The First Step (Part 2)

Step 2: Website/Landing Page optimisation

An ideal website is one where the visitor performs an action for which the website was designed for (irctc.com is one such site). The navigation should be free and simple, should be minimal and very simple in design. At times, even the colours add to the page weight, reducing the performance. Therefore before you decide to put that extra monies in your marketing budget, ensure that the website performance is optimal. One such measure would be website conversion (for content site this would differ).

The website should be continuously measured (through webanalytics) and bettered. There are a variety of means available, if one needs to test out
1. Multivariate Testing: here a combination of elements (Images, content etc) is tested. Point to note here is that, there are multiple execution options, and the calculation is not very simple.

2. A/B Testing: This is simpler to execute, as it is comparison test and popular. The one which gives result closer to the goal is chosen.

You MUST serve relevant landing pages for your advertising campaigns, once you have optimised the creatives (by getting the best CTRs). You can use these landing page optimisation (LPOs) techniques, serve a number of pages and use the best converting one finally. If you are using Google Analytics and Adwords, this service comes free. Else conversion and ROI from the paid traffic will be very poor.

Step 3: Invest in Brand, do regular television advertising
Not many businesses are fortunate. They don't have multimillion rupees budget to spend on television. Especially if you are website, where most of the monies will disappear into technology and SEM. The idea to use television can also be risky, considering what had happened in the past with home trade and pets.com. More importantly there are no fixed rules/study unlike FMCG.

Television is the smartest way to build awareness and positive disposition toward a website. The first visible effect is the increase in natural searches, which maybe through directly typing the brand name in the browser or through the search engines (and therefore SEO should have prepared foundation to handle this). The other empirical observation is that Click through rates (clicks/impression %) are higher both on Pay Per Click Advertising and banner displays. If the website is optimised, conversions will also be higher than a non TV period.

One should take care in media planning, as the effect can be measured, not through research, but in real time (and more often than not, CFO and CEO will be standing on your head). The old Krugman's theory of 60% at 3+ reach (& 450 grps/20day activity for sustainence) still applies here. However, there are no fixed rules and considering that media is now so much fragmented, the mix needs to be changed every now and then. This is like SEO, and will not yield immediate results, more than often, the marketing performance sheet will be in red.