Marketing Hypothesis: A/B Landing Page Tests

As Director of Product Management, I spend a good portion of my time talking with customers. I want to know all the different ways in which B2B marketers tackle the constantly (and quickly) evolving challenge of delivering qualified leads to their sales team. Do they spend their limited time and effort on SEO? Social media? Email marketing? Conferences? Creating content?

I get all sorts of answers. Some marketers tell me social media campaigns are worthless; others tell me social media provides their best leads. Some marketers tell me they stopped doing PPC; others tell me they moved their entire budget to PPC. Some marketers tell me they get their best leads from conferences; others tell me conferences are a waste of time. The list goes on and on.

But more importantly, how do they decide which efforts to pursue? Usually, I get a very good answer, but one spoken with very little confidence. “Well, we tried doing X, but it ended up not really working.” Or, “We tried doing Y and it ended up giving us some of our best leads. So we kept doing it.” That’s exactly what you should be doing—test, and optimize. This is what I call Marketing Science.

As we all know, marketing is part art, part science. At Optify, we want to help make the science part easy. So I plan to post several volumes of what I’m calling Marketing Hypotheses that all marketers can conduct their own experiments against.

Marketing Hypothesis – A/B Landing Page Tests

Let’s say you’re running a PPC campaign, although this could work with other campaigns too (email, social media, etc). You’ve bid on a specific term, you’ve edited the copy on the ad. Now what? Where are you sending people—to your homepage? Bad idea. You won’t learn how to optimize. To a Landing Page? Getting closer. At least now you can fine-tune the page to go with the term you bid on, and offer relevant and specific content. But still, you are losing the opportunity to test and optimize. To one of two Landing Pages that differ in some specific way? Bingo! You, sir or madam, should grab your white coat. It’s science time.

What can I learn, you ask? Any number of things. You can vary the title of your Landing Page, the color, the image, the copy, the call-to-action (CTA), the content, et cetera (I spell out et cetera when I really mean it). There is so much to learn about what works and what doesn’t. And the secret is, we usually don’t know why it works or why it doesn’t. Just like a lot of “real” science.

If you haven’t had the joy, nay the splendor of running an A/B test, please, let me welcome you to a land of Opportunity—Optify—where your marketing dreams can become reality. And we’ve got a free trial, too. Just don’t go looking for my other blog post in which I wrote this exact same content but in Comic Sans. That one didn’t do so hot, so I won’t be using that font again.

See you at Volume 2.