Digital marketing = continual optimization

Post Summary: Despite spending high amounts of money and energy acquiring traffic, marketers are not following through by devoting significant funds to optimization strategies that can increase their returns. In fact, 81% of the more than 1,700 digital marketers surveyed reported spending 15% or less of their marketing budgets on optimization activities. And beyond this lack of investment, many are also not exploiting critical opportunities: 53% are not optimizing the relevance of their on-site search results, and 52% say that testing consumer engagement is not a priority at their organization.

Sur­vey responses from more than 1,700 dig­i­tal mar­keters world­wide, span­ning business-to-consumer and business-to-business com­merce com­pa­nies across retail, finance, media, and tech­nol­ogy and con­sumer goods indus­tries, reveal that:

Con­ver­sion Opti­miza­tion needs to be given higher priority.

  • Over 80% of respon­dents allo­cate 15% or less of their mar­ket­ing bud­get to opti­miza­tion efforts – up only 1% from our 2009 survey.

Test­ing con­sumer engage­ment through­out the fun­nel is crit­i­cal to optimization.

  • But more than 50% of the respon­dents cited test­ing was still not a com­pany priority.

The search box is often the most-used area of a website.

  • Yet fewer than 50% of respon­dents are opti­miz­ing on-site search results.

Mar­keters are not tak­ing advan­tage of sim­ple cross-sell or up-sell opportunities.

  • 38% of dig­i­tal mar­keters sur­veyed do not pro­vide any con­tent or prod­uct recommendations.

In the bur­geon­ing areas of video, mobile and social, mar­keters seem to be on the right path:

  • 61% of respon­dents are focus­ing on video in 2012 for help­ing drive conversion.
  • 70% of respon­dents are focus­ing on social shar­ing as a top effec­tive social strategy.
  • The top three mobile strate­gies mar­keters plan to focus on this year are mobile opti­mized sites, mobile apps, and adver­tis­ing pro­mo­tions, includ­ing bar codes and QR codes.

In eval­u­at­ing this year’s responses, the fol­low­ing Top 5 con­ver­sion oppor­tu­ni­ties emerged:

  • Pri­or­i­tize opti­miza­tion across your orga­ni­za­tion as a strate­gic process – demon­strate small con­ver­sion wins to gain sup­port and buy-in for more ongo­ing opti­miza­tion efforts.
  • Use a data-driven approach to opti­miza­tion – lever­age your ana­lyt­ics to bet­ter inform site search results, what con­tent to test and to rec­om­mend and what areas to focus on personalizing.
  • Opti­mize con­ver­sion with video – offer more video con­tent, whether it’s cre­ated in-house or cre­ated by your users. Both for­mats offer vis­i­tors with a way to engage deeper with your brand and become more edu­cated before decid­ing to click, pur­chase or subscribe.
  • Opti­mize social engage­ment — enable con­tent shar­ing func­tion­al­ity within your con­ver­sion fun­nel and test the place­ment and mes­sag­ing of the calls-to-action.
  • Opti­mize for all mobile chan­nels – make sure that your tablet expe­ri­ence is laid out for that par­tic­u­lar audi­ence and the way they pre­fer to shop or con­sume con­tent. Your approach for smart­phone users will also be distinct.

For more on the Adobe 2012 Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Opti­miza­tion Sur­vey, down­load the full report:http://​bit​.ly/​K​S​u​IkT

About richmeyer

Rich is a passionate marketer who is able to quickly understand what turns a prospect into a customer. He challenges the status quo and always asks "what can we do better"? He knows how to take analytics and turn them into opportunities and he is a great communicator.

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5 Comments on “Digital marketing = continual optimization”

  1. You have to optimize ALL aspects of your marketing communication, not just one, and especially not any at all! Search engines have to be able to find and index your site for keywords; you need to build the proper engagement across social media; your marketing messages should be consistent; and you should make sure the user experience is enjoyable.

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