Taking More of the Mystery Out of Marketing
We’ve already told you all the great things you can find out about your marketing results with internet marketing and website tracking, but internet marketing gives you control even before you decide exactly what message you’re going to market.
Testing Your Marketing
Several programs are available today that allow you to test different marketing messages before you decide on the right variation. These are a bit more in-depth than a focus group sitting in front of you telling you whether or not they like this color, that headline, or the bigger picture, though. Some programs provide general information and are available for little to no fee and others provide detailed data and demographic information for a price.
Not sure which version of your shopping cart check out page converts the most visitors – a smaller picture, a longer product description, a more detailed headline? Programs today allow you to test a variation with each randomly as visitors pass through the check out (or any process) on your website, providing you with reports on which version leads to the best results for you. Stick with the version that works best, or keep running tests to continue optimizing your site.
Testing Traditional Marketing: Commitment
When advertising in traditional media, you have to make commitments. If you try a risky idea, you have to send out this risky idea and wait months to see its results in the market. If the reaction wasn’t positive, you’ve just wasted a lot of time.
Testing Interactive Marketing: Freedom
With internet marketing, you don’t have to commit to a risky decision and wait in anticipation to see how it impacts your bottom line. With internet marketing, you can try any idea – no matter how crazy or revolutionary it might seem - with little commitment. You can run several tests at a time. Of course, you need to commit to an idea long enough to gather some data and results. But, not everyone in the market will see this message, and more importantly, you can see how a risky message is performing almost as visitors are seeing it.
A New Approach
This aspect of internet marketing introduces a completely new approach to how we’ve thought about marketing in the past. Marketing is no longer a slow process of testing ideas only to get vague results after several months. Today, interactive marketing allows you to test several ideas at one time and provides you detailed reporting with real results almost instantly.
A new freedom to try any idea you can think of emerges when you know you can confidently back it up with concise statistics concerning your results.
