Sales reps aren’t paid on the number of calls they make, and real estate agents don’t get commission on the number of showings they do. Activity does not equate to outcome, and conflating the two can have really expensive implications.
The same story applies to marketers. We seem to spend a lot of effort fostering cultures of activity rather than outcomes.
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By now most marketers are familiar with the process of experimentation, identify a hypothesis, design a test that splits the population across one or more variants and select a winning variation based on a success metric. This “winner” has a heavy responsibility – we’re assuming that it confers the improvement in revenue and conversion that we measured during the experiment.
Is this always the case? As marketers we’re often told to look at the scientific community as the gold standard for rigorous experimental methodology. But it’s informative to take a look at where even medical testing has come up short.
For years women have been chronically underrepresented in medical trials, which disproportionately favors males in the testing population. This selection bias in medical testing extends back to pre-clinical stages – the majority of drug development research being done on male-only lab animals.
And this testing bias has had real-world consequences. A 2001 report found that 80% of the FDA-approved drugs pulled from the market for “unacceptable health risks” were found to be more harmful to women than to men. In 2013 the FDA announced revised dosing recommendations of the sleep aid Ambien, after finding that women were susceptible to risks resulting from slower metabolism of the medication.
This is a specific example of the problem of external validity in experimentation which poses a risk even if a randomized experiment is conducted appropriately and it’s possible to infer cause and effect conclusions (internal validity.) If the sampled population does not represent the broader population, then those conclusions are likely to be compromised.
Although they’re unlikely to pose a life-or-death scenario, external validity threats are very real risks to marketing experimentation. That triple digit improvement you saw within the test likely won’t produce the expected return when implemented. Ensuring test validity can be a challenging and resource intensive process, fortunately however it’s possible to decouple your return from many of these external threats entirely.
The experiments that you run have to result in better decisions, and ultimately ROI. Further down we’ll look at a situation where an external validity threat in the form of a separate campaign would have invalidated the results of a traditional A/B test. In addition, I’ll show how we were able to adjust and even exploit this external factor using a predictive optimization approach which resulted in a Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) increase of almost 70%.
As marketers we could learn a lot from ants.
They don’t attend conferences, have multi-million dollar budgets or get pitched by the latest AI-based tech vendors. Yet over millennia they’ve figured out a radically efficient solution to an important and complex problem – how best to find food to sustain the colony.
This is no easy task. The first ant leaving the colony walks around in a random pattern. It’s likely he (foraging ants are always male) doesn’t find food, so he’ll return back to the colony exhausted. It’s not a completely wasted effort however, he (and every other ant behind him) will leave behind a pheromone trail that attracts other ants.
Over the course of time and thousands of individual ant voyages, food will (likely) be found. Ants that do find food will return immediately back to the colony. Other ants will follow this trail and, because pheromone trails evaporate over time, they’re most likely to follow the shortest, most traveled (highest density) path.
This approach ensures that the colony as a whole will find an optimal path to a food source. Pheromone evaporation also helps ensure that if the current source runs out, or a closer one is found, the colony will continue to evolve to the globally optimal solution.
It’s a classic optimization solution that maximizes a critical outcome as efficiently as possible, and one that has been studied by entomologists, computer engineers and data scientists. In the current B2B marketing environment it can illuminate where we’re spending our time and money.
The 1907 Quakers from the University of Pennsylvania were the juggernauts of college football. Heading into a home field matchup with the Carlisle Indians they had not only won, but dominated their previous seven games by a combined score of 189-10.
Their October home game on Franklin field against Carlisle wasn’t expected to be much different. Although the Indians were also undefeated, they were a group of unheralded, undersized players that the 22,800 fans in attendance didn’t give much of a chance against their mighty Quakers.
So what happened? Carlisle demolished Penn 26-6. The most notable play of the game was fullback Pete Hauer’s 40 yard perfect spiral pass that sports historians would later call one of the “three or four signal moments in the evolution of football” and “the sporting equivalent of the Wright brothers taking off at Kitty Hawk.”
These historians attribute Carlisle’s stunning upset that Saturday to Carlisle coach Pop Warner’s exploitation of a rule change that was adopted a couple of years earlier. In order to curb the surging violence in football schools adopted a number of rules changes, most notably legalizing the forward pass.
Warner decisively capitalized on this rule change, confusing the Quakers with long passes and new formations. Penn was playing by the old rules, and caught completely unprepared for the new era of football that they had the misfortune of writing into history that day.
Houston, we have a problem.
As enterprise focused B2B marketers, we have a problem.
We all agree that we want to grow traffic to our website, turn the traffic into leads and convert the leads into customers.
Yet, we have all blindly trusted the theory that, producing more content, showing product options, displaying more testimonials, and creating more case studies will get you a bigger pipeline.
Let us be the first to refute this claim: more is not better.
In fact, with every additional piece of content or white paper you are killing pipeline. Why, might ask?
Because you are simply overwhelming your customers.
Explanation please!?
To illustrate this point, let’s talk about Cognitive Load.
Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory.
When we put irrelevant, unnecessary and distracting information in front of people, we fill up that working memory. The result is a decreased ability to absorb information, learn and ultimately make decisions.
While it may seem that having multiple content options on your website increases the likelihood that you will connect with your visitor, it actually has the opposite effect.
When customers are given too many content options you are forcing them to make decisions that take up their mental resources, derailing your chance at a direct path to purchasing.
Can someone say cognitive overload?!
Think about it this way: the most important factor in the design of a website is making it easier for customer to find what they want. Customers crave simple and easy navigation over anything else in regard to design.
Most important factors in the design of a website
If your website presents multiple decisions for the user, you filled with decisions for users to make, you are not making it easy for them to find what they want!
Let’s break it down.
Let’s take a look at some examples unintentionally cognitive overload.
Content.
As marketers, we are producing too much content that is both expensive and unnecessary.
In reality, only a small portion of your content is necessary to help the customer move down the purchase funnel and it is our job as marketers to present that one (perfect) piece of content. Sadly, we are letting our customers down by allowing them to read irrelevant content and thus, introducing cognitive load.
Produce more content
Calls to action.
While letting visitors chose from multiple CTA’s may seem like a great way to help customers find what they want, it actually leads them to confusion. Rather, you should be putting them on a specific path that you have identified as most effective for conversions.
Multiple calls to action
Product options.
If you’re selling an enterprise focused product, it is likely that your website is showcasing all of the products and services that you offer. Again, this overwhelms customers.
We should know about our customers well enough so that we are only showing the products that we believe (based on research) they are likely to buy! Don’t give them fifty options and hope their first selection is the one best suited for them.
Analytic Solution
Case studies.
A customer only works in one industry; do not show them case studies from other industries where the use cases might be completely different. This content is irrelevant, distracting and increases cognitive load.
All case studies
Industry solutions.
We are asking customers to unnecessarily identify themselves. Having to go through a selection process, like the example below, does not inspire confidence that the software is well suited for a visitor’s industry.
Industry Solutions
Pricing options.
A multitude of pricing options is a perfect example of cognitive overload. We are overwhelming our customers with pricing options to the point where they don’t know which option to choose.
Target enterprise accounts shouldn’t see basic pricing tiers. Similarly, SMB’s shouldn’t see enterprise offerings. This substandard experience increases friction and reduces conversion rates!
pricing options
It is time to stop – your are overwhelming your Customers.
So, what’s the solution then? How do we make sure customers aren’t overwhelmed with cognitive overload?
It’s simple: reduce content and only show the most relevant information.
Calls to Action
Keeping this in mind, what if instead of showing everything to all of our visitors, we only showed the most relevant and effective calls to action?
Logos & Testimonials
What if we show the logos and testimonials that were most relevant to customer needs or highlighted the testimonials that most reflected their pain points?
Pricing Plans
What if we focused on and only showed the pricing that was going to be relevant for the given account and the features of those plans that were going to meet their needs?
Customer Experience
What if we only showed customers relevant experiences based on what we knew about them?
Doing things right
Doing this right has real and meaningful implications. 94% of buyers in a Demand Gen survey choose the winning vendor because that company demonstrated a stronger knowledge of their needs.
In an Accenture survey, half of B2B customers already expect improved personalized product or service recommendations. In fact, 65% of business buyers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize communications to their business.
The takeaways.
The more options you give customers, the more cognitive load you put on them. The result is a filled-up working memory and hindered ability to make decisions toward purchasing a product.
Instead of producing more content, focus on showing the single experience that will resonate most with your customers!
You’ve spent a huge amount of time optimizing your social media, PPC, email and content marketing strategies. And yet despite the respectable level of traffic you’re receiving, you’re not seeing a decent lift in lead conversions.
It’s a problem many B2B marketers face and it’s often rooted in the difficulty of finding high quality leads. Sure you can get the traffic and a decent level of interest, but more often than not that interest doesn’t converting into paying business.
We can sit here and wax lyrical about the problem being with the quality of leads, but that’s hardly a new revelation. Knowing the problem is completely different to knowing how to fix it.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some proven steps you can take to increase the effectiveness of our B2B campaigns.
It seems as though every other week there’s a new marketing buzzword or practice that’s “guaranteed to improve your business.”
Most of the time, these new fads are simply that. A fad. They have their 15 minutes in the limelight before retreating to the darkest corners of marketing history. Their only support following their demise comes from diehard fans unable or unwilling to let them go.
There’s plenty of hot-button topics in the world of online marketing right now, but out of all the various approaches out there the one that deserves your time and attention the most could well be account based marketing (ABM).
ABM is an approach that has been used for the last 20 years. It’s different from the marketing fads that are quick to rise and quicker to fall as it’s proven itself time and again to be a viable, profitable approach to marketing. The lack of coverage can largely be attributed to a shortcoming in marketing technology. (more…)