On this weeks post, I just wanted to highlight and make some comments on the article included in this post.

The article focuses on the importance of using data to drive decisions and optimization in digital marketing and how companies that do this, beat the competition significantly in terms of conversion rates. More to the point, the article makes reference to a study performed by Adobe where we can observe that top online marketers (in terms of conversion) have a conversion rate that is almost three times than the bottoms third.

When analyzing the causes of this phenomenon, the article brings up a couple of points. However, I would want to make emphasis in two that seems the most relevant to me. First of all, the need to make data driven decisions and to test this decisions in the relevant environment. More specifically, the article focuses on the need of introducing a trial culture, if you are to become a top digital marketer. Nowadays, the internet allows us to try campaigns and to separate control groups in a signifcantly simpler way that it used to be in ordinary marketing. We can make a minor tweak to a campaign, re-run it with a specific target in mind, and see if it changes conversion rates or behavior. The article mentions that is not important to only do this, but to be structured and disciplined in doing it and learning from it.

Second, the article also makes focus on the importance of investing in optimization tools and agencies. It quotes again the study made by Adobe and clearly shows how companies investing large part of their budget in optimization tools tend to increase there conversion rate, leading to more investment in optimization, creating a virtuous circle. I think this is an important point to have in mind. Given the straight forwardness of all the easily accessible digital marketing tools it is easy to fall in the trap of thinking that the public or general tools provide us with all we need. However, evidence shows somewhat different. Of course there is a trade-off we should bare in mind, but as far as the data goes, higher investment in optimization tools and services yield higher conversion rates, and that is what this is all about.




http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/03/data-driven-digital-marketing-triples-conversion-rates-study/