Beth Kirsch over at Revenews raises an interesting point - winning against your competition online is about more than optimizing landing pages for PPC or SEO for Organic Search - it’s also about optimizing your business model (and that’s much harder to do).
"It’s the big spenders’ business models that allow them to win at the online marketing game. Moog writes, “So in many ways, your challenge is not just optimizing targeting, creative and landing pages. It’s optimizing your business model to go up against every other company competing for the same inventory.”
Note: that’s very true of my architectural house plan clients - present and past - the biggest problem they had was business model and branding.
Now, take a look at the Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance Top 10 Advertisers for July 2006.
" …read a study from MarketingSherpa that tested landing pages’ look and feel against banners’ look and feel. The matching banners and landing pages move the needle 35%. When we did that at Audible, and our numbers skyrocketed. A few weeks later, I saw Netflix performing some testing during a one of their Yahoo home page events. Nextflix tested a number of components in their acquisition process
The creative The offer The landing page And they were testing variables on each piece of the acquisition puzzle. They did not seem to be testing the reg path process, but I assumed that was already optimized or other tests were planned. A few weeks later, I saw NetFlix role out the winners across their online campaigns. Personally for me that was a seminal moment in understanding what online advertising is and what we need to do as marketers to beat our competition: it’s multivariable testing across the whole acquisition process.
The entire process - not just the SEO and SEM part.
"it’s the advertisers that are able to optimize every variable at every stage in the advertising and buy/sign-up process in relation to each other is key, but pairing it will the ability to tweak a business model, so a advertiser can scale is what will let saavy ones break away from the pack. "
I don’t know anyone who’s doing testing at that level - none of my clients, including my corporation work approaches it.
"It’s a combination of optimizing one’s business model working in concert with the significant multivariable testing that will allow advertisers to break away from the pack and win the game in Advertising 2.0 — and the anchor that hold this all together is a heavy focus on math. "
Beth has a very strong opinion on Advertising 2.0 but it makes sense to me - why would you just optimize the creative, landing page and seo unless you thought your business model was OK and it was just getting more traffic of the right type that’s needed. But what if it’s not traffic that you need, but a revamping of your entire business model? …. How many businesses are willing to look inside, at how they do things - and willing to change it? Not many.
