Posts tagged testing
Labor Day is the Unofficial Start to…
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
I’ll finish that title, Labor Day is the unofficial start to…the ski resort marketing season.
In the years I’ve worked in ski resort marketing I’ve often wondered a bit about why we started each winter’s marketing cycle when we did. Much of it has been related to the timing of the ski vertical publications – anyone checked circulation numbers lately? Much has also been related to traditional lead times of vacation rental bookings – anyone seen how short lead times have gotten over the past several years? A lot of timing has also been tied to the idea that Labor Day weekend is the “traditional end of summer” and that if a resort is first to market that they may seem some sort of bump in brand awareness and hopefully business over the coming season. Does any of this still hold true, and when is the ideal time for resorts to start their marketing as well as PR efforts?
Certain things like mountain improvement announcements are usually announced earlier in the summer. This is then followed by special package deals for select time frames around Labor Day Weekend. Season pass sales typically are pushed anywhere from mid-summer up through Labor Day weekend. And you can count on a big blitz of PR and marketing as soon as the first major snow storms pass blanket the mountain tops.
I think that the best time for each resort to start their marketing efforts is different, depending upon who their target audience is and therefore upon when their target audience begins to think about their winter plans. I also think that it’s integral in today’s integrated marketing environment to continually test to see if what you thought was the right time might be wrong and vice versa – see my post on testing for more.
This is also topic that we will discuss on #mrktchat tomorrow, so please stop by on Twitter at 3pm MST and tell us what you think Labor Day weekend is the unofficial start of – or just let us know in the comments on this post.
Photo credit: Flickr user iwouldstay
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Do you test?
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
By asking “Do you test?” I mean, do you do A/B or multivariate testing online – whether it’s on your website, email, online ads or social networks? I know that we’re all busy with various projects, writing content, updating backends and the like, but testing is a sure fire way to show that you’re doing your job as an online marketer by demonstrating that what might seem like simple changes can really make a difference to a stated goal.
A wonderful website to see the impact of online teting is a website called Anne Holland’s Which Test Won? One of my favorite tests from the site is one in which Delta tested a form vs a grid, this one was a bit obvious to me (particularly as a fairly frequent user of the Delta website), but there are tons more, along a new test to guess at each week.
As I’ve mentioned before, I look at this blog as a way to test various ideas for myself. An example of this is my posting schedule which I upped to once every other day earlier this summer. I’ve noticed that this has provided more views as well as more RSS views, but it’s still been limited to Monday through Friday with minimal traffic on the weekends. This isn’t unexpected as the topics I cover are ones that I think are more relevant to the work week. So, I’ve recently changed to posting on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to see if this schedule makes for more consistent traffic. Guess what this is – A TEST! 
We’ll see how it does in another month or so…I’m predicting the three posts per week schedule will have more consistent readership than once every other day – what do you think?!
Photo credit: Flickr user Horia Varlan
What do Ski Resorts Want from their Websites?
21 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
Every business that has any sort of a web presence should always be asking – “What do we want our visitors to do?” We know what we would do and we all probably think that we know what most of our visitors will do, but do we really?
Most ski resorts probably want their websites to help them sell lift tickets. Pretty simple, but how do they tell how well they’re succeeding at that? Probably by tracking their online sales and ideally even trying to tie offline sales to online actions – a basic way to do this is via customer surveys. The problem with this is that all of this is readily able to be tracked via analytics, probably even more accurately and in greater detail than most of us would imagine. Most of us have probably installed Google Analytics on our site and others may even have Omniture or another analytics package, but how many are holding ourselves accountable by continually setting goals and then testing different tacts to in order to improve consumers actions?
Here’s a quick example that I am currently testing right now on this very blog. Just over three weeks ago, I decided to up my posting frequency from about twice a week to every other day. The below Google Analytics chart shows that traffic was relatively even, had a big bump from a topical post, but then once my every other day schedule took effect, the visitation was markedly higher during the period when I was posting more frequently. This certainly is what I was hoping for and expecting, but now I can start to test different things, such as the best time of day to post, as well as the best way to promote by posts.
Click for full-size image.
The question then becomes, how do resort marketers use this sort of information to ‘do better’ on the web? I would suggest that they start by deciding what they want their site to do, find that metric in their analytics to determine a benchmark, and then start trying out different ideas to see which ones really to cause their visitors to do what the resort really wants on their website.
I highly recommend visiting the wonderful blog Occam’s Razor, written by the passionate and brilliant analytics guru Avinash Kaushik to learn more about the what, how, why and what else of web analytics. An additional resource that I’ve found quite valuable in finding insight into online marketing is the Marketing Profs site – on which I recently listened to a wonderful 90 webinar on Multi-Channel Analytics presented by none other than Avinash Kaushik.
