This blog post ends with an opportunity for you to win a stay at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas and a ticket to Email Summit, but it begins with an essential question for marketers:
How can you improve already successful marketing, advertising, websites and copywriting?
Today’s MarketingExperiments blog post is going to be unique. Not only are we going to teach you how to address this challenge, we’re going to also offer an example to help drive home the lesson. We’re going to cover a lot of ground today, so let’s dive in.
Give the people what they want …
Some copy and design is so bad, the fixes are obvious. Maybe you shouldn’t insult the customer in the headline. Maybe you should update the website that still uses a dot matrix font.
But when you’re already doing well, how can you continue to improve?
I don’t have the answer for you, but I’ll tell you who does — your customers.
There are many tricks, gimmicks and types of technology you can use in marketing, but when you strip away all the hype and rhetoric, successful marketing is pretty straightforward — clearly communicate the value your offer provides to people who will pay you for that value.
Easier said than done, of course.
How do you determine what customers want and the best way to deliver it to them?
Well, there are many ways to learn from customers, such as focus groups, surveys and social listening.
While there is value in asking people what they want, there is also a major challenge in it.
According to research from Dr. Noah J. Goldstein, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, UCLA Anderson School of Management, “People’s ability to understand the factors that affect their behavior is surprisingly poor.”
Or, as Malcom Gladwell more glibly puts it when referring to coffee choices, “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.”
This is not to say that opinion-based customer preference research is bad. It can be helpful. However, it should be the beginning of your quest, not the end.
A/B Testing: How to improve already effective marketing (and win a ticket to Email Summit in Vegas)
