to the real world, in real time.
Climb Off the Digital Slush Pile: Content Marketing That Works
Written by Martin Wong on January 20, 2012
Literary agents have a name for the thousands of manuscripts that come through their door each day from hopeful authors. It’s called the “slush pile”. The agent’s job is to read through that slush pile and pick out the few that are worth taking to market. Thus, when we read a book, we trust there has been some quality control. Similarly, when a reputable newspaper prints an article, we trust the editor has checked facts and news sources; furthermore, he has curated the information by giving prominence to the article based on his assessment of its newsworthiness.
On the Internet, anyone can blog, tweet, and YouTube. As a result, the content out there is the digital equivalent of a huge slush pile, all of it competing for attention from your target audience. What can you do to increase the success of your content marketing efforts?
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A/B Testing: Seeing the Forest
Written by Amy Gyoba on January 16, 2012
Have you ever heard the saying “not seeing the forest for the trees”? It means that someone doesn’t see the forest (the big picture) because they’re too busy looking at the trees (the details). We experienced this problem while performing A/B testing and want to share our lessons learned. In this case, it took some time to figure out why we weren’t getting conclusive results—we had been focusing too much on the small details.
Defining A/B Testing
A/B or split testing is exactly what it sounds like: testing one version of an ad or webpage against another one to see how a change to one component affects the conversion rate. Conversion, the desired user action, is defined before testing. It’s a key part of split testing because it determines which version is more successful.
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