Seven years ago, my company launched its first prototype of a landing page management platform. At the time, landing pages were extremely nascent, only used by a handful of pioneering digital marketers. So many times I had to answer the question, “What’s a landing page?”

Now, they’re nearly ubiquitous. The disciplines of conversion rate optimization and post-click marketing have matured into a rich subfield within digital marketing. It’s been inspiring to see how much what-happens-after-the-click has improved in this time.

So, on this occasion of my seventh anniversary of “converting” to this line of work, I thought I would step back and share the seven biggest lessons that I’ve learned over the years.

7 Principles Of Landing Pages

For those of you who are regular readers of my column, many of these will be familiar — so forgive me for reiterating them here. But hopefully, you’ll find it useful to step back with me, rising above the tips and tricks and best practices, to reflect on the big themes that really make a difference in our work.

#1. People > Software

Yes, I say this as a proud software vendor. There are many wonderful tools out there — but brilliant post-click marketing is far more a function of the people wielding those tools.

I fully agree with Avinash Kaushik’s 90/10 Rule: you should invest 10% of your marketing budget into tools and 90% into people. This means offering great compensation to attract and retain talented people and supporting their growth with a budget for training and conferences.

Seek out people who are self-motivated, collaborative, imaginative, good-natured, curious, genuine, courageous and passionate about great marketing. Not only will they deliver impressive results — they’re also a joy to work with.

#2. Agile > Rigid

If you’re going to hire brilliant people to gain the benefit of their passion and imagination in pursuit of great marketing, why would you want to constrain them with unnecessary bureaucracy?

Slow, rigid marketing processes that emphasize top-down, command-and-control hierarchies are increasingly a competitive drag in the fast and fluid environment of digital marketing. That’s not to say that top-down vision and values aren’t important. They are. But, the front line in digital marketing needs much more freedom to practice their craft and provide bottom-up execution.

This is why I’m a huge advocate of agile marketing as a management methodology. It’s not a panacea, but I’ve consistently found that teams that are able to operate on an iterative and adaptive basis — in contrast to strictly following a more inflexible plan dictated from above — are tremendously more effective in digital marketing.

#3. Experimentation > Optimization

In my view, optimization is about tweaking existing pages to squeeze out greater performance or efficiency. For instance, landing page optimization can involve things like trying different headlines and button colors. Does a green button or a blue button achieve a higher conversion rate?

That’s fine, but it’s rarely a game changer.

The big wins are achieved through experimentation — trying brand new ideas. Experimentation can involve things like making a new offer, targeting a new or more specific audience segment, or substantially reframing your value proposition.

In digital marketing, it’s technically easy and cheap to run experiments. The challenge, however, is that many marketing organizations have a legacy of risk aversion — trying experiments that may fail is scary.

It shouldn’t be. The way to master marketing experimentation is to try bold ideas on a small scale, quickly eliminate those that don’t work, and then scale up the ones that do. It’s a more enlightened approach to risk mitigation that doesn’t filter out the opportunity for real innovation.

This is why I believe the future of marketing is “big testing” — far more than big data.

#4. Specific > Vague

Almost the entire premise of landing pages rests on a single, simple truth: respondents prefer a more specific post-click experience that is more relevant to their search than a more generic experience that is less relevant.

If I do a particular search on Google, and you serve me an ad that speaks to that query, then I expect that you will follow through with relevant content on that landing page. I’m counting on you to fulfill your promises, both implicit and explicit. If I have to connect the dots or hunt around for relevancy, you run a much higher risk of losing me.

This is why making sure your post-click experiences are relevant — in context — is the very first principle in the READY framework for conversion optimization.

My co-founder, Anna Talerico, identified this as “message match” — or message mismatch when there’s a fatal break in pre-click/post-click continuity — nearly 14 years ago. But it’s still very much an issue today.

It’s not rocket science, but better message match is probably the single greatest tactical improvement that you can make to most digital marketing programs. This dovetails perfectly with good content marketing.

#5. Ideal Experience >= One Page

When most people hear the term “landing page,” they naturally think of a single page.

I’ve come to believe that this is one of the biggest self-inflicted handicaps in digital marketing. We artificially constrain ourselves to the box of what fits in a single page when we should be thinking more of designing post-click experiences and flows.

With the right interface, multiple pages can be easier for visitors to fulfill their goals in a post-click engagement. And, frankly, multiple pages — little microsites or multi-step paths — are pretty easy for marketers to build, too. They’re just pages with links between them. The only real barrier is a conceptual one.

This is particularly true in mobile, where traditional webpages often don’t even make sense. People are looking for app-like experiences on their smartphones. A couple of quick taps and swipes can be far more productive than scrolling around a larger webpage.

It’s 2013 — it’s time to break free the cliché landing page.

#6. Beautiful > Sloppy Or Dull

Rand Fishkin made this simple point in his opening session at Interactivity Digital: “Beautiful websites are trusted. Ugly websites are not.”

But because landing pages emerged in the search marketing space, which revolved around keywords and text — anything that Google could algorithmically digest and interpret — design was rarely a priority in the landing page community. Some landing page experts outright vilified designers.

Thankfully, the rising user-experience movement has shifted the emphasis to the visitor’s perspective. Well-designed post-click experiences are empirically more compelling, and this makes them more effective both in their immediate impact on conversion rates and in their contribution to longer-term brand equity.

Good design does not have to come at the expense of high quality scores or index-ability either. You can create brilliantly seductive landing pages that also look attractive in the eyes of a search engine crawler.

#7. Big Picture > Myopia

This all leads to the final point: we must recognize that most conversion points are only one step in many along the buyer’s journey.

You can certainly employ a number of tactics to aggressively boost your conversion rate on a single page. You can eliminate escape hatches or alternative choices. You can over-promise what’s waiting for respondents on the other side of the conversion. You can use late-night television infomercial psychology to push people’s buttons.

These tricks will squeeze more conversions out of a page. But this is just a recipe for winning the battle and losing the war.

Ultimately, you want to win customers who will be happy and loyal and who will become advocates and influencers on your behalf. You achieve that by delivering — or over-delivering — on your promises after the conversion. You achieve that by not forcing people into a conversion until they’re ready. You achieve that by giving people who aren’t ready to convert some value for their click, such as options to engage with you in a less committed way.

You want to be a brand champion in conversion optimization.

These aren’t best practices — they’re more high-level than that. But, I believe these are the seven best principles of producing magnificent post-click marketing.

Across our profession, more and more people are talking about marketing science, scientific marketing, marketing as a science (in contrast to an “art”), and so on. In our digitized and data-deluged world of modern marketing, these phrases resonate. “Yes, marketing is more of a science today.” That just feels like a true statement, doesn’t it?

But what do we really mean by it?

What makes an approach to marketing scientific? In what ways does it differ from marketing as an art? And how far should we take this? Is science driving out the art of marketing completely? Or are they complementary worldviews?

After reading many articles on this subject and talking with numerous marketing practitioners, I’ve come to believe that “marketing as a science” can be distilled into four principles — with caveats.

1. Data-Driven Decision Making

Data is at the core of the marketing-as-a-science movement.

Colloquially, the “art” of marketing management in the past can be characterized primarily as decisions that were made from the gut (intuition) based on experience.

In contrast, marketing as a science favors data-driven decision making. When facing a marketing choice – Should we buy top-of-the-funnel keywords? Should we offer a discount in our ads? When is retargeting effective and when is it annoying? — the more scientific approach is to seek data to help answer these questions.

Because the digital environment gives us access to a prodigious amount of data, and because there is a plethora of marketing technologies that can help us analyze and leverage such data, this approach is increasingly practical across a wide range of marketing decisions.

It’s a huge step forward in marketing management and culture.

However, we have to be careful not to overreach, reading more into the data than is actually there. A Harvard Business Review blog post on The Hidden Biases in Big Data cautions managers to resist “data fundamentalism,” the belief that data has all the answers and that techniques such as predictive analytics always reflect the objective truth.

What you’re doing with data is also important, whether it’s mining data for forward-looking exploration or reviewing data for confirmation of past performance:

The real essence of data-driven decision making isn’t merely using data, though; it’s striving to use data objectively. And, that’s harder than you might think, thanks to a psychological quirk known as confirmation bias.

Therefore, ironically, this is one of the places where “art” still remains in marketing management. Are we using the right data? What other factors should we consider that aren’t in the data? How much weight should we give to the insight from certain data? Are we asking the right questions in the first place?

The more experience you have with data-driven decision making, the better you become at answering those questions.

2. Empirical Pattern Recognition & Model Building

The second principle of marketing as a science builds upon data-driven decision making, but aims to use data to organize customers and marketing activities in a much more quantitative — and automated — fashion than ever before.

Marketing science, to quote another 80′s song, has “orders to identify, to clarify and classify” customers, prospects, and influencers. This goes beyond traditional demographics and a handful of bulky customer segmentations. Instead, we drill down deeply into more specific personas and micro-segments with a granularity that has only recently become technically feasible.

Marketers as “scientists” are principal investigators into the phenomena of the marketplace and all the varied species of customers within it. This really emphasizes the exploratory side of data. Marketers are increasingly building models — mental models, data models, software models — the way that scientists would, seeking patterns and empirically validating them.

In addition to being able to target ever narrower customer segments with greater precision — asymptotically approaching a “segment of one” — these models, when embodied in data and software, enable things like marketing automation. Either explicitly or implicitly, we can use rules and heuristics to personalize messaging and experiences for individual customers.

The caveat, however, is that we must remember that the model is not reality. At best, it’s an approximation that can be very helpful to us and our target audiences. But, to paraphrase a famous survival guide, when the model and reality disagree, always listen to reality. Keep a vigilant watch for data that requires us to modify (or outright discard) a model and create a better one.

3. Controlled Experimentation: Hypothesize, Test, Refine

Of course, the real workhorse of a scientific approach to marketing is running good, controlled experiments:

1. Create a hypothesis.
2. Test the hypothesis.
3. Accept or reject (or refine) the hypothesis.

You can certainly run tests without a hypothesis. (For example, Google’s infamous 41 shades of blue experiment.) But having meaningful hypotheses generally helps to direct experiments toward useful business goals and helps build validated learning.

Great hypotheses can come from anywhere, but increasingly, they’re emerging from the analysis of big data. It’s the smart use of hypotheses that helps drive data-driven decision making and validates the kinds of models discussed above.

Marketing as a science also recognizes that the number of opportunities for controlled experiments is large, spanning almost every facet of modern marketing. Therefore, businesses that value a scientific approach to marketing will encourage broader experimentation throughout their organization à la massively parallel marketing.

4. Cross-Pollination Of Ideas From Other Scientific Disciplines

The fourth principal of marketing as a science is simply embracing ideas from other scientific disciplines that are relevant to marketing, such as psychology, biology, sociology, neuroscience, economics, computer science and so on.

Scientific marketers are usually interested in science more broadly. They’re curious and open to new learning. As they read about new findings, theories, and frameworks from other disciplines, they consider how they may be applicable to their own work and are eager to try such cross-pollination — which is another excellent source of hypotheses for marketing experimentation.

What does marketing as a science mean to you?

It’s More About Talent Than Technology

As far as I’m concerned, adopting agile marketing remains the single most valuable thing marketing teams can do to improve their conversion rates.

I can’t emphasize that enough. It beats “best practices” hands down. It’s more effective than any tool by any vendor. (And, I say that as a highly enthusiastic vendor in this space.)

Because, as Avinash Kaushik so famously said in his 10/90 rule for investing more in talent than technology, modern marketing success is more about your people than anything else. Agile marketing is designed to unleash their full potential.

An Introduction To Agile Marketing

I know, the label “agile” is attached to many things these days to make them sound sexy. You might be tempted to lump agile marketing into the same bucket of buzzwords such as real-time marketing and high-metabolism marketing, filtering it out as hyperbole.

Don’t.

Agile marketing isn’t just an aspiration. It’s a family of concrete management methodologies.

If you aren’t yet familiar with agile methodologies and how they can be applied in marketing, you might find the following slides, from a presentation I recently gave at the Marketing Operations Executive Summit, helpful. I’ve also written a 6,000-word accompanying essay that recreates my talk in full, Agile Marketing for a World of Constant Change:

If you’re reading — or clicking through slides — I’ll wait.

Okay, so you’ve got the basic idea of applying agile management in marketing: small, highly-collaborative teams, working in a series of rapid cycles of 1-4 weeks, adapting to feedback along the way, and emphasizing full transparency among all stakeholders to keep priorities up-to-date.

Agile Marketing Helps Organize Big Testing

In my last two columns, I described Big Testing — embracing marketing experimentation on a broad scale — and discussed how to structure such widespread testing with massively parallel marketing. That’s great at scale.

But, the real magic of testing happens where the rubber meets the road: the front-line marketers who are designing and implementing these marketing experiments.

In massively parallel marketing at larger enterprises, that real world implementation happens with teams on the leaves of that big branching org chart tree. However, many companies don’t need to parallelize marketing across dozens or hundreds of people. They may have eight or fewer people — a single agile team’s worth — in marketing in total.

But, in both scenarios, the quality of what is produced comes down to those people who are actually creating marketing experiences. In the context of paid search, that’s AdWords campaigns and their matching post-click experiences. But the principle certainly applies to marketing more broadly.

If they’re invested and passionate and inspired, then you’re going to reap far greater results than if they’re mechanically following dictates from above that are inevitably less connected to the opportunities on the ground.

You want everyone to adhere to the same vision — the same overarching strategy — but at the same time, you want to give them the creative freedom to bring their own ideas and imagination to bear in that mission. You want that — or you should want that — because that’s how you tap their talent to your advantage.

Agile marketing provides a way to balance these two forces — top-down strategy and bottom-up creativity.

“Customer stories” that represent concrete desires for specific customer personas along the buyer’s journey are brainstormed jointly by the team and their manager, who takes responsibility for keeping them aligned with the company’s top-down vision.

The manager exercises influence in the definition of those stories and the prioritization of which stories will be tackled for a particular sprint. But, the team is invested in the co-creation of those stories and makes the commitment for implementing the top-priority stories in that sprint.

Not All Marketing Experiments Are Created Equal

One of the advantages of agile is that it minimizes supervisory overhead while increasing managerial visibility. Because there’s full transparency about the customer stories and tasks that have been prioritized for the current sprint — and their updated progress on a daily basis — there are fewer opportunities for unexpected “surprises” resulting from miscommunication.

This is helpful in Big Testing, because not all marketing experiments are created equal, especially when it comes to deciding how formal your test management process should be:

Some marketing experiments, such as testing different AdWords copy or variations of your landing pages that don’t fundamentally change your offer or the essence of your message, can be run with low formality. The scale of impact on the brand is low, and the likelihood of contention among multiple people testing in parallel is low.

That low formality quadrant in the above diagram is the sweet spot for massively parallel marketing.

However, other experiments — such as tests of significant new offers, especially around pricing — require more coordination, as they can have significant impact on your brand. These kinds of experiments may benefit from more formality, especially if they’re being run in high-contention environments such as your main website’s home page.

The agile marketing framework is flexible enough to handle this range of scenarios.

Customer stories that are going to involve tests that require greater formality can be flagged as such in the backlog or sprint planning process. An “awaiting approval” column may be added to the team’s task board, where such experiments can queue for more formal verification before being launched in-market.

Low formality experiments, on the other hand, can skip that stage of delivery.

Agile marketing teams may also consider an additional column on their task board: “awaiting validation.” When experiments are in-market, they can be queued here, pending their results. Particularly for experiments worthy of higher formality, this mechanism can be used to control the number of tests in progress at any one time to minimize interaction effects.

With its inherent malleability, agile marketing makes Big Testing practical for organizations of almost any size.

But one question came up several times in the comments: how do you enable many marketers in an organization to run experiments at the same time without interfering with each other?

Massively Parallel Marketing

The idea of empowering many marketers to engage in testing at the same time — not just a small subset — is a case of what I call massively parallel marketing.

Massively parallel marketing is derived from the idea of massively parallel computing in computer science. In parallel computing, you take a large computational job, break it into smaller pieces, and let dozens or hundreds of processors work on those pieces simultaneously. The results from those individual processors are then combined into the final answer.

This is in contrast to serial computing, where one processor works on the large job all by itself, piece by piece, until it’s complete. Parallel computing is dramatically faster because you don’t have to wait for one piece to be done before you move on to the next one; you can compute all the pieces at the same time.

Massively parallel marketing applies that model to marketing, where individual marketers are analogous to processors. Just as certain jobs in computing that lend themselves nicely to parallel processing, certain kinds of work in marketing can be effectively parallelized too.

There are two requirements for work to benefit from parallel marketing:

1. The work must be able to be partitioned in a logical way, so that each “piece” can be worked on at least somewhat independently of the other pieces
2. Each piece must benefit from having a human being working on it: creativity and judgment are valuable to the work being done

Social media marketing is a great example of massively parallel marketing. Many different marketers can split up the work of responding to individual customers or engaging with individual influencers. There’s certainly coordination between them, but not so much that it prevents them from working in parallel.

The challenge in parallelizing marketing experimentation boils down to one overriding concern: you don’t want to subject an individual prospect to multiple conflicting tests at the same time in a way that would lead them to believe your organization is suffering from schizophrenia. This is the age of converged media, after all.

A lesser concern, but still a valid one, is the risk of multiple simultaneous experiments confounding each other’s results in the way they influence the prospect’s action.

Essentially, this is a variation of the “attribution” problem that has plagued marketing analytics since the dawn of time. In practice, as long as you’re not engaging in schizophrenic experiments, this effect is rarely dominant.

Let’s set aside the attribution issue for now, but we’ll address the bigger concern of schizophrenia in the specific context of testing in paid search.

Partitioning Experiments In Search Marketing

Paid search marketing, especially at the top of the funnel, is particularly well-suited to parallel experimentation.

Many brands already partition paid search using campaigns and keyword groups. Often, these represent different sets of touchpoints that lend themselves to being independently optimized — albeit with a bit of light coordination.

As illustrated above, you could split up those campaigns across two different teams. Each team would experiment with the ads and post-click experiences in their partition, seeking to optimize target metrics such as CTR, CPC, CPA, lead quality, revenue, etc.

Many experiments can be conducted in this environment without devolving into schizophrenia in the eyes of the prospects because, by their very nature, each keyword group usually implies a different “conversation.” As long as you limit your tests to messaging, presentation, and offers that apply to that conversation but don’t violate an agreed upon common identity for your business, you can safely run experiments on different conversations in parallel.

For instance, at my company, which sells software for creating and testing post-click experiences, prospects might reach us for a variety of different conversation starters: landing pages, microsites, conversion optimization, A/B testing, demand generation, content marketing, etc.

With most kinds of tests, we can experiment with the ads and post-click experiences for each of those terms independently of each other. We can try very different ideas for how to engage a visitor responding to “conversion optimization,” without worrying about what they might see if they subsequently click through on a “microsites” ad.

The only caveat is that we don’t want either experiment to violate our common identity. In our case, our common identity includes brand standards, product names, product pricing, and an underlying brand vision that will be consistent further downstream in the sales funnel.

Common identity elements can be tested — but they’re more tricky and require considerably more coordination.

Coordinating Parallel Teams

Within any one team, it’s important to have a high degree of communication and collaboration, since tests within a partition are more likely to have interaction effects.

For instance, the post-click experiences for “landing pages” and “landing page software” may very well service the same visitor in the same search session. You want as much synergy between those experiences as possible.

I recommend using agile marketing management within each team, to keep communication high and priorities flexible with sprints and daily stand-ups. One person on each team serves as the lead.

But, what about coordination among the teams?

7 Ways To Coordinate Parallel Marketing

There are many great ways to coordinate across teams. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but here are seven devices for coordination that I believe are particularly helpful in massively parallel marketing efforts.

1.  Internal chat software such as HipChat. This works best when it supports multiple rooms for different topics, on-the-fly group discussions, and a persistent history — so one can always go back to conversations later. In the context of search marketing experimentation, you might have rooms focused on personas, current offers, content pieces, etc.

2.  Lead huddles where the leads of the different teams do a daily 15-minute stand-up among themselves to keep everyone appraised of what’s happening across the different partitions. This helps to quickly uncover mutual challenges and opportunities and coordinate a common response.

3. Centralized wikis where the latest information about the shared “common identity” of the brand can be found, everything from brand standards to image and content resource libraries. (True digital asset management software can be quite helpful at scale.) The latest offers and persona definitions are here for any team member to reference.

4. Shared specialists such as graphic designers or software developers. Any one team may not need a dedicated resource with these talents. But an important side benefit of these shared resources is that they can help to cross-pollinate ideas across teams.

5. Team exchange on a regular basis, where teams swap members. This not only helps to cross-pollinate ideas across teams, it also helps the collection of teams develop a more cohesive culture across the entire massively parallel marketing effort. Consider rotating 10-20% of teams each cycle.

6. Science fair get-togethers, maybe once per months, where the different teams show off their work from the previous cycle, explain some of their rationale, share insights that they uncovered in the process, and help teach others new skills and approaches that they learned.

7. Leaderboard tracking daily, or real-time performance, of the different teams. This is intended to provide a little extra motivation with friendly competition, but more importantly, help identify those teams that are having the most impact. This becomes a fast feedback mechanism for teams to learn from each other — who’s doing what that works best?

Of course, you don’t need all of this structure to engage in marketing experimentation. You can start with a team of one.

But, if the size of your business presents the opportunity to benefit from large-scale experimentation through massively parallel marketing, there are definitely ways to operationalize that.

In fact, three of IDC’s Top 10 predictions for CMOs in 2013 revolve around mastering this data explosion in marketing.

In many ways, this attention on big data is a breakthrough moment for marketing. Sure, data has always been present in certain corners of the marketing department — especially with you astute search marketers and conversion optimization pros. But marketing management and culture have thrived more generally around gut instincts, creative concepts, and compelling communications.

Marketing has been about big ideas. Big thinking. Big budgets.

But big data? That’s something new. What’s qualitatively different — and somewhat ironic — is that big data actually promises more visibility into ever smaller circles of customer segments, asymptotically approaching a fully personalized “segment of one.”

With the new tools that are emerging, marketers can crunch their petabytes of disparate data, pulled from owned, earned, and paid media, mingled with transaction histories, mixed with profiles from third-party exchanges, and combined with public and industry statistics to divine all kinds of interesting correlations.

The goal: uncover connections that appear to influence different subsets of your audience to take action more successfully.

The Big Hypothesis Generator

I choose the words “appear to influence” with care. Because correlation is not causation. The insights generated by big data are usually tentative at best — possible relationships, in the past, between our behaviors as marketers and the behaviors of our prospects and customers.

In other words, most of these insights are the seeds of hypotheses. There’s no guarantee that the correlations unearthed in big data can directly influence customer behavior.

There are many reasons for this. For one, while big data naturally implies a large amount data, it’s far from complete. There always remains a huge number of “confounding factors” out there in the world, not captured in our data, influencing customers in ways not represented in our closed big data models.

(In a way, this is good news for marketers: the CEO is unlikely to be able to replace you with a robot, at least, any time soon.)

But it does mean that we have work to do to harness the insights that big data nominates as possible opportunities. We should look to big data for inspiration — and combine it with our ability to distill those revelations into testable customer experiences.

That’s the powerhouse human-machine combination that lets us move from interesting correlations to actionable marketing.

Big Testing: Big Ideas, Big Team, Big Deal

However, to take advantage of this, marketing’s culture must shift towards testing.

For years, testing and optimization have been niche practices in the marketing department. A/B testing with a few direct mail pieces in the past. A/B testing with a few landing pages in the present. But, most marketing programs have been run on intuition.

But now, big data is opening the door to the executive suite for a more hybrid analytical-creative method. The questions big data raises — okay, how do we use this data to grow our business? — have an answer: broadly embrace testing and controlled experimentation as the new “operating system” of marketing.

The answer is big testing.

What exactly does “big testing” mean? Its bigness is a function of three things:

First, big testing is about experimenting with big ideas. This is best captured in an article by Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup: learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem). It actually points out that most landing page and website optimization programs, while useful in some ways, are not very helpful at learning how to build a better business.

“The right split-tests to run are ones that put big ideas to the test,” he writes. “For example, we could split-test what color to make the ‘Register Now’ button. But how much do we learn from that? Let’s say that customers prefer one color over another? Then what? Instead, how about a test where we completely change the value proposition on the landing page?”

Embracing big ideas in big testing is about fearlessly answering the question — Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bold Test? — with a resounding, “Not us!”

Second, big testing is about empowering many people in the marketing organization to do testing. It’s about giving them the training, the tools, and — most importantly — the mandate to test new ideas.

Historically, testing has been restricted to a small number of gatekeepers. But now that we have such a fragmented and fractured marketing landscape — and with big data helping us identify ever more granular opportunities within it — we need to tap more marketers on the team to run controlled experiments.

Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, has said that Google runs about 10,000 experiments each year. A large number of different people throughout the company are engaged in all kinds of different tests in parallel. It’s not the cult of a few; it’s the culture of the many.

Finally, big testing is about making a big deal about testing from the top down, fostering a culture of experimentation.

This last point will probably be the most challenging, as culture is not something that changes quickly. Executives need to make a conscious effort to encourage real testing — starting with the acknowledgement that good experiments prove or disprove hypotheses. Not every test will be a winner, but if the test was executed well, a negative result shouldn’t reflect poorly on the tester.

Marketing leaders need to make their teams feel good — not scared — about testing those big ideas.

Big data is like fuel. Big testing will be the engine that turns it into forward momentum.

1. Content marketing is huge
2. Content marketing desperately needs conversion optimization

The “huge” part you probably already suspected from the deluge of blog posts out there on the subject.

However, this report quantifies that scale, and it is impressive. Of the B2B marketers in North America who participated in this benchmark (N = 1,416), 91% of them now use content marketing; 54% of them plan to increase content marketing or significantly increase their spending on it over the next 12 months.

On average, 33% of the marketing budget will be spent on B2B content marketing.

That is huge. And at that scale, it’s clearly an executive-level priority. The CMO, himself or herself, is making a big bet on content marketing.

The Performance Side Of Content Marketing

What should be more interesting to the readers of this column, however, is what these marketers expect content marketing to deliver. The top three goals for content marketing in this benchmark were:

1. Brand awareness (79%)
2. Customer acquisition (74%)
3. Lead generation (71%)

Okay, brand awareness is obvious — it’s exactly the kind of thought leadership that is popularly associated with content marketing.

But most companies investing in content marketing are not satisfied with the amorphous benefits of brand building. After all, we live in an age where marketing is becoming performance-driven and accountable. They want to acquire customers and generate leads.

“Show me the money.” (Or at least the leads.)

In fact, these goals are being evaluated by concrete measurement criteria. Three of the top five metrics for content marketing include: sales lead quality, sales lead quantity and direct sales. (Web traffic and social media sharing are the other two.)

Phrased another way, these top goals are conversion rate, conversion quality, and revenue lift.

How Does Content Acquire A Customer Or A Lead?

Just to make sure we’re on the same page — a landing page, actually — how exactly does content acquire customers or generate leads in a measurable way?

First, we must recognize that the “content” deployed in content marketing is quite diverse. It’s not just blog posts. Content marketing employs a plethora of tactics such as webinars, white papers, research reports, infographics, in-person events, e-newsletters, videos, virtual conferences, podcasts, microsites, mobile apps, and more.

On average, content marketers use 12 different tactics. Many of these can be considered “premium content” that has more value in the eyes of prospects.

So, one way to generate leads is to trade content for contact information. For example, to gain access to a piece of premium content, the visitor fills out a short form with their contact information. This is classic permission marketing — the marketer is asking permission to share other relevant content with the respondent in the future.

This is what landing pages are typically used for, although you can certainly be more creative in the way you present such lead-for-content offers!

Another way is to connect a clear “next step” with the content. In this scenario, the visitor can freely consume the content right there at the moment of click through: watch a video, engage with an interactive app, or browse through a detailed microsite.

But, unlike a read-and-move-on blog post, there’s a compelling call-to-action that is directly associated with the content. It’s an invitation to subscribe, sign-up, get a free sample, take advantage of a special promotion, etc.

Active Content Marketing & Framing Core Content

We can call these kinds of content marketing delivery vehicles “active content marketing” because the content is presented in a way that actively moves prospects forward in the sales and marketing funnel.

This is in contrast to passive (“publish-and-pray”) content marketing tactics, like blog posts, where there isn’t a directly attached call-to-action.

With active content marketing, the marketer is concerned not only with the core piece of content, but also the “framing” of that core content.

Framing is everything in the Web or mobile experience that surrounds that core content, convincing people it’s worth filling out a form to access it or encouraging them to take the next step after they consume it. It connects the content to the buyer’s journey — without having to compromise the integrity of the core content itself, which usually resonates best when it’s not overtly salesy.

Clearly, framing can have a significant impact on the performance of active content marketing.

Of course, marketers should deploy different framing for different contexts — message match with the source from which the visitor clicked. This lets them reuse the same piece of core content, which is usually expensive to produce, to engage with a number of different audience segments.

And of course, marketers should test different ways of framing their content to see which generates the most leads and customers.

In other words, framing in active content marketing is really the practice of conversion optimization.

Active Content Marketing: A Call To Action

If you’re a content marketer, embracing the practice of conversion optimization may be one of the most productive investments you can make in the success of your programs in the year ahead.

If you’re a conversion optimization professional, I’d strongly encourage you to seek out and engage with senior marketers on the performance goals of their content marketing. By framing (no pun intended) your capabilities in the context of active content marketing, you can deliver enormous value to the biggest marketing mission of 2013.

After all, these active content marketing tactics are already proven — you’ve been doing this with amazing results for your respective organizations and clients for years.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to implement mobile landing pages:

• Use responsive design to have your pages adapt to the appropriate device.
• Implement native mobile pages that are explicitly designed for that purpose.

Using Responsive Web Design

With responsive Web design, you can create one version of your pages that should look good on smartphones, tablets, and desktops alike. Scenarios where your audience may arrive from any device, such as your company’s primary website, are well-suited to this approach.

However, responsive Web designs can be challenging to build well. In many cases, you still want to conceptually evaluate content at different breakpoints (for instance, the width of the screen for a smartphone vs. a desktop browser) to determine which content is hidden or de-emphasized at each point and how the remaining content flows. Implementing flexible images and progressive enhancement can also be technically challenging.

For conversion optimization aficionados who value testing as a way of life, another conundrum should be apparent: the preferences and behaviors of mobile users may be very different from their desktop counterparts. You’ll want the ability to independently measure those two segments.

Many people like the idea of responsive design because they believe they won’t have to manage separate content for mobile and desktop users.

However, if you find that the “A” version of a test wins on desktops, while the “B” version wins on mobile, you’ll want the ability to deploy the winners to their respective audiences. In which case, you end up managing two different versions of your pages anyway.

Scenarios For Native Mobile Landing Pages

The trade-offs for responsive design in conversion optimization are subtle and complex, and they deserve their own article. For now, let’s examine two scenarios where having native mobile landing pages — built specifically for smartphone form factors — makes sense.

The first scenario is mobile ads. If we know the click is happening on a mobile device, then we can make a number of important assumptions in the post-click experience of the landing page.

Mobile ads, particularly in search, have tremendous potential to intercept prospects at a key moment of intent. New research from Google reports that 57% of smartphone users who use the Internet in general do one or more searches on their phones every day. Google also claims that mobile search ads have 11.5% higher click-through rates (CTR) on average.

The advantages of mobile-specific ad campaigns include the ability to bid differently, define a separate mobile budget, test different keywords, and write mobile-specific ad text. But most importantly, they let you link directly to mobile-specific landing pages.

The second scenario is QR codes. If someone triggers a QR code, not only do we know they’re on a mobile device, we also may know something about their location or physical context. For example, QR codes used at conferences and trade shows can connect people to highly relevant content and offers.

Now, we could debate whether QR codes are the best form of bridging the link between the physical world and the digital one. Indeed, new technologies such as near field communications (NFC) may supersede QR codes. But we can agree that where QR codes — or their future replacements — are being used, we should fulfill the expectations of those respondents with an appropriate mobile experience.

To quote the UX Drinking Game, “If a QR code doesn’t lead to mobile-enabled content, drink.”

Advantages Of Native Mobile Landing Pages

In those scenarios where we know we have a mobile user based on the origin of their click, there are several advantages to crafting mobile-specific landing pages: form factor, speed, and context-specific content.

The form factor is the most obvious. By designing a page that is explicitly targeted for a mobile device, we can properly proportion and lay out the content with a small touch-screen in mind in a WYSIWYG fashion. That may be achieved by removing “optional” content on a page, but more often it’s better to tailor your content to the format, such as using shorter headlines and copy blocks.

By building pages explicitly for mobile devices, you can also design interaction mechanisms that best suit those use cases. Taps, vertical scrolling, click-to-call, and swipes are easy. Pinch and zoom, horizontal scrolling, and filling out forms are not.

For instance, you may find that content is best rolled up into accordions or tabs that let people tap for more detailed information on specific sub-topics, rather than having to scroll through a full page of prose. (See Wikipedia on your smartphone for a great example of this.)

The size of your pages — as in how much bandwidth they require and how long they take to load — is more subtle, but extremely important. Even on so-called 4G devices, mobile users are often slowed by factors such as poor signal strength or contention with other Internet traffic on their particular hotspot.

Even under these constraints, however, mobile users don’t have much patience for slow-loading pages. A recent study by Compuware reported that 74% of mobile users expect a page to load within 5 seconds or less.

Another advantage of designing mobile-specific pages is that you can optimize your content for such low-bandwidth conditions. You can use smaller images — and a small number of them. You can eliminate some of the heavier Javascript that doesn’t apply on mobile devices. I generally recommend keeping total page weights (all assets included) to less than 300K.

The biggest advantage of native mobile landing pages, however, is that their content is tailored to the context of those respondents. As mentioned above, mobile users have more resistance to filling out forms as a call-to-action than they do on a desktop. However, actions such as click-to-call, click to download a mobile app, or click to use geo-location for local maps and directions are relatively easy and often much more helpful to mobile visitors.

If you are going to use a form, consider a single field form that simply asks for an email address and emails the respondent more detailed information with a number of follow-up links. This facilitates sequential multi-screening use cases, which are on the rise.

In a recent study of Fortune 1000 marketers conducted by the Marketing Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board, only about 50% of the respondents agreed with that statement.

Think about that for a moment.

In an age when it’s never been easier, technically speaking, for marketers to test ad creatives and landing pages, what may be holding back half of them is a cultural resistance to trying something that may fail.

If you’ve got something that is kind of working, do you want to take risks to improve it?

In old-school marketing, where it was often difficult to run small, controlled tests, organizational resistance to taking a chance on change was more understandable. However, that difficulty no longer exists — at least not for any technical reason — in digital marketing. Yet, the hesitation to try something bold still lives on.

That’s a shame, because even if you go through the motions of running a test, you will rarely gain much if you’re unwilling to experiment with bold ideas. If you’re only willing to test, say, two different headlines that are nearly identical, you may squeeze out a little lift. But it’s unlikely that you’re going to achieve a significant bump with such timidity.

How To Be Bold And “Play It Safe”

You can embrace meaningful testing and do so safely.

First, you must recognize that not testing — or testing only minor rearrangements — is not actually safe for most businesses. We live in an age where the status quo is constantly under attack from disruptive innovation. A dominant position in digital marketing can be surprisingly fleeting.

The only way to stay ahead of your competition is to keep innovating. If you don’t figure out the next new way to impact your audience, someone else will. In marketing, this is best achieved through a program of continuous experimentation. Clay Christensen is a big advocate of such self-driven innovation.

Safety is not achieved by watering down your ideas, either. Organizations that develop the capability to brainstorm and pursue bold marketing ideas — and nurture that in their culture — will have a distinct advantage over such milquetoast marketers.

Instead, safety is achieved by limiting the scope of your initial tests of a bold new idea. There are three ways to do this.

The first is to focus on a source of traffic that is important but small — i.e., a highly specialized keyword campaign in Google. The number of respondents to ads in that keyword group are small enough that if the experiment doesn’t work, you’ve risked little. If it succeeds, you count your win and move on to the next one. This is the “long tail” strategy of experimentation.

The second is to try an entirely new campaign, where the source of traffic is arriving from some channel, vehicle, or context that is different from your existing marketing programs. In many cases, this has negligible risk — if the experiment doesn’t work, you simply shut it down. (Or start again with a new hypothesis.) If it succeeds, it’s additive business. This is the “frontier” strategy of experimentation.

The third — and most flexible — is to use weighted split testing. A/B tests don’t have to be implemented as a 50/50 split of your existing traffic. If you have a current “champion” as your status quo that is performing well — but you think has the potential to be improved nonetheless — you can run a “challenger” with an 80/20 split, or even a 90/10 split.

Granted, when you siphon a smaller percentage of your traffic to a challenger in an A/B split test, it may take longer to achieve statistical significance on the result. But if you have a lot of traffic — which popular existing programs often do — the calendar time required to achieve significance may still be quite short.

If the challenger doesn’t work, you’ve minimized its impact to a small fraction of your audience. If it does work, however, you can ratchet up its weighting and eventually crown it as the new champion. This is the “toe in the water” strategy of experimentation.

Effective Test-And-Learn Capability Is A Competitive Advantage

All of these strategies for experimentation can balance the risk-reward equation. The real trick is learning from the experiments that don’t work, not simply celebrating the ones that do and sweeping the rest under the rug.

The ability for a team to look at an experiment that didn’t work, and without blame or shame discuss the insight that can be derived from it is invaluable. Often, failed experiments inspire great hypotheses for new tests.

Without the cultural freedom to fail, and to milk insight out of the losses as well as the wins, an organization will not be effective at test-and-learn experiments. Not surprisingly, the Marketing Leadership Council’s research included a question that identified just that weakness:

Only one-quarter of the respondents felt their teams were effective or very effective at test-and-learn experiments. (Although I don’t have the correlation with those who responded to the other question — whether or not they accepted that some experiments must fail — I have a pretty good hypothesis that the yellow-highlighted segments overlap.)

Who are the companies that are very effective at test-and-learn? Google is one. In Jim Manzi’s fascinating book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, he reported that:

Google ran approximately 12,000 experiments in 2009. Only about 10% of those experiments successfully resulted in changes to Google’s business. But that’s nearly 1,200 demonstrable improvements in a single year. That’s pretty impressive.

It’s not easy to shift culture in an organization. But test-and-learn capabilities, an important part of the broader movement toward agile marketing, will increasingly be a source of competitive advantage.

It won’t be too much longer before it’s more embarrassing to not be doing continuous marketing experiments than it ever was to do an experiment that didn’t win.

The first time I met Brian was at a Pubcon session on landing pages, where he had donned a white lab coat, was engaging the audience — a hall packed with several hundred attendees — in impromptu experiments in conversion, and was whizzing balls and t-shirts at people. I don’t remember if he was throwing them for right answers, wrong answers, or both. But it was a cross between a raucous Saturday Night Live skit and an erudite TED talk.

It was brilliant.

His columns here on Search Engine Land exude that same energy and insight. Some of my favorite include Landing Page Battles of the Flat-Foreheaded, 7 Things To Teach Your Children About Conversion, and 5 Ways Conversion Takes Market Share Like Candy From a Baby.

This guy never fails to make me laugh and, more importantly, make me think about my work in a fresh light.

So I was delighted to hear that he’s just had a book published, Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist, that captures his inimitable perspective on modern marketing.

Since modesty and the wise no-self-promotion rules of blogging on Search Engine Land preclude him from writing about the book in his column, I hope you’ll indulge me the chance to share a review of it with you here.

In full disclosure, I have no business ties with Brian, but he did send me a free copy, and I’m admittedly biased as a fan.

The Best Way To Start Thinking About Web Marketing

If you’re relatively new to Web marketing — really committing to making the Web a primary channel for your business — this book is a great place to begin. It starts at a high level and takes a holistic view of websites, landing pages, shopping carts, email, and social media under the umbrella of one driving question: what works best to grow your business online?

What’s unique, however, is that it frames the entire marketing mission in the context of the scientific method. In Brian’s narrative, conversion optimization isn’t a tactic. Rather, it’s an overarching mindset that spans all of these different vehicles, a continual process of testing and learning.

He is quick to illustrate examples that show the scientific method isn’t inapproachable to nonscientists, and in fact, is ideally suited to digital marketing.

To appreciate how central this is to the book, Chapter 2 is titled Your Digital Conversion Laboratory. “Think of it as your Bat Cave,” Brian writes. “Or your presidential situation room. In other words, it’s high-tech and cool. But that doesn’t mean it has to be difficult to build.”

“Do not underestimate the power you have to monitor and control a digital world that is, in many ways, as real as the one you are walking around in.”

I believe this is still the single biggest mental and cultural shift that needs to happen in marketing. The digital medium and a plethora of testing and analytics software has enabled companies to systematically grow through experimentation and iteration. These capabilities are a big part of what’s driving the agile marketing movement.

But it’s a very different worldview than traditional marketing, and a lot of marketers and business people still need help wrapping their heads around it.

What Experienced Conversion Pros Get Out Of This

If you’re already experienced with conversion optimization, this is obviously preaching to the choir. There are certainly parts of Brian’s book that you will find elementary — such as a patient (but good!) explanation of conversion rate.

However, I think you’ll still find this a valuable read.

A big part of our jobs as conversion optimization professionals is to explain to others what we do and why they should buy into it. Conversion pro Chris Goward of WiderFunnel recently said on a conference panel — with some surprise in his voice — how undervalued conversion optimization still is for all the measurable benefits it provides.

Brian’s book helps make the case for conversion optimization marvelously, with lots of colorful examples and analogies. He writes in language that is plain and easy to understand, while at the same time evoking vivid and humorous imagery that really drives his points home.

For instance, the metaphor he uses at the beginning of Chapter 8, Landing Pages Put Money in Your Back Pocket, humorously addresses the perennial question of why use landing pages in addition to your standard website.

You will want to reuse his explanations to help others see the light. I know I will.

While the book assumes the reader is a beginner, it doesn’t dumb down the material either. Brian describes many of the nuances in this discipline. For example, early on, he shows that the simplified conversion funnel that is ubiquitous in such discussions is actually quite chaotic in real life.

Building A Landing Page In Reverse

The chapter on landing pages is, naturally, my favorite. What I really love about it, however, is an innovative approach that Brian takes to constructing a landing page from the ground up.

He starts with the call-to-action — a button on a page.

Next, he backs up and works on the headline to “fulfill the promise” of the ad, email link, or social media post that enticed the prospect to click through to this page.

There’s refreshing clarity in looking at a page with just the call-to-action and the headline. He then uses this to backfill the supporting content, product imagery and additional points to sell the offer and overcome resistance with badges of honor, statistical proof, and social proof.

He finishes by tweaking the visual hierarchy to make the balance and flow between all these elements cohesive.

For someone who is used to taking a more top-down approach to landing page creation, I found this bottom-up approach novel. In creative endeavors, anything you can do to get a fresh perspective on your work is a gift. This heuristic acutely focuses your attention on the connection between the original promise and the call-to-action — the backbone of landing pages, which unfortunately, so few get right.

There are many more great nuggets of inspiration and insight in this book, but I hope this gives you enough of a flavor to give it a peek.

Want to improve your conversion rate on search campaigns? Direct your clickthroughs to targeted, contextually relevant landing pages. Works like a charm.

But there are two reasons to step back and look at the bigger picture.

First, the term landing page still gets interpreted literally as a single page. That cripples their creative potential. In some cases a single page is best, but in other cases, the respondent is better served with a richer “landing experience.” It might be a microsite, a conversion path, a Web app, or something entirely different.

There’s so much opportunity to tap more imagination.

Second, most discussions around landing pages remain very tactical in nature: tips, tricks, and best practices for improving conversions on individual pages. That’s certainly valuable, but it doesn’t address a more fundamental transformation that’s underway. Landing pages are on the cutting edge of — and actively shaping — a new kind of marketing that’s performance-oriented, test-driven, and agile.

But how do we characterize that bigger picture?

The Convergence Of Three Kinds Of Media

A new report from Marketing Land contributor and Altimeter Group analyst Rebecca Lieb and Jeremiah Owyang (also of Altimeter), The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Must Combine Paid, Owned, and Earned Media, offers a compelling way of looking at it.

In their view, there are three kinds of media in modern marketing:

• Paid Media is primarily advertising — PPC in search and social, display ads, TV spots, etc.
• Earned Media includes what others say about your company in reviews and social media channels, as well as things like organic search rankings
• Owned Media is all digital content that you own or wholly control, such as your website, your blog, your Facebook page, mobile apps — as well as microsites and landing pages

Paid media and earned media are the vehicles by which people become aware of your brand. In particular, paid media continues to play a crucial role in explicitly targeting audiences under the ideal circumstances for them to discover your brand. (I like to think of great advertising as scripted serendipity.) Paid search has proven especially effective at capturing buyer intent.

Owned media is where clicks from paid and earned media are driven. It carries responsibility for converting that intrigued brand awareness into compelling brand experiences that win customers. In turn, great brand experiences generate positive earned media.

While these concepts have been around for a while, Lieb and Owyang believe that the next wave of digital marketing innovation will be breaking down silos and managing these different kinds of media in a much more coordinated fashion.

They call this Converged Media.

The Powerful Intersection Of Paid Media & Owned Media

To me, this is the bigger picture in which to frame landing pages. They’re a subset of owned media that is deeply integrated with paid media, tying together before-the-click brand awareness with after-the-click brand experiences.

Framing it this way addresses both of my concerns with landing page nomenclature. Overall, owned media doesn’t have as many preconceived creative limitations. And while specific landing experiences are tactical, an organization’s capability to produce and manage converged media at speed and scale is much more strategic.

Rachel Lawlan, AKQA’s Director of Strategy, describes this convergence as a shift from producing stocks to operating flows. “Stock is advertising, websites, tangible things. Where we’re going to now is understanding flow — second-by-second, minute-by-minute monitoring, responding, making sure you’re there.”

In the context of search and conversion, this means that landing pages and optimization programs aren’t separate, one-off projects. Instead, they become integrated into a more fluid “marketing operating system” that is continuously adapting itself to real-time opportunities and feedback.

You may have specialized conversion optimization resources, but they’re plugged into an ongoing cycle of iterations with their counterparts in other specialties.

Agile Marketing Makes Converged Media Possible

This is why the agile marketing movement is gaining such momentum. If converged media is the “what,” agile management methodologies are the “how.”

As shown in the above diagram — from an article I wrote on the principles of agile marketing management — the very center of agile marketing is delivering remarkable experiences to customers.

It’s the same motivation driving converged media: connecting the dots between brand awareness and brand experience.

Agile marketing achieves this by encouraging marketers to:

• Break out of the rigid silos of the traditional marketing org chart
• Share plans and progress more transparently across the whole team
• Implement and assess efforts more iteratively with shorter work cycles
• Embrace testing and data as the primary factor in decision-making
• Experiment more frequently across more facets of marketing’s domain
• Establish good feedback loops to assess iterative progress
• Seek and nurture more direct and indirect customer collaboration

This is what it takes to execute upon the vision of converged media. Teams must work together across the entire marketing organization (and its extended ecosystem of agencies and vendors) with less loyalty to their media specialization and more loyalty to the connected customer experience. And they must do this at a new greatly accelerated cycle speed that favors iteration and experimentation.

These are big changes to marketing’s structure and culture.

But for the maturing community of paid search and conversion optimization professionals, this is the next level at which to impact your organization.

P.S. To get a concrete sense of how agile marketing can be adopted in the context of search marketing, I highly recommend flipping through a new presentation by Jonathon Colman that he delivered at this year’s Mozcon, Agile Marketing: 4 Principles and 13 Hacks. There’s also a great interview with Jonathon where he talks about his experience implementing agile marketing at REI.