Marketing is constantly evolving. We see new platforms, tools, tactics and training coming around just about daily. It can be frustrating and downright stressful to stay on top of all the changes and still be an effective marketer.
Below are five habits I've learned personally and from some of the top marketers in the game.
Always be optimizing.
To maintain a competitive advantage in the increasingly noisy digital world is to practice proactive optimization and testing. This approach will help you keep low moments to a minimum, make you smarter and help you better connect with your audience and make smarter marketing decisions. You need to get in the habit of always testing and working to improve.
With testing, nothing is off limits. Colors, layout, text, offer, images and visitor flow on site are all worth testing. It's important to always look for ways to remove friction and make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for. Then, lead them down the path of least resistance to the end goal you want to achieve.
Test plans are constantly evolving as you follow the data from previous tests. What you decide to test today may change as you learn how your visitors interact with your brand and marketing messages. Companies that embrace testing as a regular practice often see increases in average order values and reductions in cost per acquisition in addition to increases in conversion rates on key goals.
Go deeper.
Mike Pisciotta of Marketing Your Purpose says he does a deep dive into his stats three times per week to get the full story on his data. This allows him to avoid making vanity decisions and helps him focus on the long game with stats like lifetime value and return on ad spend (over the life of a campaign).
We tend to focus on the short-term numbers, like click-through rate and cost per acquisition, which leave out a lot of the overall marketing story. In turn, only analyzing these front-end numbers can result in making decisions that actually hurt growth and profit. Make it a habit to regularly look at the long-term numbers as it will help you make more informed decisions.
Understand your customers better.
At the end of the day, all that matters is what your potential and actual customers think. With buying habits changing and attention spans getting shorter, it is important to keep a close eye on your target audience.
Thomas Bell, a leading direct response copywriting and lead generation expert, told me that it is important to consistently work to understand what makes your customer stay up at night — what they fear, what they aspire to and what makes them tell their friends when they like something.
Eric Graham, a leading business growth expert, added that you have to be consistently interviewing and talking to actual people in the target market to keep a finger on the pulse of the wants, needs and hot buttons. Marketing any other way is just based on guesswork as to what your prospects want or will respond to. Some of his best copy, headlines and ads are verbatim words from target customers about their pain points.
I tell people all the time they need to interview their customers. Sometimes you don't like hearing what they have to say, but more often than not they will tell you exactly what you need to improve.
Never make assumptions.
I have a saying that assumptions in marketing kill your chances at success. If you just assume something is going to work and don't actually measure it, you will never know if it actually helped or hurt. I recall a campaign that would have missed out on hundreds of thousands in revenue if we had stuck to what we assumed was the best way to go.
Never assume something. Test it out for yourself. It doesn't matter how great you think the idea is.
Look past the surface.
We often get so ingrained in the product we are selling that we fail to overlook even the smallest leverage points that can have a massive impact. We get too close to our marketing that we become blind to the elements that can have the most improvement.
Don't blind yourself to what is simply on the surface. Take the advice of longtime marketer David Frey: "One habit I think most of us have is that we are constantly looking passed the 'thing' and analyzing the marketing of it to see what best practices we might take away."
In conclusion, you need to constantly be evolving and testing your message based on the information given by your audience. Go deeper on the stats to help paint a better picture of what your visitors are telling you by their behaviors. Be sure not to take things at face value, and never assume something is going to work better, no matter how good the source.
