Monday, September 14, 2009

Fast & Easy Focus Group Testing

There are several factors to consider when improving conversion of your marketing material. We often talk about Website conversion but any marketing material involves some type of conversion. Granted some conversion is harder to test and measure than others. One aspect of most marketing items includes graphics.

We advocate that you should test everything and test often. It’s not always easy to do. We did find a cool site that allows you to test your graphics. You can upload any jpg, gif or png. You can test the graphic or do a screen shot and test a landing page or print material.

The site is www.fivesecondtest.com and you can join for free and have others test your graphic. You can get a fast reality check which acts like a mini focus group.

You just upload your image and select if you want a classic test (someone views the graphic for 5 seconds and list five things they recall). Or your can do a click test (someone views the graphic, clicks on the first thing that catches their interest and then describe what they click on). It’s that easy.

You can email, the list or post them on Twitter or Facebook. You then view the responses. We’re experimenting with the program now and find it to be very interesting. Its worth trying.

We often test images to see which image we should use in a campaign, Web page, advertisement etc. Our test includes focus groups and online surveys. These test combined with fivesecondtest can give you valuable incite to your images.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Executives and Social Media

Social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. are all extremely popular and companies are trying to get a handle on how to use them. There is an interesting article today in eMarketer about Executives and Social Media.

Apparently, according to research by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law, 8 in 10 management, marketing and HR executives cited relationship and brand building as the primary benefits of social media. So, should you jump on the band wagon and implement a social media strategy and let all your employees tweet away? Not so fast. Reading on in the article you’ll see that a Sophos, a security software company, found that 50 to 60% of companies studied blocked access to social networking sites from the workplace. They sited productivity and security as the primary reasons. So if most companies are blocking social sites who are you reaching?

Like anything else you need to look at the situation and study it. Then develop a strategy for your company or organization. Social media is growing and will continue to do so. There are plenty of reasons why you should consider using LinkedIn and other sites. Like any other marketing tool always be testing. What works today for social media may not work tomorrow. There is definitely a marketing power of Twitter and other sites so explore, experiment, test.