Lead Generation: Great results don’t always have to be complicated

By John Tackett On Apr 14, 2014

To discover what works best for generating leads in your organization, at some point, you eventually have to do two things:

Wade through enough trial and error until success is the only destination left
Keep the process as simple as possible on that journey to reach success

For Shawn Burns, Global Vice President of Digital Marketing, SAP, keeping the company’s testing simple was instrumental in helping SAP reach some of its goals of maximizing the ROI on existing marketing.

“We can complicate everything,” Shawn explained, “and when you’re in a testing environment and you start to think about navigation, templates, images, copy, colors and buttons, you just have to sort of stop and say ‘whoa’ – clear away the madness, take it step-by-step, do simple things and see what has an impact.”

Shawn’s focus on keeping SAP’s testing simple was also influenced by a need to apply those discoveries to growth in areas like mobile marketing. A simple testing approach and the lessons learned from the process would be highly beneficial in aiding SAP’s efforts to optimize its marketing in what is literally a pocket-sized medium.

“There are 2 million smartphones being activated every day on the planet, so all of us as marketers are having to deal with this incredibly [physically] tiny media channel,” Shawn said. “And so, you start to look at testing as, ‘how simple can I be?’”

In this brief excerpt from Shawn’s MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013 presentation, “5 Optimization Discoveries from the SAP Website Test Lab,” you can learn how small changes can make a big difference in your testing and lead generation optimization efforts.