Many marketers use just their gut feel for decisions on marketing campaigns. Get this, I read a study that researched 600 marketing professionals and found that on average the marketing professionals were wrong about what would work or what their customers would do at least 50% of the time.
Your visitors are telling you what they want. They don’t say that in words but by their actions. Monitor the actions, test which layout or content or offer gets more/better actions and give the right experience to them.
When you can base your decisions and assumptions on the data, do it. As you know 1 piece of datum is better than 1000 opinions. The data are now available for most of the website activities from tools like Google Analytics. Capture the data and use them.
I recently asked someone why their website looks the way it looks and if there were specific goals for the website or for the webpages. The reply was “my web designer said that this is the best layout”. This friend has not tested the pages. He said that they wanted to go with that graphic designer because the graphic designer has developed the website for their competitor. I asked if the competitor’s website was successful. They said they assumed it was successful.
I understand that it is hard to develop a website that pleases everyone in the organization. Usually everyone wants to jump in the decisions related to the website. But even if you develop a ‘generic’ website for your business you can test and see what works.
Select some areas of your website to test and then ‘split-test’. Use the data to modify the site. Keep improving the site
By the way, I’ve a presentation in the membership area of our site – free to join – that clearly tells you what you should think about BEFORE you give the job away to the graphic designer.
There are plenty of definitions of marketing. From text book definitions (that relate to “the 4Ps”) to the street-smart definitions like “marketing is finding out what the customer wants and giving it to them”. I believe “marketing is experimenting”.
