The internet is an unpredictable place. It is powered by people, who are unpredictable beings.
And the one fast rule about internet marketing is that there is no fast rule about internet marketing.
There are best practices, certainly. There is generally good advice.
But just when you’ve think you’ve found the magic rule for how websites should be designed, a website like Lingscars comes along and becomes one of the most successful car leasing businesses in the UK.
You think you have your banner ads covered with your slick modern graphics. Then along comes your neighbor with a garish, epilepsy-inducing manifestation that looks like it just crawled out of Microsoft paint, and gets twice as many clicks as you do.
What is a marketer to do?
The web may be a fickle, transient place, but one of the big upsides is how easy it is to play around. Make mistakes. No one will remember in 20 seconds.
So question everything.
Assume you’re just one tweak away from fame and fortune. Or at least, marginal improvement.
Develop hypotheses and make assumptions. Then test them:
- “I wonder if I add another pricing tier, if anyone will buy it?”
- “Blue is the warmest color for banner ads”
- “I bet writing ‘Buy Now’ will be more effective than ‘Order Today’”
- “10pm is probably a good time to send this email”
- “I think this product would appeal to 40 year old males”
And so on, and so forth.
Until you find your sweet spot. Or rather, while you continuously try to define a sweet spot in an ever-changing sea of internet trends and human preferences. Along the way you’ll learn a lot about what your audience likes, and build your own set of best-practices. Which you’ll of course question constantly anyway, right?
The Jewish Content Network makes it easy to experiment with headlines, pictures, and scheduling of your media to find answers to many of your marketing questions. And so, your homework for this week is to come up with a question. And then experiment until you get an answer. And then experiment next week all over again.