Creating a Culture of Optimization

Opti­miza­tion has mul­ti­ple lev­els­for con­tin­ued success

A few weeks ago I wrote about the fact that Web ana­lyt­ics is no longer optional: whether it’s easy or hard is not the issue — Web ana­lyt­ics has become manda­tory for us all doing busi­ness using the Web.

Web site opti­miza­tion, as well, has become some­thing that busi­nesses can­not ignore.

Opti­miza­tion has become a buzz­word. As such, its mean­ing has become diluted; mar­keters may find it easy to roll their eyes when uttered once again, or gloss over it and ignore it.   Let’s take a look at the rise of “opti­miza­tion” and why its still a crit­i­cal con­cept that needs to spread even deeper into mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tions today.

Old-School Web Ana­lyt­ics: Site Optimization

Tra­di­tion­ally, Web ana­lyt­ics and opti­miza­tion was borne out of the idea of remov­ing bot­tle­necks on a site.  In the early days, whomever owned the Web site, often IT or spe­cial­ized eCom­merce teams, wanted to know where the bar­ri­ers for suc­cess­ful con­ver­sion were located, and would set out to remove those bar­ri­ers deliv­er­ing the best flow for the typ­i­cal vis­i­tor to the site. They were able to use ana­lyt­ics to fig­ure those pieces out.

Mar­keters Have Arrived: Cam­paign Optimization

In the last few years, as more mar­keters have dis­cov­ered Web ana­lyt­ics, they have begun embrac­ing the idea of opti­miz­ing their cam­paigns — that is, improv­ing each step of a user’s inter­ac­tion from first impres­sion or touch point (be it a ban­ner ad, an email or a search engine key­word) all the way through to the reg­is­tra­tion, con­ver­sion event or sale. With this cam­paign analy­sis comes the idea of using ana­lyt­ics to ensure that the cam­paign is suc­cess­ful and if not, mak­ing course cor­rec­tions while there is plenty of time to make sure it’s successful.

Are We There Yet?

Mature mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tions know that, if they are to con­tinue their adop­tion of being fully account­able for each dol­lar spent, and to increase their mea­sur­able con­tri­bu­tion to the orga­ni­za­tion, they must embrace opti­miza­tion as a cul­tural shift, on all of its many lev­els. Every­one in the depart­ment needs to be think­ing about con­tin­u­ous opti­miza­tion so that marketing’s con­tri­bu­tion can con­tinue to grow.

But even as mar­keters are begin­ning to take advan­tage of these types of opti­miza­tion, there tends to be a dis­con­nect at many lev­els within the orga­ni­za­tion.  Opti­miza­tion often occurs in a sort of ad hoc man­ner. As of yet, for many orga­ni­za­tions, there seems to be no top-down man­date push­ing the entire team to make opti­miza­tion a part of their cul­ture.

That must change — and mar­keters, who know the ben­e­fits of opti­miza­tion bet­ter than any­one, need to be the dri­ving force.

Start With the Tac­ti­cal, but Move to Strategic

My first two exam­ples — opti­miz­ing on the site level and cam­paign level — are tac­ti­cal in nature, and most mar­ket­ing depart­ments with rudi­men­tary ana­lyt­ics in place can begin embrac­ing opti­miza­tion at these levels.

But mar­keters can’t stop there, even when suc­cess is expe­ri­enced. Mar­keters need to broad­cast this suc­cess and use it to start ask­ing other ques­tions that lead to more strate­gic opti­miza­tion. Good ques­tions to ask include:

• Where are we spend­ing our dol­lars for max­i­mum busi­ness benefit?
• How do we best allo­cate between paid and nat­ural search, rich inter­net dis­play ads, sta­tic ban­ners, email?
• How does our offline mar­ket­ing effec­tive­ness com­pare to our online mar­ket­ing effectiveness?

This will direct mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tions toward opti­miz­ing their bud­gets and spend­ing at reg­u­lar inter­vals. This can be done on a quar­terly, monthly, weekly — even daily — basis. It all depends on a company’s abil­ity to put the analy­sis to use with improv­ing actions. The process of opti­miza­tion for each com­pany is dif­fer­ent, but after some expe­ri­ence, each orga­ni­za­tion will fig­ure out the best ways and time inter­vals to make bud­get opti­miza­tion effec­tive and not burdensome.

Take opti­miza­tion to still another level: what needs to hap­pen in order to help bring opti­miza­tion into the con­scious­ness of the organization’s CMO and CEO? As mar­keters become more com­mit­ted to opti­miz­ing their con­tri­bu­tions to the com­pany, C-level exec­u­tives will begin buy­ing into that culture.

Finally, each orga­ni­za­tion needs to think about how its cus­tomers’ rela­tion­ships are strength­ened, and opti­mized across the orga­ni­za­tion. At every touch point, are they being given the best ser­vice and expe­ri­ence pos­si­ble? Is the orga­ni­za­tion as a whole com­mit­ted to opti­miz­ing the cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ences on an ongo­ing basis, and are the met­rics avail­able to mea­sure this in an unbi­ased manner?

While the Web site, the main chan­nel of dri­ving cus­tomer expe­ri­ences today, needs to sit at the cen­ter of all this, it can­not be the only area of the orga­ni­za­tion that looks to opti­mize its inter­ac­tions with customers.

What Does a Cul­ture of Opti­miza­tion Look Like?

Once all lev­els of an orga­ni­za­tion have embraced opti­miza­tion, there’s a sub­tle shift in team con­scious­ness. Gut feel, intu­ition and opin­ion take a back seat to met­rics and facts. Argu­ing and debat­ing var­i­ous ideas give way to dis­ci­plined test­ing. Every­one will know that new cam­paigns will have mul­ti­ple cre­atives designed to test, and that num­bers will drive the results to decide which ver­sion is the best one. Every­one knows that test­ing will be an ongo­ing process, because what’s “right” today is not nec­es­sar­ily “right” tomorrow.

In the past, mar­keters would launch a cam­paign and three months later, would look at all the data and announce its suc­cess (or lack thereof). In today’s world, an orga­ni­za­tion oper­at­ing that way gets left behind in an instant. Mar­keters can now launch cam­paigns and don’t have to wait to see if it is suc­cess­ful. They have the tools to ensure that it is suc­cess­ful, because they can adjust their course in real-time until it is successful..