It is the middle of December. You lead the marketing team at a health insurance company the venus factor review , no doubt spending a significant amount of your budget on performance media (PPC, Remarketing, Paid Social, Display, etc…) to meet your acquisition goals. The deadline for open enrollment is quickly approaching. Your team reports that your current performance media landing page designs are producing lackluster sign-ups, and they are certain growth can be accomplished with a new design. After a thorough competitive analysis, heated sessions with your internal marketing team, and recommendations from your digital agency, two new landing page designs are approved for development. Your team takes them straight to IT and lets them know the priority. The IT team comes back with the news that unfortunately, they are 4 weeks out from being able to push new content to the website due to the CMS development/release cycle. Most unfortunate, because the open enrollment period is over in two months and maximizing the online sign-ups is paramount to the organization’s success.
Successful performance marketing strategies are driven by taking immediate advantage of opportunities as they arise. When a competitor is all over the media due to a major security breach, delivering content around your spotless security record should be rolled out WHILE your competitor is still in the news. When you have a chance to increase your conversion rate during a time-sensitive open enrollment period, you need to be able to take advantage of the opportunity quickly, maximizing the number of new customers for your organization. Rolling out content at the right time is a primary factor in the success of performance media.
As a digital marketing agency, one question we commonly hear from our clients is “Which CMS should we choose? Our current solution requires too much custom development and we can never get anything done!” A Content Management System (CMS) can be an awesome tool (some more awesome than others) and there are a myriad of reasons why your organization should have one. With a CMS, you get a central framework allowing you to do various tasks including web content management. You can easily roll out your web content using your website templates at whatever release schedule the IT team sets up using a CMS.
Problems arise when you are trying to fit your performance marketing strategy into your CMS release cycle. Most CMS solutions require the help of your IT Department for any customization, and when your IT team can’t quickly roll out new landing pages due to a pipeline backup, you lose the ability to take advantage of the right time. You are paying for every single visitor to your website (more now than ever), and it is imperative that you make the most of each visit. Successful performance media landing pages, designed to effectively drive conversions, often need tweaking from existing website templates. Most content management systems cannot handle rolling out a quickly developed landing page in a custom template designed to correlate with a strategy that evolved due to market trends or opportunities.
How Can your Business Quickly Capitalize on Unexpected Opportunities?
One option would be to hire a front and back-end developer whose time is dedicated to the marketing team to ensure you can improve efficiency and launch in a timely manner. However, depending on your budgets, head count, and organizational structure, this can be a costly and still somewhat time-prohibitive solution. So how do you react to changes and opportunities across your performance marketing channels in a timely and effective manner?
The solution we at Parallel Path frequently recommend to our clients is simple. Create a subdomain of your website that is owned by the marketing team, not IT. Having access to a subdomain that is not managed through a CMS or other department allows for huge gains in efficiency and performance. Efficiency is key when working within performance media. Creating a subdomain that your marketing team can easily manage on their own circumvents the holdups frequently encountered when you utilize a CMS that only your backlogged IT department is equipped to manage, allowing you to easily create time-sensitive content/landing pages and push them out quickly.
Take Control
What messaging resonates? What templates work? What assets convert? Quickly finding the answers to these questions is key to increasing your conversion rate and should not depend on the adaptability (or lack thereof) of your CMS or IT teams. You know that setting up quality A/B landing page tests are crucial in helping you determine what performs. With your own subdomain, you can find these answers quickly and move on. Performance landing pages are not being used to increase your organic search traffic (as your core website pages should be), so don’t let the sub-domain idea scare you .
Stop the madness! No matter which CMS or internal team manages the release or development schedule at your organization it’s time marketing departments take ownership and control of every aspect of performance marketing (traffic acquisition, user engagement, & tracking). As a Marketing Executive, you depend on your agencies and internal teams to meet your plan for the quarter/year, so if when you break down the barriers associated with the limitations on growth, you and your organization can see the full value of performance media channels, and meet your growth goals.
Want to learn more about taking control of your CMS? Give us a call. 303.396.1111.