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