Digital marketing spend continues apace. Natural search, paid search, display, email, all continue to enjoy big budgets as companies try to drive online business. Alongside this, big projects are run to build websites to handle arrivals and turn them into buyers.
Yet any web user will tell you that most sites are a poor experience for the prospective customer. Typical moans are difficulty in finding what you want, confusing navigation, and that it is simply not easy. Despite this, paltry sums are spent on making sure that sites are easy to use and deliver completed sales.
How is this so?
In most cases it comes down to that age old division between Marketing and IT. In the Blue corner we have IT, responsable for big budgets, big projects, big technical builds with back end systems and technology and wires and all that stuff. Not a huge amount of customer knowledge being applied at that end.
In the Red corner we have Marketing, with great big budgets for driving Direct Response, otherwise known as Traffic. Lots of expertise here in concepts, advertising themes, campaigns – things that get the punters in the door (where they find the IT bloke under the desk sorting out cabling).
Somewhere in between, there is the online experience, and no-one really owns it. Marketers fire traffic at it, IT build a robust platform with disaster recovery and, er, fat pipes. A junior analyst runs a weekly report that says there really are quite a lot of page impressions. Saddest of all, customers wander about on it, unable to find what they are looking for, struggling with the payment screens and generally finding it easier to go elsewhere.
A positive development in 2009 was a growing trend for marketers to task agencies with actual sales rather than just traffic (CPE – Marketing v Sales) but the bigger challenge is within the companies themselves. There is a crushing need to align marketing, sales and service (excuse the use of these old fashioned, pre-digital terms…). I worked with a big UK company last year that saw a big drop in conversions when they launched a new site. I was working with the Marketing bods – they weren’t too happy but it had no impact on their marketing spend – millions of pounds comtinued to deliver traffic to a site that couldn’t turn it into sales.
A good starting point will be an alignment in the measures of success for the different departments. Imagine those that drive the traffic, those that persuade that traffic to transact, and those that enable the whole thing, all pulling in the same direction and all rewarded for the same success.
