Open Ambition

Finally, data-driven marketing

In my earlier post about conversion rate optimization I realize there’s a lot there to unpack. I thought I’d go into a bit more detail.

And in that earlier post I took a very liberal definition of CRO – which could confuse folks. I’m expanding the topic of optimization (of which CRO plays a huge role) to cover the entirety of the customer journey all the way to satisfied, enthusiastic user of the product. Let’s just refer to this as optimization.

For the marketing team, there’s likely three orgs at work here – an SEO team optimizing organic traffic volume and patterns, a CRO team looking at how to make the most productive use of that traffic, and a product team (product managers and product designers) ensuring the user experience pays off.

Optimization isn’t just throwing an A/B test up and seeing what happens. It’s about getting super focused on understanding the journey that a visitor is taking and the purpose of the journey. And then using data inform where you focus and improve that journey. This is easy to do for one particular customer’s journey, it’s super hard to do at scale for everyone you are targeting.

While to people deep into marketing this is well known, I’ve lost track of the number of executives, salespeople, and partners who don’t really understand this.

At its simplest, optimization is about examining the path a customer or prospect follows in getting a solution to a problem they have. And then it’s about ensuring that the solution they found really does solve the problem.

The path to the solution follows the “customer journey” model popularized by Hubspot, which I like because it helps you understand what type of engagement is most effective based on where that prospect is in their journey.

At first the prospect is looking for information – to help them understand what kind of problem they have. This means you need to understand the problem AND the words the customer us using to describe their problem. Their words.

On the last marketing team I led, we’d use the prompt of “there’s someone awake at 3am, they can’t sleep because of a problem at work. We need to know the words they’re typing into Google at 3am to describe their problem.”

Your content describing the problem needs to be fully search optimized for those terms. And that piece of content they find needs to also provide a set of terms that visitor is going to remember and use to describe the kinds of solutions to their problem. Because if you do your job well with this first piece of content they will search for more. Ideally follow a link in that first piece of content they found.

This creates the next set of content. And the terms in the first stage of content now align with the terms in this second set and your search optimization needs to be heavily focused on this second set terms. Now you’re providing more specific information about the kinds of solutions to the problem exist. Helping guide the visitor to a solution they can choose (ideally yours).

In this second phase you need to provide a set of specifics about solution capabilities, advantages and drawbacks, and how to select. Again, this content needs to be optimized to get the visitor from the first stage to this content, as well as provide specific terms that will guide the visitor to your solution in this next phase.

There are three types of search terms to optimize for: navigational, transactional, and commercial. Up until now we’ve been dealing with “informational” search terms and strategies. The visitor is not prepared to make a buying decision yet. So “transactional” search terms and strategies would be premature and would send the visitor elsewhere. And data will tell you this. If you’ve got a low conversion rate across phases, that’s where you need to dig in and figure out why.

At this third stage, the visitor wants a specific solution. Yours. Now you show up with a set of search terms that are about transactions. They are about selecting the solution. And the visitor is ready to buy.

You can see how complex this gets. At every juncture connecting these three stages of the journey, there’s a different strategy for optimizing the conversion at each stage.

And we haven’t even talked about how this can change by persona, by type of company and size of company.

But the optimization doesn’t stop there.

Let’s assume the visitor has chosen your solution to evaluate. They fill out your form and submit it. You have literally minutes to contact them. That’s because at the pace we all work today, that prospect will have completely forgotten the form submission and your company by tomorrow. On my last team we got our repose time to under 10 minutes. That’s right, within ten minutes of that potential customer sending in a form asking to be contacted, they were on the phone with a sales development rep (SDR).

And let’s assume that the SDR qualifies that opportunity, and an account rep made a sale. What happens the first time the customer (likely not even the person who purchased) uses the product you sold them?

That too has to align with the terms and expectations set during that journey. Because the cycle doesn’t end with the sale. In a lot of respects the real journey begins with the sale. It causes that customer to want more of the product they bought, and be interested in learning about the other products they might not have considered originally. A happy, satisfied customer is what also causes more prospects to learn about you by sharing their experiences. And one of those people they tell will head to a browser, and type in a phrase that should bring them to you, and the process starts all over again.

For CMOs today, this whole landscape is pure gold. optimization is measurable, it connects words to actions and connects prospects to products. It’s everything you’re responsible for, and it now is informed and driven by data. What could be better?