change  December 13, 2011

Joel Lockwood, Partner, President

Where was SMS advertising five years ago?

How about interactive digital signage? Or social referrals?

And did you ever think you’d be reading QR codes with your smartphone?

Marketing tactics and media never stop changing. But one of the most fundamental principles of marketing communication remains the same: a great idea still has value.

Of course, even the strongest message will only resonate if you articulate it clearly and aim it at the right audience. That’s why nothing is more pivotal to the success of a marketing or advertising campaign than the creative brief.

Give Your Creative Process the Right Foundation
At its best, the creative brief is a clear and focused piece that guides a project from start to finish. It defines every aspect of a creative project’s objectives. It’s the one salient document that all parties agree to, and the foundation of the creative process. Whether you’re using a short assignment brief for a quick-turn project or an all-encompassing brief for a major campaign, your creative brief can save you time and money.

Want to increase your profit margins and protect against budget overruns? Of course you do. That’s why you’ll use well-written creative briefs to run your projects efficiently. Here are seven tips to help you do just that:

1. Start every project with a solid brief – no exceptions. Launching an important project with a tight deadline? That’s all the more reason to take the time to write a good brief. After all, the expression “measure twice, cut once” applies to marketing, too.
2. Use critical thinking to simplify and focus your briefs. Many marketing professionals put too much superfluous content in their briefs. Background material is good – but throwing in “everything and the kitchen sink” will only confuse your entire project team and result in a watered-down creative product.
3. As you’re writing the brief, get signoff from all key decision-makers. Let everyone see, contribute to, and sign off on the brief – but be careful not to let them muddy up the objectives and strategy. It’s especially important to get signoff from anyone who will be present in creative presentations.
4. Let creative directors and senior creatives review the brief before your kickoff meeting. This will help prevent the catastrophe of discovering during the kickoff meeting that the strategy is unworkable, the target is under-defined, or the key message is misguided.
5. At the project kickoff meeting, give everyone involved a copy of the creative brief. By this point, you’ve worked hard to develop the brief. Now, get the most possible benefit from it by passing it out. The brief will serve as everyone’s contract, their reference, and their guide throughout the project.
6. Work to establish consistent, repeatable brief-writing processes. You don’t want to be starting from scratch each time. Learn as you go. Keep track of what works, and what doesn’t. Improve your process by incorporating the lessons of each campaign.
7. Hold brief-writing workshops for your team. Like any other valuable skill, brief-writing is something you learn by doing – and it takes practice. Set aside a couple of afternoons per year for hands-on brief-writing sessions. Strive to keep the atmosphere positive, and stress to everyone that practicing this skill will make their jobs easier.

The Little Document with the Great Bottom Line
If you really want to know the bottom-line value of a good creative brief, think about how many millions of marketing dollars are wasted each year on creative work that doesn’t resonate.

American consumers encounter between 600 and 3,000 commercial messages every day. They’re experienced, savvy, and unequivocally impatient – and in the online environment, their attention span becomes even shorter. That’s why there’s a greater need than ever for agencies and marketing departments to create smart, relevant work.

When you stop and think about the truly great advertising campaigns, engaging interactive websites, or smart lead generation programs, they all tend to have one common trait: a singular message and focus. This doesn’t happen by accident. A significant amount of work goes into the creative brief to make it possible to produce a simple yet powerful creative product.

Build a Creative Brief Program
All of this begs the question: where do good creative briefs come from?

Naturally, they come from good creative brief programs. Whether your company is a startup with great products but immature processes, or a major corporation with well-developed processes that sometimes stifle creativity, you can benefit from establishing a standardized creative brief program.

The easiest way to do this is to sit down with a cross-section of your marketing stakeholders (including strategists, product managers, project managers, artists, and copywriters) and talk about what’s working and what’s broken in the creative process. Are briefs typically too long and detailed, or too, well, brief? Are key messages clear and concise, or so vague that they elicit scattershot creative? Is your review cycle contributing to missed deadlines and cost overruns?

Let everyone vent. Ask everyone to contribute constructive suggestions. Put your heads together, and make a plan for improving the way your creative briefs are written. Measure your results, and incorporate your learnings into each subsequent campaign.

It’s important to create a culture of constant improvement across your marketing team. Because remember: better briefs mean better creative, higher response rates, and a better bottom line.

Joel Lockwood, Partner and Chief Marketing Officer

A/B and multivariate testing is a lot like going to the gym.

You know you should be doing it. You understand the benefits of doing it. Your friends who do it swear by it.

But getting started is, well, painful. So it’s much easier just to keep procrastinating.

Keep in mind, though, that when you put off testing, you’re really just putting off getting better results from your website or online marketing campaign.

The best way to get started is to learn the ins and outs of A/B and multivariate testing, and when to use each. Here’s a basic overview.

A/B Testing
In A/B testing, you test a change in a single website element against the original (control) version. For example, you might tweak the headline on a landing page, or change the size of the product image on a product page.

A/B testing is a quick way to determine whether one idea works better than another. For best results, test new ideas that are drastically different from your control. Got a dull, gray “Buy” button? Test canary yellow, or fire engine red.

Here are some tips on executing an A/B test:

• Test a change to only one element. If you change your headline copy, while also bumping up the font size and changing it to red text, you won’t be able to tell which change caused the increase (or decrease) in your conversions. And that would defeat the purpose of testing.
• Split your traffic 50/50, so that equal numbers of visitors will see option A and option B.
• Test enough for statistical relevance – but strike a balance. Too many marketers either pull a test too early, or let it run beyond the point when it is yielding useful results.

Multivariate Testing
A/B testing is clear, crisp, and to the point. There’s no arguing with the results. But if you have a variety of elements to test and want to speed up the process, consider multivariate testing.

In multivariate testing, you test multiple elements simultaneously. For example, on a product page, you might want to test two new headlines, two new product images, and two new order buttons. Assuming you use your current headline, image, and button as the control, that means you’ll have 27 different combinations of elements to test (3 x 3 x 3).

One of the goals here is to determine which combination of elements results in the most conversions. It’s all well and good to know that headline A beats headlines B and C, but multivariate testing also helps you determine that headline A works best with image B and button C.

Another goal is to find out which individual elements influence visitor behavior – and which don’t. Using your control as the baseline, you can then determine what change you caused by swapping in different headlines, versus different images or buttons. You might find, for example, that neither of your new headlines caused much of a change, whereas your new order buttons both caused significant spikes in conversions.

Because multivariate testing involves many variants, you’ll need more traffic to gather a significant sample size. This may mean you’ll need to run your test for a longer period of time. But because you’ll be testing multiple elements at once, you’ll probably still find that multivariate testing yields faster results than running a series of A/B tests.

Building a Testing Strategy
If you’re just getting started with testing, we recommend a simple, five-step approach:

1. Figure out where you’re at.
Determine your current conversion rates for the pages on your site that seek to drive conversions. Keep in mind that a conversion doesn’t necessarily involve a sale – it can also be someone signing up for your email list, filling out your form to request more information, or downloading your white paper.

Next, you’ll need to assign a value to each conversion. When a visitor downloads a free white paper, you don’t make any money up front. But if 2% of white paper downloaders typically go on to become customers, and the average lifetime value of your customers is $1,000, then you can say the long-term value of a white paper download is $20.

2. Decide where you want to be.
Identify your most important conversion goal for a section of your site – or for the entire site. Whether you want to collect more email addresses, convince more people to friend your company on Facebook, or persuade more people to actually buy a product, focus your testing efforts on this one goal. Also, make sure you know exactly which metrics you’ll use to track your results.

3. Get buy-in.
When you start trying to make changes on a website, you’re going to step on some toes. One of your executives may love the headers you’re using on your landing pages. Another colleague may insist that large product images are a waste of space.

You’re going to have to manage these expectations – and be prepared to slay some sacred cows – before you start testing. Before you dive in, have a meeting in which you clearly articulate the goals of your testing project and give everyone a chance to discuss. Take comments and suggestions – but avoid letting “committee-think” clutter up your testing program with secondary and tertiary objectives that distract you from your true focus.

4. Determine a testing order.
You can’t test all pages at once – but whatever you do, don’t start “safe.” Start your testing on the pages that have the most potential to deliver greater revenue. You’ll find them close to the end of your conversion funnel – your lead-gen forms, opt-in pages, and shopping cart pages.

Your next testing priority? We’ve all heard the expression, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” Open Google Analytics (or a similar program) to determine which pages are your most popular entry pages. Are there any with high bounce rates? Focus on turning that around by pulling people deeper into your site.

Next, optimize any pages that have high abandon rates. By tweaking specific elements, can you prevent more visitors from jumping ship?

5. Identify which elements to test.
On the pages you’ve decided to optimize, give some thought to which elements may be driving visitors away, rather than compelling them to take the action you want them to take. Test some better alternatives.

Focus on eliminating clutter and distractions, making calls-to-action more visible, rewording copy to increase urgency, and reassuring the prospect about their decision to convert.

Testing Tools
Check out some of these testing tools to help you in your optimization process:

• Google WebSite Optimizer 
• Optimizely 
• Visual Website Optimizer
• Unbounce 

Parting Thoughts
Testing isn’t just about confirming what you already know – it’s about taking chances and being willing to fail in pursuit of the Next Big Breakthrough. You’ll make greater progress if you “fail faster.” That means you should run your tests on high-volume pages, and, if possible, use multivariate testing to execute multiple experiments at once.

Once you’ve learned what you can from your high-volume pages, apply those lessons to lower-volume pages. And don’t forget to share what you’ve learned with your email marketers and web designers.

After all, just like going to the gym, testing and optimizing your online marketing is much easier to do in a group.

Sean Shoffstall, VP Innovation and Technology

Did you catch the Power of eMarketing Conference in San Francisco?

On April 19 and 20, I had the privilege of speaking on three panels at the conference. Naturally, social media and SEO were the hot topics of the day. But the conversation also trended toward lead nurturing and how to drive conversions from your social conversations.

Here are a few quick thoughts on the three panels I participated in.

Don’t Stop at CAN-SPAM Compliance
On the morning of April 19, I was on a panel with a Director of Compliance for a large corporation. The conversation focused on best practices in subject lines and email formatting, and how they apply to spam traps. These three ideas really resonated with the audience:

1. CAN-SPAM compliance is the bare minimum. If you want to avoid spam filters and get your message delivered, you need to go much further.
2. Keep subject lines short and sweet, yet descriptive and honest. Remember that if your subject line is longer than, say, 70 characters, it will only be partially visible in a preview pane or mobile device.
3. Image-only emails not only provide a bad user experience (most of your clients probably set “images off” as a default), but are also a spam filter trigger.

 “You Can’t Handle the Truth” About Email Content
For my second session on April 19, I shared the stage with Loren T. McDonald from Silverpop. The conversation was much more detailed. In fact, I felt like we were two old war buddies sitting up on stage reminiscing about battle scars and answering questions. We covered deliverability, content creation and relevancy, frequency, and, of course, CAN-SPAM.

We even had a “You can’t handle the truth!” moment when an audience member complained that he didn’t have any content. We spent the next 5 minutes covering all the different ways you can generate content.

If you face a similar problem, look at these simple facts:

1. If you sell products or services, you have content. Go to your people who know the product best. Interview them and create a top 10 list.
2. If you have customers, you have content. See point #1.
3. You can repurpose existing content to create new content. If you’ve captured a video, do a write-up about it for your newsletter. If you’ve published a popular blog post, make a web clip summarizing the top points. If your CEO is giving a presentation, have him or her write an article about the subject.

Protecting Your Online Reputation
Our session on email and branding covered everything from tone and voice to email and newsletter design. Across the board, everyone agreed that having a consistent tone and communicating and fulfilling on your customer’s expectations is key. There was some disagreement about using comical versus professional tone, and about how often to send communications. But much of that hinges on whether you’re writing B2B or B2C emails.

Here are some of the high points, which may seem obvious but are easy to overlook:

1. Naming your constant communications helps boost deliverability and open rates. So, name your newsletters, webcast series, and any regular postings (especially your blog).
2. The fastest way to lose the branding battle is to do a bait and switch. Be consistent, and deliver what you promised.
3. Protect your online reputation. Don’t spam, don’t incite flame wars, and keep the conversation on topic.

 If you were at the Power of eMarketing Conference, I’m glad you could join us.

If not, there will be another conference coming up in October in Rhode Island. Ozone Online’s Joel Lockwood and I plan to participate. It’s always good to get out of our bubble and swap best practices with others who are in the trenches.

See you there?