Here, we’ll take a look at the very top of the funnel, to see how three different companies are handling early-stage interest on the same keyword phrase: “big data.”

With all the talk about big data these days, you can picture many people searching on this topic. Even though they’re probably not yet evaluating vendors at first, they may be open to educational materials provided by or sponsored by vendors — if those materials are truly useful, not fluff.

The top three ads when I did this search were from Oracle, SAS, and EMC. So let’s examine their landing pages in order.

Oracle’s Content-First Portal Strategy

Oracle’s ad promises “simplify and put your data to work.”

Their landing page is a deep-link into a topic portal page on their website. The top half includes a couple of paragraphs of introductory copy and links to a number of white papers from Oracle and industry analysts.

The bottom half includes context-specific links to relevant products within Oracle’s portfolio.

Unlike traditional lead generation tactics, which would require a registration to download white papers or analyst reports, Oracle makes the links to these materials freely available — just click to instantly open up the PDFs. Oracle weighs the brand marketing opportunity of distributing that content as more valuable than leads at that moment.

Of course, it can still track the “microconversions” of each of these downloads. That is very likely their primary performance metric on this page, and I expect it’s performing well.

For lead generation, Oracle offers a set of premium calls-to-action on the right column of the page: a webcast center, an online forum, and a big data summit in major cities — all requiring registration — as well as an offer to talk to Oracle on the phone.

Oracle is clearly betting that if you like the free content on the main part of the page, you’ll eventually be ready for these premium content options that convert you officially into a lead. That may not happen on your first visit — which is a risk if you end up being pulled into another vendor’s lead machine before returning.

But with good content, I think this content-first strategy is worth the risk and can be highly effective at this early stage of prospect exploration.

My only beef with this landing page is that it doesn’t do a very good job of maintaining “message match” with the ad.

With such a large collection of educational materials and so many different products presented as applicable to big data, the “simplify” promise doesn’t feel well addressed. This could be easily solved by tweaking the ad copy to more accurately reflect the “everything you wanted to know about big data” nature of the landing page.

SAS’s Traditional Lead Generation Strategy

The ad for SAS leads with “gain insights from big data” and promises respondents: “view white paper to learn more.”

Their landing page takes a more traditional lead generation approach: register to download a specific piece of premium content.

Here, they’re offering an independent survey report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, which I think is compelling. The image of the report in the upper right corner is a nice touch for making the offer tangible.

The registration step on the next page asks for a modest amount of information — name, email, organization, country, state — so I suspect their conversion rate is good.

This strategy gives respondents one clear, simple choice: here’s the best piece of content to start your education of big data with us. If the offer is compelling enough to win a conversion, SAS can then follow up with this lead using marketing automation — guiding and responding to their progress through later stages of the funnel.

Although I think the strategy here is a solid one, I would suggest several improvements to its execution.

First, the message match with the ad should be much tighter. The “gain insight” message from the ad is buried in the copy. The promised “white paper” is actually a survey report. I like the title in the landing page — harnessing a game-changing asset — so I’d try moving that out to the ad.

Instead of promising a white paper, promise an “independent report” — which may be more intriguing to early-stage prospects anyway.

For the registration, since their form on the next page is relatively short, I’d consider moving it on to the landing page. Maybe change the call-to-action from “register now” to “get the report now.”

At the bottom, their claim as the leader of business analytics software at the bottom of the page could probably be presented more powerfully with social proof in a more visual format. This is a great branding opportunity: use it to make a strong impression.

EMC’s Registration Required Portal Strategy

The ad from SAP says big data will “improve enterprise decision making” and offers a free case study.

The landing page is almost a hybrid of the previous two strategies: a portal page with multiple fulfillment items, but a short, on-page registration is required to access them.

If the advantage of a single-piece offer is simplicity, the advantage of a multi-piece offer such as this is choice. Respondents can self-selct the analyst report, white paper, or case study that intrigues them most. As long as one is sufficiently compelling, the chance of winning the conversion is good.

The downside to a multi-piece offer, however, is that it can lose focus, especially if the choices don’t have a clear narrative that relates them to each other.

In this case, EMC clearly has some terrific content, but I feel that this landing page diverges the most from message match with the ad. The emphasis of the page seems to be more on “scale out” instead of “decision making.”

The case study that I was promised is the last item on the page — below the fold for shorter browser windows — and sounds very specific to medical imaging.

I think the first fulfillment piece, the IDC analyst report, may be the best starting point for an early-stage prospect, especially before you know their role or their industry. The top part of the page could probably make a more cohesive presentation around that piece, while better connecting the dots with the ad. (The ad would need to offer to IDC analyst report instead of the case study.)

Also, a small but useful conversion optimization tip: try “Access These Materials Now” (or “Access This Report Now”) as the button call-to-action instead of “Submit.”

Which Strategy Is Best For You?

All of these strategies are viable. Which one is best depends on your solution, your brand, and most importantly, your audience. How does this early stage touch point relate to the rest of your marketing strategy deeper into the funnel?

This also seems like a great scenario for A/B testing. (Hint, hint.)

But whatever you do, please — please — keep an eye on message match with the ads from which you’re driving traffic.

The first point of being relevant to a respondent’s search is fulfilling the promises — explicit and implied — that your ad made to lure them to your landing page. At this early stage of the funnel, living up to your word is one of the best first impressions you can make.

All screenshots were taken by the author on May 7, 2012.

Doodling with a new drawing app on the iPad — 53′s Paper, which is a real beauty — I took a pass at illustrating what I consider to be five important ideas in conversion optimization.

The Conversion Funnel

As marketers, we obsess with the prospect-to-customer funnel. Getting more people in at the top. Moving more of them through the middle faster. We talk about top-of-funnel (TOFU) tactics and middle-of-funnel (MOFU) tactics. All of which is good to a point.

But the real art of conversion optimization is crafting our marketing through the eyes of our audience. From a prospect’s perspective, their funnel progresses through four questions of you:

• What do you do?
• Why should I care?
• How do I believe you?
• Where do we begin?

If your funnel aligns with their funnel, answering those questions, good things happen.

Why Landing Pages Are Awesome

I’ve spent 7 years working on landing pages and post-click marketing, yet every day I still wake up amazed and inspired by the possibilities.

Why? Because landing pages are at the intersection of three innovative forces in marketing: content marketing, performance marketing, and technical wizardry.

You need terrific content to be relevant and engaging. You leverage performance marketing principles for testing, analysis, and measuring success. And you use technical wizardry to create remarkable user experiences and to optimize the entire process end-to-end.

Each of these fields is fascinating on its own. The combinations of them are electrifying.

Modern Marketer’s DNA

Bryan Eisenberg said it best: as marketers, we need to Always Be Testing.

Test early, and test often.

A/B testing should be more than a capability. It should be more than a best practice. It should be rooted deeply into the culture of every modern marketing team. Our genetic code — at least metaphorically — should consist only of A-B pairs.

Brand Impact vs. Conversion Rate

There can be a perceived tension between conversion rate optimization and brand impact, which dates back to the early rivalries of direct marketing vs. brand marketing.

But it’s a false choice: you can — and should — do great on both dimensions.

Sure, there are cheesy used car salesman type tactics that you can use to squeeze short-term bumps to your conversion rate. (“I promise you the world, just give me your email address and click ‘Boom!’”) But such chicanery costs you brand equity.

On the other hand, great brand-building content is often published without any direction towards a “next step.” It leaves visitors dangling like a sailboat in the middle of a lake with no wind. Sure, they can paddle their way to a conversion step. But paddling is hard work.

The sweet spot is pushing the Pareto frontier of brand and conversion to achieve both. That’s brilliant post-click marketing.

Eschew Cookie-Cutter Landing Pages

Okay, so this sketch only makes one big point: differentiate.

There’s an art to producing seductive landing pages, and it doesn’t emerge from boring, cookie-cutter webpage layouts that look like they came out of Microsoft Word.

Stand out from the competition. Don’t just be branded — be a brand.

In the end, 100% of visitors to your page see what you produced. What percentage will be impressed? What percentage will find it memorable? And, of course, what percentage will convert?

1.  How would you approach deciding what to optimize first?

For most businesses, the potential universe of optimization opportunities — from their high-level home page down through highly targeted campaigns that have yet to be conceived — is extremely large. How would the candidate decide what to prioritize?

There are many ways to tackle this. Which e-commerce categories or demand generation campaigns have been most successful? Which have been least successful? Which search queries are generating the most traffic? Which of those have the lowest bounce rate, the highest bounce rate? How do these data points intersect with the company’s strategic direction?

In my opinion, a good answer reveals an analytical approach to identifying opportunities, while at the same time demonstrating an openness to finding the right analytical lens for your specific business — not necessarily a cookie-cutter checklist. A great candidate should ask questions about your existing analytics and other factors driving your business priorities.

2.  How do you think about audience segmentation?

There’s a natural flow of conversation from priorities to audience segmentation. Which audiences are the most important to the business and why? How do you identify them? How do you serve them best?

What are the possible dimensions by which the candidate even thinks to segment people? New customers versus existing customers is an obvious (but important) one. Vertical markets too.

Demographics have a rich legacy in marketing, so segmentation options along that axis can open up some good possibilities. But I’d love to hear a candidate open the door to more modern segmentation approaches too, such as personas or Clay Christensen’s insightful question, “What job are you hiring this product to do?”

Upon brainstorming different segmentations, a good follow-up is to discuss ways in which those segments can be identified. By answers they fill out on a form? Previous purchase histories? The ads they clicked on — and the keywords or site contexts in which those ads were placed? Behavioral choices on landing pages? Data from services empowered by cookies or IP address look-ups? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these different mechanisms?

3.  What was one of the most surprising outcomes to a test you’ve run?

A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT) are the workhorses of conversion optimization. Experienced conversion professionals should have a rich history of tests to draw upon. Which ones were the most memorable? And why? While this is certainly an opportunity for a candidate to (humbly?) note some of their biggest successes, I think the best answers to this question reveal courage and creativity.

In particular, how bold has the candidate been in trying big and imaginative ideas? Did they push the envelope, or did they play it safe?

What were some of the hypotheses that motivated their testing, and how did their perspective evolve over a sequence of tests? Were there any tests that were spectacular failures? What did they learn from them? If they haven’t taken any risks that have failed — or if they’re uncomfortable admitting them — that would be a red flag.

4.  In your testing, what variables do you try to control? What potentially confounding variables are outside of your control?

There are two alarming answers to this question. One is an unawareness of any variables to be controlled in conversion optimization. The other is the opposite extreme: confidence that their experiments are always perfectly controlled.

The reality is that confounding variables are some of the biggest — yet rarely discussed — challenges in conversion optimization. Sometimes respondents come from different traffic sources — the same ad served for two different search queries can send traffic with very different intent.

The timeframe during which a test occurs might have any number of externalities, from holidays to major events in the news. Other events that are happening with your company or within your industry — especially in our Age of Social Media — can wildly impact your results.

There’s no perfect solution. However, savvy conversion professionals control the variables that they can, within reason, while remaining vigilant to a wide range of external factors that can skew their results.

5.  How do you weigh the trade-offs between brand consistency and experimentation?

There’s no single right answer to this question — it depends a lot on your organization, your brand, your audience. But since conversion optimization usually plays the role of championing change to the status quo — while still leveraging, and hopefully enhancing, the value of your underlying brand — it’s insightful to hear how a candidate thinks about this trade-off.

How far should you experiment with the look-and-feel of your landing pages? When you should engage in special offers (and what kinds of special offers)?

In addition to considering different points along this continuum, a good conversion optimization professional should have suggestions for mitigating the risks of experiments that “poke the box.”

6.  Did you ever have a time when you had to deal with a HiPPO?

Everyone in conversion optimization should be familiar with the HiPPO — Avinash Kaushik’s label for the highest-paid person’s opinion, emphatically presented without regard to testing or analytical data.

In practice, it’s not just an affliction of executives and senior managers. Almost anyone on the marketing team or the company at large may voice strongly-held opinions on the direction of your conversion optimization programs.

The question is how a candidate deals with such situations. A masterful conversion optimization professional is able to gracefully channel such input into productive efforts. It’s important to not give in or give up in the face of thundering viewpoints.

At the same time, a diplomatic touch goes a long way to keeping people engaged in a positive way. Great interpersonal skills are golden here. Listening to a candidate describe their previous experiences managing these dynamics can tell you a lot about what it will be like to work with them.

Are there other suggestions for good conversion optimization interview questions? Share them in the comments.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Back in 2007, landing pages were almost cliché — what I would call Landing Pages 1.0. Take this example from Google — yes, Google — with the prototypical structure: a headline, a short description or some bullets, a small image (“hero shot”), and a form.

Most of the fields on the form were required. The “submit” button was still in vogue. And the payoff for filling out the form? A phone call from a sales rep.

Okay, so this first generation of landing pages wasn’t very good. But such pages were effective enough in lead generation that they got the ball rolling. Marketers started to wonder what they could do to make landing pages better.

Landing Pages 2.0: The Beginning Of Best Practices

To me, 2008 was the year when a new generation of landing pages took off — call it Landing Pages 2.0.

Two great books came out that year, Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash and Always Be Testing by Bryan Eisenberg, and launched what I would characterize as the “best practices” era of landing pages.

Best practices were things that everyone using landing pages could — or should — follow. They included:

• A/B and multivariate (MVT) testing — test, test, test your ideas
• “message match” continuity between ads/emails and their landing pages
• shorter and friendlier forms with better calls-to-action (CTAs)
• emphasis on text content (not Flash!) to improve SEO and quality scores
• “social proof” with logos, awards, certifications, testimonials, etc.

A year and a half ago, I put together the READY Conversion Optimization Framework as a broad summary of the most universal landing page best practices of the time:

Landing pages were definitely getting better at persuading people to convert. But for the most part, they were still somewhat formulaic — just following a better, richer formula.

Landing Pages 3.0: Beyond Best Practices

In the past year, I believe there’s been another qualitative jump to a new generation of landing pages — Landing Pages 3.0.

This generational shift was fueled in part by the creative explosion of content marketing, the customer-centricity of social media, and the impressive advancements in Web interfaces due to HTML5, CSS3, and a Renaissance of robust Javascript packages and frameworks.

It was also motivated in part by senior marketers — not just the paid search team — realizing that landing pages and websites were becoming the primary touchpoints by which prospects and customers assessed their brands. The rally of digital “customer experience” has brought much needed executive attention to the proverbial online marketing funnel.

But as much as anything, this metamorphosis is the result of conversion optimization maturing as a marketing discipline.

This new generation is ready to move beyond “best practices.”

Whereas the height of Landing Pages 2.0 was an ever-expanding list of rules and rubrics for implementing good landing pages, marketers who have graduated to a Landing Pages 3.0 mindset have outgrown such checklists and cheat sheets.

Instead, they’re now driving conversion programs from a higher set of principles:

1. Deliver meaningful, context-relevant content
2. Present that content with an engaging, affective design
3. Offer a compelling, but not coercive, “next step” to take

Like an architect who has completed his or her basic design studio courses, practiced and perfected the fundamentals, who is now ready to start breaking the cookie-cutter “rules” in pursuit of more impressive and imaginative ideas. Or like a musician who has mastered scales, riffs, and progressions — hours and hours of the mechanics of their instrument — who is now ready to improvise and jam with the pros.

Landing Page 3.0 marketers have studied best practices, absorbed them into their thinking, but they’re now ready to synthesize new creative ideas of their own — unafraid to break the “rules” to deliver remarkable experiences to their audience.

An Example Of Landing Pages 3.0

I was recently struck by this post-”best practices” era when looking at a landing page for an online game called Dragons of Atlantis:

It violates several “best practices” from Landing Pages 2.0. It uses large images — in the background, in the foreground, in pop-up lightboxes. It actually uses a slide show of images — gasp! — in that main window, rotating one after another every few seconds. (I can think of at least one Landing Pages 2.0 consultant who would be apoplectic at that thought.)

But in my opinion, that’s what works in this context: the images sell the experience of the game itself.

All the SEO-optimized text in the world couldn’t hold a candle to those big, crisp slices of game screens. They’re lightly annotated just enough to communicate the essence of game play. The rotator tells a story with them in a succinct and captivating way.

It may take a second or two for this page to load on a fast connection, but if it enchants respondents enough to sign-up, that’s a price well worth paying.

And to be fair, it’s smart in the way it’s breaking those rules. Those large images are being served via a content delivery network (CDN), and the image rotator is not Flash-based but driven by lightweight Javascript.

Meanwhile, other Landing Page 2.0 rules are still observed: short form, clear call-to-action, the highlighted “free to play” value proposition, a strategic sliver of social proof. It’s a hybrid of solid fundamentals and creative departures from the old school.

That sums up the essence of what I believe Landing Pages 3.0 are all about. The shackles are disintegrating and the mandate to impact your audience with something extraordinary has been issued from the highest levels.

How will you answer the call?

Disclosure: Kabam, the makers of Dragons of Atlantis, is a customer of my company’s software. They were a handy example, however, there’s nothing about this Landing Pages 3.0 gestalt that is unique to or dependent on our software.

It reminded me of the negative side effects that certain kinds of tests can have on customers — sometimes your best customers — and the steps that marketers should consider to mitigate those risks.

This is a cautionary tale, but I don’t want to lambast the the company running the test. They ultimately handled the situation fairly. So I will refer to them anonymously as a business software provider named Acme.

Testing One’s Sanity

Acme typically offers three levels of their product: Basic, Advanced, and Super-Duper. Each level adds more features and increases in price. For illustrative purposes, let’s say their monthly subscription prices are normally $100, $200, and $300 respectively.

During a family gathering for Christmas, one of my in-laws asked for a recommendation of such software for his business. Since I knew and liked Acme, I was quick to suggest them. He pulled out his laptop, and I navigated to their website. But when I clicked on their “Pricing” tab, expecting to show him the three different levels, there was just one option: $100.

At first, I was disoriented. I was looking for the Advanced level that I already knew, but it wasn’t there. I could have sworn it was there a few days ago when I looked at it on my computer. Had they rearranged the site architecture?

To check my sanity, I pulled out my laptop, went to their site, clicked the “Pricing” tab… and still saw all three levels with their original pricing.

Huh? I refreshed my page. I refreshed his. He had one option. I had three. Looking more closely, the difference was even more striking. It turned out that for $100 he was being offered all of the features of the Super-Duper level — what was being offered on my screen as a $300 package.

My first reaction was, “Cool, an A/B test!” (What can I say? I’m a conversion geek. And I was relieved to have a rational explanation for the bizarre dichotomy between our two computers.)

But my professional appreciation for finding an A/B test in the wild was slowly replaced by a different sensation. I felt, well, gamed. I had been ready to sign up for the Advanced package myself and would have paid $200 for it.

In fact, that was what Acme was telling me, with a metaphorically straight face, was still “the” price. But on the computer right next to mine, they were telling my in-law that the price was something very different — twice as many features for half the price.

“Hey,” I wanted to chide Acme. “I’m referring you business, and you’re offering them a deal that’s way better than what you’re telling me I have to pay? What gives?”

Testing One’s Patience

I actually did feel a little indignant. This was a pretty big difference in pricing. And my reaction was tempered by a pro-A/B testing worldview. I wouldn’t expect most customers to be so enlightened.

To someone who doesn’t understand the impersonal randomization at work in such experiments — or even that it’s an experiment at all — it would be easy to attribute ill intent to Acme’s schemes.

And that’s not the end of the story.

We eventually signed him up — Acme does have a very nice product — in a browser where we had the special $100-for-everything offer. It started with the first two weeks as a completely free trial.

But when that expired, and he went to add his credit card info for the recurring subscription, the Acme system somehow reverted to giving him the regular three-tier pricing. Confused, he chose the $100 level, but it was the Basic version without all the Super-Duper features.

Technically, I believe this happened because two different computers were used. One had the cookie for the special pricing, the other did not. But however it got mixed up, it caused another round of confusion and consternation.

We opened a support ticket with Acme, explaining the situation and asking for the $100-for-everything package. The first reply we received was a little squirrelly, vaguely admitting that they had been testing new packages with a small customer group — to help them “understand how to better serve all of our customers, like you.” But they didn’t acknowledge us as one of the test subjects and didn’t adjust our package.

Now I was starting to get annoyed. We replied to clarify that, indeed, we had been in that test group, and that we expected them to honor the offer.

After an escalation or two on Acme’s side, they relented and gave us the special deal. They also apologized for the confusion caused by the price test. In the end, I felt they resolved it well. But I was convinced that for other prospects put through such an experience, it easily could have ended badly — lost trust, lost customers, negative referrals, or a social media PR disaster.

Suggestions For Testing Prices

After contemplating the above situation for a while, I have a few suggestions for Acme (and the rest of us).

First, although testing is the bedrock of modern marketing, recognize that price testing is a bit of a different beast. People are unlikely to be offended if they see one headline and their colleague sees another.

Experimenting with different content — such as videos versus images on a page — is very low risk. But if I get told a different price than the person sitting next to me, for no apparent reason, there’s going to be trouble.

Keep in mind how easy it is for people to compare the same site on two different computers. An employee sees one thing, the boss sees another.

A consumer sees one thing, a friend or family member sees another. And, of course, there’s the ever increasing propensity to share what one sees with whomever will listen on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Nonetheless, sometimes you will want to test pricing.

As one alternative, consider testing serially instead of in parallel. Try offer A this month and offer B next month. Such tests have a few characteristics that are less than ideal — such as more potential for confounding variables — but they avoid scenarios where people are getting two different offers at the exact same time.

Or consider limiting tests to particular campaigns — with their own landing pages, separate from your primary site. You can have more control over who receives the offers and the context in which they’re presented.

One option is to explicitly identify something as a special offer, available for a limited time or constrained by other restrictions. Admittedly, this is a very different test than quietly testing two different prices that people assume is the regular price. But if the test is discovered, a special sale price seems more forgivable.

Another factor to consider is how big the price difference is. In the Acme example, they were effectively offering the product at 1/3 its regular price. A difference that big really smarts when the person told to pay full price finds out about it. If the difference had been 10%, maybe even 20%, it would have been less jarring to discover.

But perhaps you really want to test a big price difference, quietly, without identifying it as a special offer or sale. In that case, you may want to keep the ratio of the the “challenger” price low — maybe it only shows up 1 out of 10 times, rather than a traditional 50-50 split test. It doesn’t eliminate the problem, but it does reduce the probability of a collision.

Finally, no matter what, make sure your front-line staff is prepared. If someone stumbles into awareness of both prices, make sure that your team is ready to respond gracefully. You don’t necessarily have to extend the offer to people who just “heard” about it. But if you take that tack, you may be risking relationships that have far more value than the price difference.

Test, test, test. But when testing prices, test carefully.

Image courtesy of U.S. Department of the Treasury.

So in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d begin this column by sharing with you an adapted poem I first started playing with a few years ago, ‘Twas the Moment of Click-Through (also known as A Visit from Saint Click).

My apologies to the original classic.

Image from Wikimedia Commons: Cover of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" (1912 edition) - Project Gutenberg eText 17135

‘Twas The Moment Of Click-Through (A Visit From Saint Click)

‘Twas the moment of click-through, and all through the site
All the pages were crafted to bring visitors delight
The images were placed in the layout with care
Along with the headlines that perfectly paired

The tracking scripts were nestled, all snug in the page
To measure performance at each purchase stage
The variations were ready for a good A/B test
To discover which versions would convert prospects best

Landing pages were added to match ads even more
Leveraging the secret to a great quality score
“Now Facebook, now Twitter,” the marketer cried
Enabling site links to be spread far and wide

Respondents were segmented with a choice and a click
Receiving the right content and offers right quick
Behaviors were noted so the whole team could learn
How to do even better when respondents returned

And as the traffic arrived, through the funnel it went
From pre-click to post-click to money well spent
How the dashboard twinkled as the conversion rate soared
And the marketer knew there’d be joy on the Board

As the conversion rate multiplied, the marketer winked
“Conversion optimization rocks, don’t you think?”
And you could hear her exclaim as she drove out of sight
“Happy click-throughs to all, and to all a good night!”

Ahem. But looking beyond the holidays, 2012 is going to be an exciting year in conversion optimization.

“Customer Experience” Will Be Big 2012 Focus

It’s safe to say that 2011 was the year when landing pages achieved ubiquity. Almost every marketer I’ve talked with this year employs at least a few landing pages in their digital universe — and many have deployed them at scale.

But not all landing pages are equal. With Google Instant Preview, released earlier this year, landing pages now have more visibility than ever in the search experience.

We’re becoming ever more cognizant of a widening “landing divide” — really awful pages that look like they were made in 1996 on one extreme, truly amazing ones that are almost app-like on the other, and enormous variability of user experiences in the middle.

Landing page optimization in 2012 will be focused on moving up this curve. It will go beyond testing message-matched landing pages for different campaigns and keyword buckets. (Although for late adopters, that’s still a good place to start!)

Instead, it will be much more about improving the experience respondents have on those pages, and the paths they then follow deeper into the funnel.

Increasingly, the phrase “customer experience” is becoming the rallying cry of CMOs in all industries, who are recognizing that in the age of the zero moment of truth (ZMOT), customer experience is the new marketing. And that customer experience starts with the very first contact onward — and landing pages are the quintessential first contact.

Mobile Landing Pages Will Be Fruitful & Multiply In 2012

One area that I expect will be particularly hot for experience optimization in 2012 is mobile landing pages.

The continued explosion of smartphone usage will lead to more mobile marketing, which will lead to more mobile click-throughs, which will lead to more mobile landing pages. Sure, most webpages (Flash excluded) render on mobile browsers. But that doesn’t mean they’re usable at palm-sized scale, where users are literally all thumbs.

Efforts such as Google’s GoMo site are bringing much needed attention to this mission. Stats quoted on their site include: by 2013, more people will use their mobile phones than PCs to get online; mobile searches have grown by 4X since 2010; and there will be one mobile device for every person on earth by 2015.

Google also quotes a study from Compuware about the impact on customers: 57% would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site; 40% have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience; and 23% of adults have cursed at their phone when a site doesn’t work.

In other words, good mobile experiences are becoming an expectation, not just a nice-to-have.

While the stakes will be higher than ever for mobile experiences in 2012, the good news is that there are also more tools than ever to help marketers create compelling — dare I say seductive — mobile landing pages.

For instance, the popular Javascript library jQuery now has an impressive-looking jQuery Mobile release. It supports touch-optimized layouts and app-like UI widgets (toggles, sliders, tabs) with a cross-platform implementation that works on iPhones, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile.

By the way, another motivating force for better mobile landing experiences appears to be the steady rise of QR code usage. Melissa Parrish of Forrester Research has a great post on what marketers need to know about these 2D bar codes.

While there are certainly skeptics out there, I believe that the mobile explosion will drive demand to bridge real-world experiences and digital experiences with greater ease and frequency. Other solutions may appear — such as near field communication (NFC) — but QR codes seem the most accessible in the short-term.

He bluntly told the audience that ad agencies are on the verge of destruction. The old model of buying mass media to sell mass market products is anachronistic in a world where the media “channels” that customers spread themselves across continue to multiply, with those channels serving ever more specific niches. And the products and services being offered are increasingly diversified, customized and tailored to fit.

Seth’s new book, “We Are All Weird: The Myth Of Mass And The End Of Compliance,” presents this as the flattening of the bell curve of what’s considered “normal.”

People’s interests — and the ability to fulfill them — are spreading out, instead of being clumped in the middle.

Things that we now consider to be cool and remarkable are out in the edges; but on different edges for different niches. This phenomenon is exactly what Chris Anderson revealed with The Long Tail; but now, more and more industries and markets are subject to Long Tail dynamics.

“Weird” is good.

In one place in the book, Seth notes that the non-advertising parts of Omnicom — the second-largest ad agency holding company in the world — have grown from 11% of the company’s revenue to nearly 60% over the past 15 years. “That’s right,” he emphasizes, “more than half the revenue at the second-largest ad agency in the world comes from activities that aren’t mass advertising. Game over.”

How Does Being Weird Affect Search & Conversions?

For search marketers and conversion optimization professionals, this is wonderful — and manifestly true in our day-to-day work.

The best way to optimize CPC? Target more specific keywords with more specific ads. The best way to increase conversion rates and optimize CPA? Pair those specific ads with message-matched landing pages.

Our stock and trade is in exploring those edges beyond the middle.

My takeaway from Seth’s new “weird” theme is that we should push our work on those edges even further. Reflecting back on last month’s column, The Art of Seductive Landing Pages, that’s part of what makes them work.

A respondent who lands on one of those pages immediately experiences something different than the generic middle of mass marketing (or their landing page equivalent).

Getting Out Of The IT-Marketing Gap

At first, this might seem like a non-sequitur, but stick with me.

As I wrote in a column a couple of months ago, conversion optimization software — the tools of our trade — are only a slice of an exploding new field of marketing software. I happen to think that conversion optimization professionals are some of the most proficient at understanding how these kinds of tools work across many different facets of the new marketing. But admittedly, I’m biased.

I am continually amazed by what software now enables marketers to do. But the frustration that arises with it — and we see this all the time with website testing software, landing page management software, SEO tools, PPC bid management software and the rest — is that in many companies, it falls into the IT-marketing gap.

You’ve no doubt seen that gap, and probably experienced it firsthand. It occurs when IT is responsible for selecting and operating software, or at least parts of it, but marketing is responsible for getting results out of that software.

Even with the best intentions, that tends to cause things to take more time and effort than they should. Cross-departmental communications and collaboration are important, but they can be costly.

Tying back to Seth’s advantage of being “weird,” this overhead of execution tends to dampen experimentation and the velocity by which marketers are able to generate new and different experiences.

Econsultancy published a recent quarterly briefing where they reported that 68% of marketers consider conversion optimization to be “resource intensive” — and that only 26% are actively using it. It’s too much work to align the marketing and the technology.

How do we fix that?

Reorganizing Marketing To Be Weird, Faster

A new report from Forrester Research, Investing In Marketing’s Technology Future, proposes a major organizational shift to address this. If you work in the marketing department of a company of any significant size, this may be the most important marketing management report you’ll read this year. Seriously.

Forrester recommends creating a “marketing technology office” — enterprise-speak for a team — of technologists who work in the marketing department. This team lives fully in marketing and reports to the CMO (or a VP of customer intelligence) and takes responsibility for selecting and operating the burgeoning portfolio of marketing software.

The report states: “For marketing to build a technology strategy, implement and develop those technologies, and better integrate and act on the customer data it captures, marketing resources must be organized within a central framework that can act at the speed that marketing requires.”

It looks like this:

Note that this marketing technology office still has dotted line responsibility to the CIO. It has to adhere to good IT governance — this is not “shadow IT,” but an official part of a distributed technology strategy.

There is no longer an IT-marketing gap, because everything is now holistically contained within marketing.

Which lets us be “weird” faster.

P.S. If you’d like to read more on this topic, I’ve posted slides and a 4,000-word essay on agencies and the marketing technology revolution that I presented last week at the same event with Seth.

Diagram courtesy of Forrester Research Inc., from the Oct. 24, 2011, report “Investing In Marketing’s Technology Future” by Robert Brosnan, Suresh Vittal and Michelle Dickson.

Yes, seduced.

Being seduced is an exhilarating experience. (If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it.) Yes, we want to be educated and make rational decisions that optimize our goals. But we also yearn to be romanced, enchanted, in love. We seek brains and beauty. Is that an unrealistic paradox?

It doesn’t have to be.

First, recognize that seduction is not synonymous with deception. Being seduced is fun. Being deceived is not. It’s unfortunate that shady advertisers have conflated the two. But the world’s best brands pursue “honest seduction,” touching us emotionally as a way to begin a genuine, mutually rewarding relationship.

For instance, Apple seduces consumers, and their customers love them for it. There’s plenty of educational content to be found deep in Apple’s website, but their home page, their retail stores, their emails, their advertising — all weigh heavy on the visceral, more than on the cerebral. Their seductive charm has helped make them the most valuable company in the world.

So while I fully recommend incorporating the best principles of content marketing in your conversion optimization — educating, informing, and leading thoughts — I implore you to communicate more than that. Impart the spirit of your organization, your brand, speaking to the heart as well as the mind.

Here are two suggestions to make your landing pages more seductive.

Wear A Sexy Page Design

The Web is a visual medium. Although factors such as search engine readable text and page load time are important, they should not override the primary objective of delivering an amazing customer experience.

To be sure, an amazing customer experience should load quickly, and it should contain meaningful, relevant copy. But it should also impress in ways that are worth a little extra load time and a little more interface love beyond plain text.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s look at an example (click to enlarge):

The above page, from a landing page/microsite offered by the Centre for Arts and Technology school (disclosure: one of my company’s customers), is rich with relevant search engine text.

The page and its assets are a mere 244 KB (in actuality, closer to 143 KB when using common cacheable resources) and a decent Internet connection loads the whole thing in ~443 ms.

Nice. But a normal person (not us conversion science wonks) wouldn’t consciously notice any of that.

The target audience for this landing page is someone who is passionate about fashion design and considering a degree and a career in it. They want to find a program that will inspire them; that requires not just words, but the holistic integration of content and design.

The seductive soul of this page is the background image that underlies the main content area, translucently visible behind the copy and the form. But not distractingly so; it emerges to the foreground in the space between the two sections.

The flow of the blue/green lines and the line of sight of the model lead the respondent from the headline to the call-to-action, providing cohesion and unity. The imagery here isn’t decoration, sprinkled on after the fact: it’s the heart of the message.

Yet the technical implementation of this page is relatively simple, using a couple of CSS tricks. It’s not much more work than the boring “hero shot” cliché that cookie-cutter landing pages are infamous for, but the difference in impact is substantial. Combined with efficient Javascript for overlays and custom fonts, this lightweight page packs a heavyweight punch.

Does it work? In a case study recently published with my company, the Centre stated that their “conversion rates increased from 4% to as much as 19% by moving from single hand-coded page experiences to content-rich microsites” such as this.

Okay, you might be thinking, such seduction is fine for high-end B2C, but is it appropriate for B2B?

Encourage A Little Playful Exploration

This next example of a seductive microsite is by Dell (disclosure: another customer of ours), targeted right at a B2B audience — traffic driven to it from display advertising on The Wall Street Journal.

Here is the landing page that leads into the microsite (click to enlarge):

Respondents are invited to explore seven different vertical B2B interests served by Dell. Marketers: think segmentation.

While it certainly wears a sexy page design, a dynamic and graphic-driven grid layout that visually communicates Dell’s innovation, this example also demonstrates the second suggestion for seduction: an invitation to explore.

Too often, content marketing is reduced to a flat page — a long, top-to-bottom article. That works if your audience is already committed to being educated on a topic, and in the mood to study. But to engage them earlier in the funnel, using a more interactive experience which encourages a little playful exploration, can be much more seductive.

On this Dell microsite, when you zoom in on a particular interest (for example, cloud computing) you are to taken to a topic page that has a number of features to draw visitors into interacting with it. I’ll describe several using this series of three screen shots (click to enlarge):

There’s a topic-specific headline and introductory text in the center left of each page (first screen shot), and then three subtopics along the bottom.

When you hover or click on those subtopics, more detailed information slides up (second screen shot), including a deep link to richer educational content on that subject elsewhere in the Dell ecosystem.

Clicking “What people are saying” in the lower left zoom up a similar layer (third screen shot) with links to articles, webinars, and other social proof content.

There are three keys to making this work:

• First, the discovery process needs to be effortless — the sliding and zooming springs from content already loaded in the page, so it happens smoothly and responsively.

• Second, the things that are being discovered need to be optional choices. You don’t want the user to jump through hoops to read linear content or to complete a series of required steps. On the contrary, these discover-able nuggets need to save the user from sorting through material that isn’t interesting to them. For instance, if I don’t care about consulting services, I never zoom in on that subtopic.

• Third, the discovery needs to pay off. The content that is presented via these zoom-able interactions needs to be meaningful. The novelty of the interface must serve the content, not the other way around.

Now, you may be wondering, this is cool and all, but how practical is it to implement this on a regular landing page budget?

To be sure, this microsite clearly took some work to pull together — the content as much as anything. But technically, it’s pretty straightforward. With advances in CSS, HTML5, and the amazing features in the jQuery and jQueryUI Javascript libraries, these kind of exploratory interfaces are within reach for even modest landing page projects.

And to assuage search engine concerns with this approach: (a) much of this Javascript wizardry can be cached using the Google Libraries API content delivery network, thereby minimizing page load time; and (b) all of the copy can still be plain text, to make relevance easy for a robot to detect.

You can promote great content, meet core search engine requirements, and be a little seductive at the same time — they’re not mutually exclusive.

There’s more than one approach to scaling conversion optimization in this environment, and they’re not mutually exclusive. We’ll examine three.

The Explosion Of Digital Touchpoints

The primary reason for this explosion of touchpoints is the continued migration of advertising dollars into online channels. eMarketer predicts that online ad spending worldwide will grow from 16.1% of total media budgets to 21.9% in 2015.

Given that worldwide advertising spend is expected to be $600 billion in 2015, we’re talking about tens of millions of additional dollars that will be invested online.

Driven by this influx of advertising dollars is an ever-expanding array of places to advertise. If we just limit ourselves to paid media, there’s the growing long-tail of AdWords search buys, an increasingly similar market for targeted display advertising, the rapid growth in Facebook PPC ads, the growing new space of mobile advertising, and so on.

In many cases, this isn’t just more real estate in which to run the same ads. Rather, it opens the door for a wider variety of ads that are tailored to their respective media and the contexts in which users see them.

These more targeted, context-specific ads then naturally have the opportunity to drive traffic to more targeted, context-specific landing pages. (Or, more broadly, post-click marketing experiences of many flavors.)

Testing Multi-Purpose Post-Click Experiences

One approach to dealing with this scale is to make sure your multi-purpose pages are well-optimized, given the variety of traffic that is sent to them.

This is the Google Website Optimizer approach. If you have a home page, or a small number of destination pages, you can run A/B and multivariate tests to find the most effect presentation on average for all users.

The upside of this approach is that you only have to invest optimization effort in a handful of pages. The downside is that you are trying to find the best “one size fits all” experience, and depending on how diverse your audience and traffic sources are, that may be a low common denominator.

For some types of experiences, such as shopping carts and e-commerce check-out processes — this works great. For other, more campaign-oriented or context-specific post-click experiences, this approach tends to hit a wall; it’s hard to serve different constituencies well with the same content and presentation.

There are some advanced technologies out there for optimizing different content on these multi-purposes pages for different audience segments.

In my opinion, however, that can be difficult for marketers to visualize at the campaign level. You no longer really have a shared experience that you can look at, understand, and propose tests and changes to. Instead, it’s more of a shell in which many different content combinations exist simultaneously in parallel universes.

There are powerful opportunities for that kind of personalization, which we’ll cover in a moment, but using it to drive the entire experience seems cool in theory, difficult in practice.

Optimizing Dedicated Landing Pages

A second approach is the “landing page optimization” school of conversion optimization. The essence of this approach is to create specific landing pages (or microsites or conversion paths) for different advertising campaigns and audience segments. You can then test and optimize each specific page, independent of the rest, for its particular audience.

This is probably the best understood approach — you can do a Google search to find hundreds of great articles on targeted marketing with landing pages. The challenge, however, is scaling up. What’s the cost efficiency for each additional landing page you create? How many different pages in total can you manage?

Luckily, those sort of operational challenges can be addressed with software tools that reduce the cost and time for producing new pages, as well as provide an organizational structure for managing a large collection of pages in total.

For instance, many marketing automation systems, such as Aprimo, Eloqua, Hubspot and Marketo, now include landing page features. Other vendors, such as Unbounce and ion interactive (disclosure: my own company), offer dedicated software solutions for this kind of post-click marketing.

However, even though these products streamline production and management of landing pages, marketers must still take responsibility for building out different pages for the different campaigns driving traffic.

This is both a feature and a challenge. It’s a feature because you can guarantee “message match” between the ads that inspire users to click and the experiences they receive after the click — you’re able to perfectly fulfill respondent expectations. It’s a challenge, because it doesn’t happen auto-magically; someone still needs to be guiding the creation of these experiences.

I liken this kind of rapid production post-click marketing to a blend of content marketing and conversion optimization.

Targeting Serendipitous Content & Offers

Finally, there’s a third approach that I touched on earlier — the use of personalization and algorithmic targeting software to dynamically populate specific offers or content elements to different respondents on a page. Although I expressed skepticism for using these technologies to generate the entire page, I think they can be very effective in populating certain pieces of the page.

The way I look at it, there are two types of relevancy in post-click marketing. The first is expected relevancy — when someone responds to a specific ad in a particular context, they expect the webpage that they arrive at to fulfill the promises implied or stated by that ad.

You can test different variations of presenting that expected content, but in all cases the content has to flow naturally and stay on message. In my opinion, that’s hard to do with a black box.

However, there is also room for serendipitous relevancy — where in addition to the main, expected message of a page, ancillary offers and content teasers can be presented around the primary content.

These secondary calls-to-action, cross-sell or upsell blocks, often placed in a sidebar, can afford to take guesses about what the user might like. If they’re wrong, there’s minimal penalty to the brand because the user wasn’t expecting serendipity.

However, if they happen to nail it — something that delightfully surprises the user (“I wasn’t expecting that!”) — it can drive significant lift to your conversion rate.

This kind of conversion optimization is prevalent in e-commerce, where store pages are often “fixed” and their primary content is deterministic, but there’s plenty of opportunity to dangle tantalizing hooks elsewhere on the page. Recommendations on Amazon are a classic example of this.

As I mentioned at the beginning, these different approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. You can employ one, two, or all three together. With more traffic headed your way, and a plethora of marketing technologies available for each of these approaches, your conversion optimization programs have a bright future ahead.

With that in mind, I’d like to share with you two “big picture” stories about the evolution of marketing that reveal just how valuable a conversion optimization worldview has become.

The Marketing Technology Landscape

First, there’s the marketing technology infographic that I published on my blog last week, an attempt to capture the enormous breadth of software applications being leveraged in the marketing department today:

It contains 41 categories of marketing technologies with over 250 representative companies and products. I grouped these into three meta-categories — the orange, blue, and green boxes that represent external promotion, customer experience, and internal marketing management respectively.

Conversion optimization professionals have two boxes of their own right in the center, Landing Pages & Microsites and Web Testing & Optimization. The former is focused primarily on content creation and deployment, while the latter is more about MVT and A/B testing.

Disclosure: I included my company, ion interactive, in both of these categories. I strived to provide a fair sampling of our competitors — some of whom are in other categories, such as Adobe in Integrated Suites — but this chart is admittedly far from exhaustive.

Of course, if you’ve been working on conversion optimization, you’ve almost certainly been deeply involved in many of these other categories: the core website, e-commerce, web analytics, SEO tools, creative tools, customer analytics, call tracking. And that’s a big plus.

Conversion-oriented marketers are particularly adept at seeing up and down the funnel — roughly left to right in this graphic — from ad management and social media marketing through to marketing automation, email marketing and your CRM. After all, conversion optimization is often a mission to provide continuity, connecting the dots along a series of touchpoints that our audience has with us.

It’s this multi-disciplinary, cross-category experience that makes conversion optimization folks typically comfortable working across the gamut of all these marketing technologies. It’s a pragmatic intersection of creative vision and technical implementation.

That positions conversion-oriented marketers who are likely to have had measurable success working within this ecosystem, for greater leadership in the evolving marketing organization.

The Zero Moment Of Truth

The other “big picture” story is presented in Jim Lecinski’s book, ZMOT: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth. Published by Google and distributed for free, it passionately describes the new reality of marketing where consumers are always connected, both to each other and to huge repositories of information on potential purchases.

Procter & Gamble’s former CEO A.G. Lafley popularized the First Moment of Truth (FMOT), when a consumer looks at a shelf of products in the store and decides which brand to buy, and the Second Moment of Truth (SMOT), when that consumer actually uses the brand at home and decides if they like it or not.

Google makes that point that there is now a new Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), where consumers explore and examine products and providers online — leveraging search and social media channels — to identify what’s most interesting to them before they ever go to the store. And this new ZMOT applies equally to B2B and considered purchases as it does to the consumer packaged goods where the FMOT was born.

Every touchpoint that a prospect has with you online contributes to their ZMOT decision.

An obvious example is when someone searches on a keyword, chooses to click your ad, and views your landing page. Their impression of you from that experience will impact their choices moving forward.

Conversion optimization is therefore critical in winning the ZMOT. Thinking of it this way frames the mission more broadly too — it’s not just about converting a visitor with one specific action in one particular context, but ultimately persuading them across a bevy of touchpoints for the duration of their ZMOT deliberation. It’s customer experience management writ large, from the earliest moments of contact onward.

In fact, when you step back and view the ZMOT as emerging from the sum of all these digital interactions around your brand, you realize that the marketing technology landscape we discussed at the start is what enables and empowers your ZMOT strategy and tactics.

From both perspectives, conversion-oriented marketers are poised to take the lead.