What happens after an athlete works so hard; is so focused; devotes his or her entire life and being to the one moment when they win Olympic gold… Then what?

Many athletes train for years, reach the apex of their careers during the Olympics and then crash. After the peak of competition is over and the highs of winning, commercial endorsements, sponsors, and the excitement dies down, according to experts, depression sets in. This is known as post-competition depression.

Is this the same as what sometimes happens after getting a breakthrough improvement on the website conversion rate?

OK, this idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds. But let me back up first.

Many athletes spend years preparing for a narrow window of opportunity such as the Olympics. Intense preparation, daily practice and adjusting life to meet the sport’s needs dominate the athlete’s life. Then, after the Olympics, the elite athlete often loses her or his sense of purpose – often experiencing depression if unprepared for the transition.

For example, in a recent interview, Victoria Pendleton (who was part of a Great Britain track cycling team that dominated the velodrome in Beijing, won the Olympic gold medal in the women’s sprint track cycling event) said “You have all this build-up for one day, and when it’s over, it’s: ‘Oh, is that it?’ You’re relieved but kind of sad and numb. It’s over.” The pressure is enormous. “People think it’s hard when you lose,” she said. “But it’s almost easier to come second because you have something to aim for when you finish. When you win, you suddenly feel lost.”

Failing to meet a goal most certainly is disappointing, writes coach Dean Henbert. And it is absolutely normal to have an emotional reaction to that. “When an elite athlete fails at a goal, they tend to pick themselves up and continue the fight after a very short time. Even in the case of epic failures, we have all seen renewed focus and energy to either persist and attack once again that race goal or to fervently pursue OTHER goals.” Contrast that to the successful endeavour. The elite athlete labors a lifetime to get to the Olympics. Suddenly it’s race day. All the preparation pays off. You did it!

And now what?

Such a reaction is natural, according to Mark Bawden, the lead performance psychologist at the English Institute of Sport. “To win an Olympic gold is a life-changing moment, but then there is a crash back to reality,” he said. “It can be as powerful an experience to come down from success as coping with adversity.”

So why am I thinking this has anything at all to do with Conversion Optimization?

First, let me say this: Marketers who move beyond the well-travelled path and embrace conversion optimization and other metrics-driven marketing strategies are elite marketers. Like elite athletes, they spend years preparing well thought out and executed marketing strategies and tactics. They know, as well as any expert knows, that stellar results call for practice and focus and the mastering of skills. It takes 10000 hours of practice. There are no shortcuts.

When these elite marketers do not get the results they seek; they refocus and try again. And again and again.

However, sometimes in our work we see that, after a wildly successful breakthrough, elite marketers in companies engaged in improving their online conversion rate stop altogether. After all their thought-leadership, their work and their push towards excellence on the website, nothing. No more tests. That’s it.

I have often wondered why that was – until today.

It now seems to me that these elite marketers are not seeing conversion optimization correctly: they see breakthroughs in conversion lift as their Olympic event. That is, the test is a one-time event. As a result, once a breakthrough conversion rate lift is attained there is no more to strive for. The Gold, so to speak, has been won.

But Conversion Optimization isn’t like an Olympic event at all.

Instead, Conversion Optimization is an ongoing strategy, perhaps more like a marathon (if I absolutely must continue with the sports analogies). Conversion Optimization is a strategy which sees the website as a capital asset that has to be improved. Again and again. Because customers change. Because products and value propositions change. And because the competitive landscape continually changes.

How to re-focus Conversion Optimization thinking to “strategy”?

Interestingly enough, the research on post-competition depression in elite athletes says that the person who is most likely to experience this is more often than not, the first-timer and that, a major reason for the loss and lack of motivation is that the elite athlete forgets to set the next goal.

In other words, inexperience and lack of goal-setting will do you in.

So, as an elite marketer, you need to remember that purpose and goals focus our behavior and thoughts.

You have won Gold. Now do it again.

PS. Yes, Canada won Olympic Gold in Hockey (and this blog post took me longer to write than the seven minutes and 40 seconds into the extra period that it took Crosby to score)

How does an organization like Disney create such a remarkable reputation? What can we learn from it?

On a recent family visit to Disneyland, I aimed to gather clues to their success. As with each visit (this being the fourth in as many years) I was again impressed by the organization’s quality of execution.

What can Disneyland teach us about experience optimization?

“Walt Disney made it clear we could never rest on our laurels, so continuous improvement has been an integral part of our culture”
- Julie Hodges, Vice President, Organization and Professional Development, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. (source)

Here are a few observations that were good reminders for me.

Systematize for contingencies
It rained for the first hour of our three-day visit to the Park. While we grabbed breakfast at a Disney bakery, I watched as the rain-contingency plans were executed.

During a rain spell, souvenir shops are instantly transformed into rain-preparation shops with ponchos, umbrella hats and stroller covers appearing at the front of the stores.

As soon as the clouds passed, a “Cast Member” with a squeegee the size of an industrial broom pushed the water off the deck in an efficient pattern beginning with the highest traffic areas.

It wasn’t until then that I noticed that the pavement texture throughout the Park was selected to provide texture for wet grip and yet be smooth enough for an effortless squeegee.

The secret here is that no discussion is needed when rain happens. Everyone knows the plan and it is executed quickly.

• Does everyone on your team know exactly what to do when the inevitable challenges happen?
• Do you have written and rehearsed contingency plans?

Communicate with personality (always be in character)

Communicate with
personality

Disney uses each interaction to reinforce the brand. For example, imagine the traumatic experience of parents being separated from their child in the Park. The “lost parents” area at Disneyland reminds us that: a. the kids are in charge, b. everyone is safe, c. even a terrifying event can be turned into fun.

• What is your communication personality? Fun, precise, innovative, empathetic, trustworthy, formal, knowledgeable, refined, aggressive, personable? Pick 2-3 and set the tone for the organization.

Manage expectations

Manage expectations

In the high season, wait times for popular rides are notoriously long. Disneyland manages expectations by posting wait times at the front of the line that are a little more than the actual wait times.

• Are you setting expectations that you can’t meet or not setting expectations at all?
• If you promise a 24 hour response time, why not have a real response time of 2 hours?
• If you have shipping costs, why not tell your visitors before they get to the shopping cart?

Turn downsides around
You would be surprised if you calculated the ratio of ride to waiting ratio at Disneyland. One of their greatest innovations has been making lineups nearly enjoyable with themed audio & video surroundings. The themed waiting experience adds to a sense to anticipation rather than boredom.

• Do you know what the biggest pain points are for your customers’ experience with you? How can you turn them into a benefit?
• Can longer delivery times equal better quality, like a fine restaurant?

Segment your audience
For the “professional riders” that aren’t interested in the lineup experience, they’ve added the “Fast Pass” system. You have the option of taking a Fast Pass from each ride, which gives you a time of the day to return and move to the front of the line. If you’re an adrenaline enthusiast, you can play the system and minimize your wait times.

The more relaxed visitors can still enjoy the themed lineups at their leisure.

• Can you segment your experience to appeal to major visitor segments or personas?

Provide a consistent experience every time

Consistent experience

Disneyland doesn’t have “bad days”. They make every day feel special with parades, special characters and full ride service. Have you noticed the street litter at Disneyland? There is none!

If you have a services business, you know that consistency of service is one of the biggest challenges. Nobody is “on” every day, right?

Disneyland has found the most reliable way to increase consistency: acting. Their staff are called “Cast Members” and they are trained to perform every moment that they are in the park. This isn’t just a job; it’s a performance. When you perform, you can ignore how you’re feeling and put on a different persona.

Frame your value proposition
Disneyland doesn’t just provide rides and attractions; they provide an interactive theatre experience. It is an escape into an fairy-tale world. Their ride planners are called “Imagineers” and their staff are “Cast Members”.

With this perspective they consequently need to pay attention to the details. To provide an escapist experience, there can be no holes in the canvas, and that is what makes Disneyland so spectacular.

• What need are you actually filling for your customers?
• Do you provide rides, or an escape from reality?
• 2″ drill bits or 2″ holes?
• Retail clothing or “looking great”?
• Business software or “looking indispensable”?

Be extraordinary
When Disneyland creates a fireworks show, it’s like nothing you’ve seen before. They don’t just light some off-the-shelf fireworks timed to some music. They invent new ways of using fireworks to tell their story. They mix, lasers, surround fireworks to colour the sky, actors suspended from high wires, projections onto buildings, flame torches and custom- designed fireworks. There’s a standard of excellence that they won’t compromise.

Commit to Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement

Imagine if you had created a “Magic Kingdom” that was the pioneer and envy of all worldwide theme parks. Would you feel motivated to tear up a ride and build a new one?

Much like the WiderFunnel Kaizen Method for Website Optimization, Disneyland is continuously improving and updating the experience. They survey visitors year-round to learn which rides are attracting visitors to the Park, and they continuously “Imagineer” new ones. There’s even a building that shows their development plans and sketches for the next three years.

• Are you too comfortable with your current level of success?
• How can you foster new ideas that could shake up the status quo for your website experience?

Have fun!
You can’t leave Disneyland without being inspired to have fun.

Life is too inexplicable, random and short to take too seriously. A scientific approach to continuous improvement should not remove the wonder and excitement of life’s discoveries. Disneyland shows that discipline and fun can live under the same roof.

For example, in a controversial article in AdAge late last week entitled ‘Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead’, Ana Andjelic, a freelance strategist whose Ph.D. dissertation was on digital branding, presents a model that separates digital from traditional agencies based on organizational theorist James March’s Exploration vs. Exploitation dichotomy.

(In case you, like me, aren’t up to speed on this subject, here is a handy definition of Exploration vs. Exploitation: |n essence, discovering new possibilities, conducting research, varying product lines, risk taking, innovation all fall under the realm of Exploration. On the other hand, Exploitation involves the refinement of current procedures: efficiency, production, execution, and so forth… Exploration is a long-term process, with a risky, uncertain outcome. Exploitation by contrast is short-term, with immediate, relatively certain benefits. Organizations face the problem of allocating resources between Exploration and Exploitation. Based on this model, the best companies have the optimal balance between Exploration and Exploitation; those less successful are doing too much of either.)

Using this model, digital agencies are considered as excelling at Exploration (i.e., impress clients with their passion, drive and technology know-how but cannot follow through) and traditional agencies as thriving on Exploitation (i.e., are risk-averse, accountable and systematic, but able to deliver).

What the troops are saying

What made this online article so interesting for me were the over 92 comments posted as of the time of me writing this post (worth reading here. There is passion as well as bile in those comments!).

The comments were posted mostly (I am guessing from the tone and content) by representatives of traditional agencies as well as digital, and range from well articulated and thoughtful to fringe and faltering.

However, they all missed the point: the comments are mostly self-serving and focus on who is more deserving of the client’s attention (and budget) and not on who delivers most value to the client.

This is wrong because deserving to be at the table and leading the marketing charge should only be a function of who delivers most value to the client.

As long as both digital and traditional agencies continue to recommend strategies that align with their own profitability model and not their client’s, there will be no resolution of the debate.

And the client’s role?

The client is only too often silent. The job of delivering greater value is enabled by the client’s understanding of its own business model and value proposition. And this means that the Marketing suite needs to move beyond “brand obsession” to a deep understanding of the company’s business model, as well as an understanding of the agency’s own profitability model.

As we have blogged in the past:

• Marketing has no real say within most top organizations

• There exists a big disconnect between what advertisers and what consumers believe works when it comes to marketing

In our experience, we see it as the marketing client’s role to define the business objectives in order to optimize profitability and then hire the right agency or agencies to deliver on those objectives.

Plus, clients need to be vigilant about aligning their needs with the right service suppliers who can not only service them properly but remain in business doing so for the long haul.

Only this way will the right agency type be ready to lead.

Why is Iceland a happy place? According to Eric Weiner, the author of The Geography of Bliss, Icelanders, culture doesn’t stigmatize failure. Icelanders are not afraid to fail — or to be imperfect — and so they are more willing to pursue what they enjoy.

That is one reason Iceland has more artists per capita than any other nation (OK, so here is where Björk comes in). “There’s no one on the island telling them they’re not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write,” Weiner writes.

This attitude makes Icelanders more productive. Instead of just sitting around thinking they would like to do something, they just do it. They are not perfectionists who only attempt to do things they know themselves to be good at.

In other words, paradoxically, it seems that perfectionism is a curse if one really and truly wants to do something perfectly.

Peter Bregman, in an HBR blog post, writes: “Perfectionists have a hard time starting things and an even harder time finishing them. At the beginning, it’s they who aren’t ready. At the end, it’s their product that’s not. So either they don’t start the screenplay or it sits in their drawer for ten years because they don’t want to show it to anyone.”

How Marketers aren’t like Icelanders

The way most marketers run their jobs, in my observation, is through “hope-driven leaps of faith” where they plan and execute a campaign and then pray that (a) The campaign works, and (b) Others think the campaign worked (not always the same thing). In all of this, little business value gets measured.

In other words, in this model there is no room to risk failure; no room to try something new and be imperfect — because the outcomes of failure are dismal.

This model makes marketers less productive and reinforces the perfectionist paradox of attempting only to do things they *know* will work. Of course, this approach is frustrating and limits marketers’ creativity to those initiatives they feel are highly likely to succeed — or at least be considered successful.

And here is where Landing Page Optimization comes in to make you happy.

Landing Page Testing for improved conversions is not about perfection. It is about seeing a problem (i.e., low conversion rates) and then trying many, many things out – until the problem is solved.

Yes, sometimes some test variations will fail. That is OK. By testing in a controlled environment, marketers will learn something (i.e., what did not work) and mitigate future risk by eliminating what didn’t work from the toolkit next time.

Having a test variation or two underperform against the Control does not mean failure. It means learning.

Of course, testing will also lead to successes, many successes. This is because at least some of the test variations will actually improve the conversion rate – and will do so measurably. And the measurement aspect will help the marketer shift the discussion away from opinions towards data – and in turn will deliver opportunities for further improvement.

So this is how Landing Page Optimization and testing makes marketers happier people: testing doesn’t stigmatize failure. Marketers become less afraid to fail — or to be imperfect — and so they are more willing to pursue what they enjoy and become more productive (always highly valuable but particularly in this economy).

In essence, the two groups pretty much disagree on everything.

Basically, advertisers and consumers both agree that “amusing ads are effective and scary and guilt-inducing ads are not,” but they don’t see eye-to-eye on the efficacy of other types of advertising appeals.

But that is not all, the two groups also clash when it comes to online ad formats – prompting the report writers to ‘warn’ that the growing trend toward internet advertising in the face of large numbers of frustrated consumers “may eventually cause a backlash.”

Here are a few examples of ad types and their perceived efficacy:

• While more than half of advertisers believe ads that make people stop and think (53%) and ads that give people new information (51%) are very effective, just three in ten consumers (30% and 29% respectively) feel the same.

• 26% of advertisers think ads that are integrated into the feel of the program, that is has the same tone as the program it is based in, are very effective compared with just 7% of consumers.

• When it comes to ads that show before/after, 24% of advertisers say they are very effective while 13% of consumers say they are very effective.

• One in five advertisers (21%) say ads that reinforce a message already known are very effective, compared with only 10% of consumers.

• Consumers and advertisers both like ads that amuse.

• More than one-third (34%) of consumers and 41% of advertisers say entertaining ads are very effective, and one-third of both consumers (33%) and advertisers (32%) say funny ads are very effective.

• However, there is a fine line in amusement as just one in ten consumers (11%) and 14% of advertisers say ads that don’t take themselves seriously are very effective. Almost one in five consumers (18%) say these ads are not at all effective.

• 41% of consumers (41%) 32% of advertisers believe that scary ads are not at all effective.

• 27% of consumers and 18% of advertisers say ads about a serious topic that make people feel guilty are not at all effective.

And what about messaging? Apparently, there is a huge disconnect here too:

• Two in five advertisers (39%) are using empathy approaches, attempting to convey that companies understand what consumers are going through. But only one-quarter of consumers (24%) say empathy works very or somewhat well, and one-third (33%) say it does not work at all.

• One-fourth of advertisers (25%) say they are using cheerleading (”we’ve made it through tough times before, we’ll do it again, and we can help you do it.”) Almost two in five (38%) of consumers, however, say that these types of ads do not work at all.

What do Recession Consumers Like? Value Propositions

The study also examined the perceived effectiveness of ads currently being used to address the economic crisis, and revealed that value proposition strategies and “luxuries for less” approaches resonate most with consumers.

• Three in five advertisers (61%) say they are using a value proposition strategy, promoting sales, coupons and discounts and almost three in five consumers (57%) say that this strategy is working very well or well to help them sell their products or services.

• But less than one in five advertisers (18%) say they are using the “luxuries for less” proposition, while more than one-third of consumers (34%) say these types of ads work very well or well in selling products or services

As if this wasn’t bad enough, there is more.

While compared to last year, advertisers now rely less on print ads and more on Internet and Digital ads – but they are taking ads in the wrong direction.

According to another LinkedIn/Harris Poll, consumers are frustrated with many characteristics of Internet advertising.

So what do consumers dislike? The list is long:

Most hated:
• Pop-ups
• Ads that are “moused over”
• Difficult-to-close ads
• Musical ads

Next come…

• Ads that spread across the page and cover the content beneath them are the most vexing for consumers, with 80% of respondents in the study deeming these types to be very frustrating.

• Ads on which consumers can’t find the skip or close button are a close second, with 79% of respondents similarly annoyed, the survey found.

The study concluded the growing trend toward internet advertising in the face of large numbers of frustrated consumers may eventually cause a backlash and suggests that advertisers who come up with more engaging ways to connect with consumers will ultimately be the most successful.

There is lots of food for thought here for advertisers unleashing agencies to create ads.

Leaving aside the issue of how you as a businessperson define “what works” — especially in the context of branding and not conversions — these finding suggest a tremendous need to corral creativity to deliver on what the consumer will respond to and not to what the creative powers-that-be desire to create.

(The findings are of note because, even though the sample size was small and no margin of error is reported, respondents included two significant audiences: CMOs and other C-suite professionals who hold roles in advertising, marketing, and other media, and senior-level executives defined as director or above who hold roles in advertising, marketing, or media from the Forbes Advisory Panel, an opt-in panel of senior executive Forbes subscribers surveyed regularly on business trends, ideas, and issues.)

When asked to identify the most important metrics that indicate the success of their digital marketing campaigns, 82% percent of those with budgets over $1 million cite conversion or sales.

Further, respondents to the survey said the most effective tools for generating conversions, such as a sale, are:

• Search engine optimization (48%)

• e-mail marketing (46%)

• Pay-per-click search marketing (32%)

Other metrics tracked include:

• 52% say registration or subscriptions via an advertiser’s Web site

• 49% point to click-throughs

• 34% identify boost in search rank is important

Plus, respondents appreciate the halo effect that a website or publication can have on their brand: 43% said that sponsoring a website, page or digital publication is the most effective digital tool when it comes to affecting brand perceptions

The study also reveals some early warning signs for a few tactics, such as behavioral targeting and Ad Networks:

• 82% of respondents say they are concerned about the effectiveness of behavioral targeting

• 81% say they are concerned about customer backlash in response to the practice

Respondents were by far the least happy with Ad networks, with half saying that the results did not meet expectations, and identify Ad networks as likely see the biggest decline in share of marketing budgets.