As if being President wasn't enough...

... Advertising Age named Barack Obama "Marketer of the Year" (in truth, they did that before the election, but still!  I'll bet you're angling for person-of-the-year from Time, too.  Leave some scraps for the rest of us, Prez!).  My friends at ReachForce did a nice blog post about it, highlighting the key online marketing tactics.

But digging a little deeper, the folks at Wider Funnel did a nice post about multivariate testing that barackobama.com was using, taking advantage of Google Website Optimizer.  This type of granular, rapid-feedback testing is truly one of the differentiators of online marketing, with one caveat:  it requires statistical significance.  If you don't have enough users to rapidly get answers, you risk making bad decisions.  barackobama.com didn't have the problem.

An easy way to test is by just doing some ad-words campaigns with varied messaging, and then look at click-through rates... but make sure you are seeing enough traffic before you make any judgements.  Even better is to keep tests going long-term, and (assuming you have closed-loop marketing of some kind) look at conversion rates of those leads.  At a minimum, figure out where people are going after the initial click, so that you can make some assumptions about the quality of the visitors.

Comments

[Suaad Sait a.k.a. Joe The Marketer from ReachForce]

Thanks for the plug Todd and also the pointer to the other post.

As that post went out, I wondered how our President-elect would use his significant asset of online community as a president on an ongoing basis. This is how I think he can keep in touch and connect with the REAL issues as he takes on the most challenging assignment in the history of time.

The nugget that I learned from our President-elect (once again) is that it's about information consumption : Ponder this as we move forward in time, the next generation of graduating college students have a COMPLETELY differently view on consuming information than we did when we graduated (yes I am old). My personal opinion is that even though we (as marketers) spend a lot of time talking about marketing channels/vehicles it's really a consumption driven model - that is how does the target consume information and react to it (it has always been this way) BUT the modes and channels are WIDE and disparate.

Cheers!

-Joe