In 2013, MarketingSherpa interviewed more than 200 marketers to find what is, and is not, working in marketing and has disseminated that valuable information through case studies, how-to articles, Summit presentations and webinars.
We sifted through all of this content from the year and presented all of the top takeaways in this MarketingSherpa webinar.
Watch Pamela Markey, Senior Director of Marketing, and Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, both of MECLABS, discuss the most insightful lessons and discoveries from brand-side marketers from 2013.
Covering topics on social media marketing, sales strategies, content marketing, email marketing and much more, this webinar encompasses a wide range of marketing areas to aid your own marketing efforts.
You’ll hear case studies such as the email effort at Obama for America; how an e-commerce site’s radical redesign led to a 500% increase in sales; Adobe’s updated webinar strategy and the resulting 500% lift in conversion; and many more deep dives into top content from the year.
Takeaways from this webinar include:
- Analyze your social media content to find the best way to reach customers
- Relate to your audience and use customer personas
- Test your email sends and never stop improving
- Optimize thought processes for your customers
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Video Transcription
Burstein: Hello and welcome to another MarketingSherpa webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Today it is our final webinar of the year before we go on a hiatus, so we’re especially thankful for you joining us and we're going to be talking about the top takeaways from 2013. We call this marketing mashup.
Markey: Mashup.
Burstein: We also want to hear from you. I'd like to hear your questions. Share what you learned this year in marketing. You can use hashtag #SherpaWebinar not just to share with us but to share with your peer’s network. Find others that you can call on the 2014 to get ideas for improving your marketing and today's presenters are joining me today our Senior Director of Marketing at MECLABS, Pamela Markey.
Markey: Hi, everyone.
Burstein: And I am the Director of Editorial Content, Daniel Burstein. So packed into these webinars, as we said, we have an entire year's worth of learning so we're trying to get as much in as we can, but really if you just get a few lessons out of it, hopefully that's really helpful to you. You can go into 2014 was some new ideas and maybe round out 2013 with some new ideas, but we have a lot of related resources.
So everything we talk about today is from a MarketingSherpa case study and you can learn much more about it if you get a good idea from some of the related resource links. We will also be tweeting those through hashtag #SherpaWebinar so be sure to pay attention to hashtag #sherpawebinar so you can see all of that. Then let's start asking them a question. We have a poll question right here because we want to know how you would best enjoy this Sherpa webinar.
Markey: We have 83 slides, Dan, here from all of these sessions all throughout the year so we want to make sure we get to as much as we can so we're going to launch a poll here. Our goal here is to serve you so how would we best serve you? Do you want us to go fast and get through as much as we possibly can? Or take things a little bit more slowly? So I give you a second here and we'll launch the poll.
Burstein: Just launched the poll. Fast and furious or go as slow as possible? If we go slow, we'll also answer some questions from the audience and see what kind of questions you have and what you would like us to go deeper into and then answer some of those questions. And if we go fast and furious, we'll just go through all of those 80 slides and give you quick high-level insights into what we've learned and also as we said we're sharing a lot of those links through #SherpaWebinar and any of those high-level insights you want to dive deeper into, you can click on one of those links.
Markey: You can dig right into it on your own time for sure.
Burstein: So let's close out that poll and see what the results are.
Markey: And ...
Burstein: It looks like 74% of you said go as fast as possible, so ...
Markey: Let's go.
Burstein: Majority has it, so let's dive into here two our first takeaway about LinkedIn. Social media connects people. LinkedIn isn't just the place for push marketing, it's a place to really connect peers with each other. What we're talking about here is we've brought in DocuSign to do a webinar and they had this great promotion through the LinkedIn email so when people think of email marketing a lot of times it's not very social. It's not very much connecting people. It's just boom, boom, boom promotions or maybe some content.
But they really want to use LinkedIn in mail. It's not just another type of email but as truly what LinkedIn should be which is connecting people. So they launched this campaign as you see right here where they had a series of messages and it was about connecting some of their customers with some of their potential customers. So the LinkedIn email promoted in this example it was the VP of sales operations at Salesforce. That was a DocuSign customer.
Markey: Wow.
Burstein: And their promotion was to join the sales op community, right? Join the community, not buy something right away and also to attend a webinar to learn from the peer from this VP of sales operations about what they can do to improve their own … I think it was sales operations with the DocuSign product.
And as you can see here with the results some pretty impressive results for the small campaign, over 1000 opens and a significant number of clickthroughs and they really were able to achieve their goal. So the big takeaway, high-level takeaway whatever medium you're using, whatever medium make sure you are using it in the way in which it was intended, right?
So if it's a PPC ad, it might make a lot of sense to have just a quick promo message. But if it's something more social like LinkedIn, Facebook, something like that, use it in that way.
Markey: Absolutely. So I’m going to talk a little bit about how customers should be at the center of your sales strategy which seems pretty intuitive. This one is about, really it's a Siemens case study that actually I presented with Debbie Pryer from Siemens in San Francisco at our Lead Gen Summit earlier this year. And so really, we don't have time to get into the whole thing and you can go and check out. She did a great in-person video, it's actually at marketingsherpa.com under the webinars category.
I can't get into the whole system, but essentially what they had was in their health care division they had the customer which is hospitals and imaging centers and that sort of thing, the service department which is a techs that was made into those servicing there and then sales. And the service is obviously the people that have the relationship with the customer so they would submit through an external lead capture form requests for sales to follow up with the customer if they had any need for replacement or a new unit or something like that.
And really, the problem was not only was it linear, but there was legal and financing compliance issues, so Debbie and her team they took an approach that involved taking an audit and discovery. The program and process development and change management, which was much larger than she ever thought would be. So really what it came down to is there was these gaps which Sales and Service struggled with, but more importantly than that, by solving those things they could really put the customer at the heart of what they were doing.
So it wasn't just service pushing leads toward Sales. It was truly delivering requirements that the customer had. So the results of that is ultimately, they really decreased the number of leads because they had to hire qualification requirements, but that being said, the revenue-per-lead, they solved a lot of problems with their efficiency and that sort of thing and really by putting the customer at the heart of their system, they were able to really turn it around. So I really recommend you check out the video, it's more than we can get into today, but again just a key takeaway we saw this year was just at every step of the way customer at the heart of everything.
Burstein: So talking again about social media, we've got a lot of questions about social media. It's become more established, still an emerging tactic and people always question about how they can incorporate social media into their marketing mix. We had Jay Baer of Convince and Convert. He spoke on a MarketingSherpa webinar this year. Also the keynote speaker at Email Summit and what he really pushed is social media isn't as unique as you might think it is and in fact he used the analogy of Facebook being a lot like email marketing.
For example, you can look at some of the email metrics like subscribes, unsubscribes and think of them like likes and unlikes on Facebook. He also made the point that you can incorporate the two, right? So email while we don't call it as social media. I mean if you're able to use the email, if you're able to use that channel to connect people with their peers, that's a great use of email.
And also those social media channels help you understand what your customers are interested in, right? So if like in this example from Crocs you find out what people like most on Facebook, what people are retweeting most on Twitter, what people are pinning most on Pinterest, that's a little bit of customer intelligence right there, right? It's not just viral marketing and then you can use that in your email campaign. Not only are you likely tying into the interest of customers, but also you're showing you have a little bit of social proof there like hey, this is what your peers like. Others might like it too.
So now you might see this and say hey this is Crocs, right? Well, I don't know what you'd call this, Pamela, but it's fashion, right? So it might be somewhat trending and people might be interested in that, but we do that here in MarketingSherpa as well in a B2B category. Our Best of the Week Newsletter for MarketingSherpa is based on you. It's based on which of our content is most shared socially so that helps us understand.
Markey: Even that … Brick-and-mortars I've seen. I think Nordstrom has started putting tags on things in the store on merchandise saying this is our most pinned item on Pinterest so you can see it seeping into the brick-and-mortar situation.
Burstein: And one last point here he made is there's a lot of cross-pollination there, right? So you can test things in email what images are working best, what messages, and then use that to inform Facebook, right? The same way, you can test some images on Facebook, on your Facebook ads, instant messaging and use that to inform email.
So of course, you have to be a little cognizant that different channels might attract different types of audiences, but it can give you a general idea of what to share in different types of mediums. So with that, we also want to let you know we have Email Summit coming up. We have a great, fun contest we've got going on right now.
We want to challenge you to come up with your best subject line. Take 30 seconds, go to the link right there, MECLABS.com/contest, and we basically got an email written by Pamela Markey, one of our own promotional emails. We're looking for some of the best subject lines written by our audience then we're actually going to test it. We're going to take these subject line, we're going to pick which ones we think are best, we're going to run real A/B tests, and we're going to see which subject line performs best and the person who writes the subject line that performs best is going to get a free ticket to Email Summit 2014 in Las Vegas, plus two free nights at the Aria Resort and Casino Hotel.
Markey: Beautiful hotel. Wonderful event if we can say so ourselves, so definitely check it out.
Burstein: MECLABS.com/contest, take 30 seconds, write a subject line for that email and again, it'll be a learning lesson, we'll test it, we'll share what we learn more about that A/B testing your subject lines that way.
We also like to thank the sponsor of today's webinar Marketo. They've got a great tool for you as we're going into 2014. If you need help creating that perfect deck for 2014 marketing plan, they have a free customizable PowerPoint template for your marketing plans. And I know, Pamela, you're in that boat right now. You're planning right now.
Markey: I am. I actually went and downloaded this, this morning and it's great and it's not gated or anything. It's just a PowerPoint deck and you just get it right there. So thanks Marketo for sponsoring and for the tools. It’s going to help me plan my next year.
Burstein: All right let's jump right back into it. What's our next lesson, Pamela?
Markey: Yeah, next we're going to talk about content again. So we talked a little bit about using Facebook and other things and really underestimating the powerful of useful content, that's the thing. We see a lot of content, content marketing's really hot right now but a lot of it's really not that great.
This next piece of content is actually when the thing that you guys have told us we did some research about why content marketing. What are people using out there? What is the degree of difficulty versus the level of effectiveness of a variety of different tactics?
So you can see at the very top there trade shows, very effective kind of tough to pull off. Not far behind is content as well. It's again very effective but difficult to put together all of that content, do all of the writing and producing it, keeping it fresh. Sometimes you're just feeding a beast, it feels like.
So then we asked the next level which is if you compare all of the different pieces of content what's the easiest stuff? So we're really trying to say OK, we know it's effective, we know it's hard, things are more doable. So obviously some of the items at the top there — images, press releases, social media — pretty doable. So if you're just starting to get into the content marketing, these are the kind of things you can do. Whereas mobile apps, online video, those kinds of things definitely are for further down the cycle with your content marketing.
Really I mean everyone's heard this, this the year. Content marketing it builds trust, it builds share of mind, it delivers value for people just like that piece of content from Marketo we just looked that and we've experienced this too. I mean Daniel and I right now it's our job to make sure that this half-hour for you is really worth the time it takes. Even though this is a free webinar, the cost is your time.
So we found this especially with our content we put out, what you see in the screen here is a quick clip from one of our sessions at B2B Summit. This is actually AutoDesk about gamification. So we have these half-hour segments of video that we can easily put up and we could assume everyone's going to come and want to spend a half-hour watching a piece of video we actually have to sell that piece of content first.
So we take a small clip, this is actually Erin on Daniel's team who has written an article. She's put up a piece of that clip, written a blog post about it and that way linking to the full video. So you really have to sell your content. You have to not just assume because you put up a piece of white paper, something else like that, people are just going to fall right into your funnel and immediately come along.
Do something like Marketo which just is provide a great tool that you can use to me or provide a great piece of video that piques their interest gets them in there.
Burstein: Another thing as part of that content strategy, is really focusing on your audience, right? And that's why we asked in the beginning of this webinar hey do you want us to go fast and furious or do you want us to go slow? Sometimes just really interacting with your audience and finding what is of most value to them for the time that's they're investing.
Markey: Exactly.
Burstein: Then you've got to produce the content, right Pamela?
Markey: Yeah.
Burstein: It isn't always so easy.
Markey: This is a question we get a lot which is hey, yeah, great, I know, I hear. The content's engaging, it gets people in my funnel, but you know what? We know that it's not easy and not all of this have teams of writers and video and everyone else and in a lot of cases we're like McGladrey and we had Eric Webb on a webinar earlier this year. His job is to get accountants to write, which can’t be easy.
So really it's about building a strategy around your content. This is a particular piece of about repackaging which we all know yes, I build a piece of content and try and think of every single way you can purpose that. So you create an article, perhaps you interview someone from the article, there's a presentation you post to SlideShare, there's a video clip you post to YouTube, you can create a press release around that, so on and so forth.
The key thing here too is the way that they've presented the content to their audience. So it's John, I believe this is an important article for you to read, it's personal. It's not just here's our white paper, we're blasting out content, it’s really kind of understanding what the customers are asking for and connecting it in a personal way.
So Eric shared with us, like I mentioned, he's trying to get financial professionals to create content for him. He really created a really tactical buttoned-down project management process with workflow and transparency and just a way for people to either submit requests for content and then he could use ... I know he can used contracted writers that were pretty easy to get, pretty easy to create simple projects and think about how you use your content.
Take a look at this, you can download as Daniel said the slides from SlideShare and it answers a couple of key questions and helps just kind of formalized and operationalize your content production. So I know one key piece that he said was really valuable was this form they created. So it's finding those pieces of your operations that keep things flowing so they created a how do you start a project. When it comes to creating a piece of content whether it's an interview or a video or a piece of writing, make it simple. Capture the things that people need. It removes poor communication.
A lot of cases of people that are asking for content, it forces them to think through this is a realistic piece? How am I going to use it? You can educate them on things that they need to consider when it comes to requesting content and think about how they can use it in other places as well.
So we can't get into all of the details, but definitely Eric Webb at McGladrey gave Daniel many more key items and if you can check out that link that I know Jessica is tweeting right now, you'll be able to learn a lot more about that.
Burstein: Yeah. So with the content marketing or really with any type of marketing it's really important to orient your customers, right? We all talk about the funnel so let's talk about the funnel now and how to help your customers understand where they are in the funnel and how to bring them into the funnel and how to walk them through.
So we talked to Adobe about what they were doing with their webinar marketing. We talked to Shelby Britton and she had an impressive case study where they really evolved their webinar marketing to get huge increases in their email rates and in their open rates and then there ultimate revenue from it.
One thing they did that was really important is first they just had that basic email and landing page to get people to sign up for webinars and they evolved that into a strategy where they had an email and landing page that tied in more directly to each other and a follow-up also that then spurred people to take another action that tied in very directly to that piece.
So sometimes we forget as marketers, we’re so used to the things that we're working on with our email, with our landing pages, with all different things and we're so focused on what those messages are that we forget that for the people who are receiving this, they are receiving so many different things and it's not always really clear that they're tied together or whatever next that they're supposed to take.
So just making sure that basic of branding 101 that sometimes we overlook make sure that's so clear that when they're getting from an email to a landing page it's the same company, it's the same offer, it's the same value you’re promising in that email and then after they taken an action whether it's signing up to attend the webinar or actually attending the webinar there is a follow-up that really ties into that and takes them into the next step.
Another thing that really helped Shelby Britton's and Adobe's webinar program was tying in with webinars that tied into a top of the funnel concern that marketers had. So in the beginning at first they just had webinars that they were very focused on the product, they were very promotional, they were very sales-y, but instead they created this funnel. They focused on only two verticals, e-learning and marketing and by doing that they were able to start off with these best practice or solution webinars as a call them.
They tied into the pain points that their target audience had. Whether that sold the product or not they tied them into those pain points that then got the audience in and when they were able to deliver on that, when they were able to deliver on some of that value you can see they were able to move people that into a product webinar to then start actually talking about the product and then get down to the funnel into the thought process that people have as they’re making their decision whether to buy a product and eventually getting to competitive comparison and then getting to trial webinars where they were actually selling people.
So never start with selling, start with value and then bring people into that webinar. And then analyzing the social media audience, right? That's important too. People want to know about their audience, who they are, what they're interested in. We had SAP and they talked about how they were able to operationalize social media, how they were able to understand their audience, and most importantly how they were able to incorporate their own employees into the work they were doing on social media.
So one thing, SAP is a multinational company and it operates in most countries in the world and so the challenge they faced was they could just have a one size fits all solution. They had to understand how different customers interacted in different places. And I think that's something we can all learn from here as well whether you're a multinational, whether you have different audiences in different countries that behave very differently, or even if you have different regions in one country, or if you have different products, or if you have different types of customers. You have to make sure that the way you're communicating through your social media or any of your marketing ties into their specific needs.
You can't be overly broad and try to hit everyone with the same message in the same way. So by doing this they were able to greatly increase their following across the targeted social media networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube as you can see here. And they did this by getting the sales team involved and getting everyone inside the company involved and focusing on how they can really inform customers the way they wanted to be informed when they engage with the salesperson.
So sometimes that involves the salesperson getting on social media and communicating with the customers, but it was in a very focused manner that SAP was able to lead. As you can see here, here's an example from the SAP Slovakia Banking Group.
Markey: Wow.
Burstein: So they're that big of a channel that they have a group focused on Slovakia Banking. So the team in Slovakia Banking they had their own social media presence, but had a smaller following than let's say an SAP overall financial channel. So what they did is they consolidated that into that SAP channel and what they try to do with the company that big, really with any company is to get everyone marching to the beat of the same drummer.
To get everyone working together so everyone in your company whether you're a two person company or 100,000 person company the power of social media is they can have their own following. They can communicate in their own ways. They can communicate to their own audiences. But social media as with any other marketing you need a strategy, it needs to be aligned, it has to be like we talk about Adobe have a sensible funnel. How are you pulling people through? How are they communicating with your brand?
And so making sure that you have to be careful not to squash the way that people like to talk in social media but you have to still make sure it's you and them, you have to make sure it's the way they want to talk. But if they're aligned across a common brand and across a common goal is going to be a lot more effective for your company and drive to an ultimate conversion.
And so here's an example that they learned in Latin America. They had 34 different social media accounts were basically doing what probably many of us have done. They see hey their new social media like Pinterest or Google Plus, whatever the latest social media things to come out is. Hey they open up a new account, now we're on that, now we have our brand on that. But the only problem is are you really nurturing that? Are you really interacting with their customers?
And I like to think of a new social media account as giving birth to a baby right? So give birth to a baby it's not just here we've got this new baby, and here we've got a one-year-old, you are dedicated to that new human being for the rest of your life. So before you start on any new hot social media platform, don't just think about it going to be as fun as a one-year-old, it's going to be as fun as a two-year-old, we're going to have such cute little outfits from the baby shower. Think about am I really committed? Am I really going to be this dedicated throughout the entire life of that baby?
Markey: No abandoned babies.
Burstein: No abandoned babies.
Markey: The worse as we see some kind of a Twitter feed or something that's just absolutely dead you know? And it just has no interaction and it obviously reflects poorly on the brand.
Burstein: So if they do that to their Twitter feed how are they going to treat me as a customer? And so this was a six-month process for SAP in Latin America and a shutdown 24 accounts and so they ended up just having some key accounts and Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Those were their key social media platforms that were working for them and they also went to as you can see only 20% promo info, 80% actual value added info, and a saw some pretty impressive results.
Markey: Great! So the next point we're going to go through is really going to relate to your audience. This particularly was about using personas to identify with site visitors. This particular case study was from One Call Now, Jacob Baldwin, who also presented at our Lead Generation Summit and what he was really focus on, it was a redesign of their site, they did some search marketing optimization, and also some content development.
So he was focused on creating a page structure that accommodates customer interest and what particular customers you have. So they have a group they sat down and tried to figure out where who were our key customers and who are the kind of four key personas. And they brought some fun into it so they didn't just say these kinds of people. They actually call it the stock project and connected the humanistic, the methodical, the competitive and the spontaneous.
So the person that connects better with case study stories about people who use the product versus those who want feature matrixes and details and specs and things versus comparison charts and then spontaneous I want to buy right now. So what they did was sort of determine that was there for kind of buckets and then consider what kinds of purchase experience and then also what kind of content those people want. So is it testimonials and stories about customer success? Is it pricing information and comparing and contrasting with their competitors? Or just get me in and I want to purchase right away?
So then they actually designed their funnels around this so you can see right there they've got the content and they've got that call-to-action just a simple buy now there for the person that just I'm ready to go. Whereas you can get a sample message or do they free trial if you need a little bit more time.
This is an example of that person wants to learn about the facts and what are all of the details? These are case studies. It's getting into the nuts and bolts of it and then of course the more humanistic side. So here's the story of a customer who's used our tool, who’s used our product and this is how they've managed to benefit from that. So just different kinds of approaches based on your personas and there's another webinar and I don't know if I'm going to tweet it out, but about the call-to-action phase. They did a lot of testing around that. So considering your personas even when it comes to calls-to-action. So speaking of testing …
Burstein: Speaking of testing, yeah. If you don't know where to get started email is a great way to get started testing if aren't already doing A/B testing, if you aren't already doing split testing. Again it's another great way to bring back your customers and what really works with your customers. So we had Amelia Showalter, the Director of Analytics of Obama for America. Obama's 2012 presidential campaign on webinar. We also had her speak at our optimization seminar with Toby Fallsgraff, the Director of Email Marketing from that campaign. And they shared that for that campaign that A/B testing helped to generate $500 million in donations which is just through the roof.
Markey: Wow.
Burstein: So I want to give you a few quick takeaways about testing to help you learn and again you some of these lessons. Go to MECLABS.com/contest and enter our own subject line writing contest and maybe we'll see you at Email Summit. So for that campaign here is an example of the big difference in sending the best and the worst possible subject lines in their test and you can see for some of them several hundred thousand dollars for some of them it gotten to the million dollar range. That's the difference from sending the best or the worst subject line.
If they would have guessed they would have been missing out on a lot of revenue. So there were some very, very big increases but sometimes they were just small increases, right? So in this example you see a control and a test and in here just improving 1% or 2% here and there they found that over time it really added up and gave some good results.
So if you're not seeing the 100%, 200% some of the really big increases we talk about here on these webinars every day, we also don't want you to feel like your work is for not. Keep going at it, keep testing and as you learn about your customers that kind of stuff wind up over time.
They also and I thought this was really interesting, they tested everything, right? So we have a simple contest around subject line testing, that's probably the easiest place to get started. They even testing their footer, right? And why that's so important is because that's often where we have the unsubscribe.
Markey: Unsubscribe.
Burstein: So they're testing to see what was most effective on keeping unsubscribes to a minimum while of course keeping compliant with CAN-SPAM and some of those things. They tested even personalization of email. So as we all know relevance equals results, right? The more relevant our email is to our audience, the better the results are going to get.
But at the same time we've been hearing that our audience is worried about privacy concerns, are worried about us marketers and the government knowing too much about them so they test it. "Hey," the first name, does it the first name help or hurt? They tested if we show the specific amounts of money they donated you can see that it says donated $61. If we show that we have that information, is that going to help or hurt? And it did, it helped improve their conversions.
And again, subject line testing was big and this is really surprising to us that hey, was the top very effective subject line for them, right? They would've only known that by testing. We would never think hey wasn't effective subject line. Actually on the webinar leading up to that webinar we also at MarketingSherpa tested hey as a subject line for that webinar. Really I just want to give Amelia Showalter a hard time and say the subject line doesn’t work for everything. It failed for us. I thought it will fail miserably …
Markey: It won.
Burstein: Won by a lot. It just goes to show you might learn some surprising things when you test and so you can see here from testing the subject line and I mean we're talking millions of dollars. So obviously it's a very big list, very big campaign, very big results, but even in your own campaigns, it can help a lot. How can testing help us by finding better words to use?
Markey: Yeah, so using words like hey or $61 or whatever else. Using PPC ads so Daniel mentioned about email, PPCs also are a great way to do some testing. I know we've talked before about using PPC to uncover messaging and the same way that you've uncovered things through social media that people are more engaged with this kind of thing, this kind of photo, these keywords. So really looking at paid advertising to understand the psychological impact of different words on your customer in your prospects.
So here's an example, this is testing a variety of different ads for addiction treatment centers. So this is CRC Health Jon Ciampi who spoke with Daniel in a webinar earlier this year and he looked at a variety of different … they ran a lot of PPC ads. These are the highest performing branded ads on the left and the lowest performing branded ads on the right. And you’ll notice that these two ads that are circled are almost exactly the same. The only difference really is the word "center" and the word "clinic" which most of us wouldn't really consider to be that different, but what they found was actually because of that three times difference in clickthrough rate.
"Clinic" seemed to be something that people considered to be cheap, quick, informal, less educated personnel. Where a center was much more of a holistic name that represented excellence and expertise and research and much more formal. So someone who's writing at these whether it's PPC or any of your creative or advertising you may not think so hard about a single world like that, but it can have a huge impact of the psychology of your customer. Obviously they learned a lot from that and enrolled that across a lot of the other campaigns.
Here's a test that Jon also shared with us. This was particularly around again PPC ads, but which one will obtain the most clickthrough rates and a kind of took two different approaches using sort of a different value proposition approach. So this was the control. This was the PPC ad they had been running so it was a company logic driven ad which means that it was focusing on what do you think about ourselves which in this case was we have the most doctors, we have the best care.
So the branded version was considered a top recovery clinic and a free assessment, whereas the non-branded was about the luxury and the high ratio of staff to patients. So then they tried a version that was customer logic driven which when they kind of dug into it and I know they considered trust to be a really core principle of what they offer. Really it wasn't about the number of doctors, it was more about I need somebody to take care of my loved one who's in a really tough spot right now.
So they did versions of the ad that used things like traditional alternative therapies, considered a top clinic, that sort of thing. And they found absolutely astonishing. Daniel mentioned about big results. I don’t think I've ever seen anything like this. 14,000% increase in clickthrough rate for branded ads. And still over 3,000% increase for those non-branded ads.
So really by understanding things like center versus clinic or presenting something that's customer logic driven instead of what you think is so great about you. Things like this, you've just got to really think again before you just put any old ad up there.
Burstein: And messaging is so important to marketing and just a few little changes can have such a huge impact.
With that, we are all out of time. I hope you enjoyed the fast and furious look at 2013 that you asked for. We're going to be on hiatus until mid-January but please join us next year or more MarketingSherpa webinars. We've already got some great case studies lined up for brand-side marketers. We have a case study with an e-commerce company which totally reinvented their marketing because Google changed how they're getting search traffic so they have this awesome personalization engine they created.
We have an IT B2B company who had this really fun zombie campaign that they used to get people to care more about their availability solutions in IT. We're going to have much more throughout the year.
Thanks for joining us in 2013.
