Believing strongly in Agile Marketing is part of the reason why I’ve devoted the last six years of my career to consulting with clients on how to better test their sites and optimize their marketing.
Learn How Mindjet Partners with Webtrends to Optimize
Their Digital Marketing and Win Sales From the Competition
Recently, I’ve been working closely with Mindjet, an innovation management software company. The marketing team at Mindjet embraces the Agile Marketing approach, and chose Webtrends Optimize in part for our ability to support the needs of Agile Marketing via software and a broad, responsive service offering. They’ve leveraged a wide range of capabilities in the Optimize platform. They’ve also stretched my consulting muscles, asking me to pivot with them in ways optimization practitioners aren’t always willing to do.
With Mindjet, we’ve used the following tools to dig for insights, and then test assumptions:
- Web Analytics – this is a foundational provider of insights about content popularity, traffic patterns, campaign performance and more.
- Heat Maps – this visual expression of web analytics data helps the Mindjet team quickly find areas of interest on web pages and generate ideas for testing.
- Segmentation – even the most basic segmentation (referrer, keyword, device type, etc.) is extremely powerful when applied to web analytics data, and even more insightful when applied to optimization test data.
- Fractional Factorial Multivariate (MVT) testing – the ability to test only a ‘fraction’ of possible content combinations (hence the name) allows Mindjet to use their existing traffic volume to quickly find winning content combinations. For example, we’ve used this method on their homepage and free trial form page with great success.
- Throttling – The ability to control how much of your total page traffic is entered into an experiment (“sample size”) is a great way to mitigate risk. For example, when a design change has stakeholders “up in arms,” you can expose only 10% of your traffic to the crazy new design, reducing your business risk if it doesn’t perform well.
While Mindjet had an Optimization Road Map essentially from Day 1, our Webtrends team has had to use the Road Map as a looser guide than with less agile clients. We are informed by the Mindjet test road map, but we are not slaves to it!
Similarly, we find ourselves being more flexible during the test planning phase of projects than with other less agile clients. Sometimes, we remove non-essential steps from the process to move more quickly. Other times, we slow down and work carefully through details of experiment plans that would directly affect Mindjet’s bottom line if things aren’t done a specific way. In other words, we don’t force our Optimize planning process on the Mindjet organization; we stay flexible to their needs on any given day.
Another interesting aspect of the Mindjet marketing group is their reliance on recent, quantitative data more so than “target audience” constructs built from 3rd party industry research, opinion and qualitative inputs. As we move deeper into understanding Mindjet’s target customer, we find that our inputs are web analytics data and test data more often than demographic profiles. There is nothing inherently wrong with things like demographics and 3rd party research, but in the Agile Marketing framework, these data sources skew toward trying to predict the behavior of a very large group of prospects, instead of moving, through discovery over time, toward a more 1-to-1 marketing approach.
