David Bullock on Increasing the Response to an Ad (Stompernet Atlanta June 2007)

David Bullock is an incredible, confident speaker who never broke a sweat when his Powerpoint stopped working (several times!) throughout his talk. With a background as a process engineer at Dupont, it’s not surprising that David stressed the importance of setting up and following processes in your business, and on the importance of knowing where you are using that as a baseline for improving your business.

I know from my 12 years experience designing and developing websites and online marketing campaigns for clients that most small business owners are clueless about how to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. They tend to try something and if it doesn’t work, move on to something else. They don’t spend time testing different ads to figure out what works best and what doesn’t.

In his talk, David addressed a process for analyzing the results of your ad campaign:

1. Define your purpose. What is it that you’re trying to test? Why do you want to test it? What are you testing for? How will you know if it’s working or not? For instance, let’s say you’re running a pay per click campaign and sending people to a landing page where you make them an offer. Perhaps you want to increase the response rate to that offer from 1% to 2%. That’s your test’s purpose.
2. Gather baseline data. In step two, you now know your purpose. The next step is to look at where your current traffic is coming from. What types of people buy from you? Where does your traffic come from? Of the people who visit your site, what percentage of visitors respond to your offer (like subscribe to your newsletter, download a free report, ask for a consultation, or buy a product)? What keywords drive the most traffic? What about the most sales? Where are your most profitable customers coming from?
3. Use the appropriate tools. To perform comparison testing, you will need to have the appropriate tools in place to test one thing vs another. In the case of testing 2 different landing pages, you’ll need to set up your campaign so that half of the people who click on your ad are taken to landing page 1 and half are taken to landing page 2.
4. Test variations. The easiest way to test two different pages is to have all but 1 or 2 elements the same for each page. For instance, you might want to test whether certain pictures affect your conversion rate. In that case, the only difference between your two landing pages will be what pictures are on them. The text will remain the same. Or, perhaps you’ll test which headers get a better response rate, so the only difference on the two pages will be the headers. You’d then send traffic from your ad randomly to one of the two pages. The page that converts the best will become your new baseline and you’ll try to beat its results in your next round of testing.
5. Rinse. Repeat. Keep testing results against the baseline until you achieve your campaign goals set in #2.

Marketing is a series of setting goals, testing responses, and making changes until you get the results you’re looking for. Rarely do you get the results you want on the first try, so keep testing different ads, headlines, and copy to see what gets

Also, another point David made which I’ll throw in here is that people don’t buy your product or service. They buy a future. It’s up to you to explain how your product or service will improve their lives. Don’t leave that up to their imagination.

David recommended the book, 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them by Ronald B. Tobias. I’ve also heard people recommend The Story Factor by Annette Simmons and Metaphorically Selling by Anne Miller. And of course, Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars, which talks about the importance of storytelling in marketing and sales.

Here’s David Bullock’s website for more information, or his freebie on Taguchi Marketing.

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