Marginal Gains – How Small Changes in Your Web Marketing Strategy Can Add Up to Big Gains

Marginal Gains – How Small Changes in Your Web Marketing Strategy Can Add Up to Big Gains

Many small changes in web marketing strategy lead to big overall gains.

The idea of “marginal gains,” that small efforts, when totaled together can make a big difference in your goals, is not a new one, but it’s still worth your notice. Dave Brailsford brought this guiding principle with him when accepting the position of Britain’s cycling director in 2009. At the time, the British team had yet to make an impact on the sport, despite decades of trying. Just three years later, however, the “marginal gains” concept led Britain to its first ever Tour de France victory – and the country’s second one a year later. If you never thought that small changes could bring big improvements to your marketing strategy, Brailsford’s achievements should make you reconsider.

A Small Idea with Big Impact

This philosophy’s focus on small, manageable changes is its greatest strength. The energy and budget you might have poured into a new marketing campaign works instead to break down the existing campaign into its components, allowing you to make small improvements in each area. When you reassemble your campaign, you find it vastly improved, despite a comparatively small investment in resources.

Bringing One Percent to Your Web Marketing Strategy

We love how WebDesignDepot’s Benjie Moss applied this idea to web design. He took Brailsford’s wise words, “If you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by one percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together,” and he played with finding the right one percent to tackle in web design. It naturally occurred to us that you could also apply this concept to a web marketing strategy for similar benefits.

To find areas most deserving of incremental improvements, Moss began toying with the idea of different types of “one percent” improvements that could offer big gains, such as:

• The Easy One Percent – There are endless small changes you can make to your marketing package when you focus on the little things -- those one-and-done changes that would fix problems you noticed after the campaign launched. Now’s your chance to remove that superfluous and distracting paragraph of copy you failed to see the first time.
• The Essential One Percent – Moss uses the idea of “essential” changes to represent the tiny details that can have a large impact on ease of use. Translated to your marketing messages, this could mean drilling down on your analytics with A/B testing to identify changes that can increase conversion rates, tweak that tagline to perfection or adjust the lighting that wasn’t quite perfect on your product images. Focus on the flow of information through your campaign to identify essential improvements that will redirect the flow of traffic towards your marketing goals.
• The Perfect One Percent - Here, Moss points out the enormous impact typography has on the reader’s perception of content. Tweaking typography is a one-percent improvement that makes your message, whether an ad, web page or blog entry, more readily absorbed by the audience. It’s about removing small imperfections that detract from your message’s focus.

Ask efelle’s creative team about ways to improve your web marketing strategy.

Whether using marginal gains or sticking with an “all-at-once” approach, efelle can help you improve the look, design and implementation of your marketing messages. Call us at 206.384.4909 or use our online contact form to arrange for a free web marketing consultation.