Don’t Celebrate The Launch

One of the hardest things to impress into clients, and even my own staff at times, is an urge to celebrate a launch…

…of a new Website

…of a new Landing Page

…of a new SEO campaign

…of a new PPC campaign

You get the idea.  We all love to celebrate a job being finished, but in online marketing, and in ALL marketing for that matter, the launch is NOT the time to celebrate.  Sure, go ahead, high-five each other for nailing the deadline, putting out good-looking work, or figuring out that complex issue, but do not get drunk in this celebration because you’ve only completed about 7% of the task.

If you really want to celebrate, save that for when the sales roll in.  I could care less about how a web site looks, reads, or acts until I start to see what it does in terms of sales.

We’ve got a new saying around here, it’s called NATO (Not Attached To Outcome).  Meaning, we never get “attached” to any website, campaign, or strategy in case we have to dump it for poor performance.  And folks – believe me – you will very rarely hit home runs from Day 1.  The real work is Days 2 through 9972.  If a campaign, site, or strategy is not cutting it, and tweaking it does not increase sales – it’s gone.  No funeral, no tears.  It’s gone.  Next idea, please.

When I wrote my book, Big Ticket eCommerce, I purposely boiled down my philosophy into 4 simple steps.

1. Strategy
2. Website
3. Traffic
4. Optimization

But even with 4 simple steps, people jump right into step 2 and then worry about step 3 once they have their site up.  Since my book came out, clients are coming to us much more prepared, and they know they need to start with step 1, and they are willing to sit down with us for a day and hammer this out.  They are patient to wait with us as we carefully plan, design, and blueprint a strategy to marry their business objectives into a well-defined website and traffic strategy, and then hand it over to us and wait for launch for several weeks.

If launch is Day 1, then Step 4 starts on Day 2, and this is the step that you never complete.  Sorry.  For you achievers that like to put the check marks in your planner for tasks completed, Step 4 is a step that you will never complete if you understand the concept of continuous improvement.  In the optimization stage we discover small, hidden, and powerful tweaks that turn losers into winners, average campaigns into excellent campaigns, low response into high response, and weak sales into strong sales.  Most people can’t stomach this, but you must if you want success.

You see – even if you get a campaign to a good ROI, if you don’t continually optimize, you will continually and eventually lose.  Every campaign and project that we’ve every worked on in which we’ve allowed it to “coast” has always regressed and needed to be propped back up.

This is where we really excel, and where tiny little hinges can swing big doors.  We track, report, and analyze campaigns every week and continually tweak, toss, or turn the strategy to improve them.

If you think it’s time for you to enter our 4-step program (Hey, we’re 300% easier than a 12-step program!), or you’ve completed steps 1-3 and want us to dig in with you into Step 4, I invite you to set up a call with our chief marketing officer to discuss how we can help you increase results and slash your advertising costs.  You won’t regret it.

Bob.

Popularity: 2%