Learn how to test and reject your own marketing intuition

I had an interesting experience at the office today. My SEO lead was working with my paid search lead to pull together some paid search keyword conversion data that we plan on leveraging to prioritize SEO efforts. One of the keywords that showed up on this particular report was “epilator.” I’d never heard of this word before today and didn’t even know it was part of our keyword portfolio (don’t judge unless you manage a really really big keyword list and know every single word by heart) but that’s not really the remarkable part.

What’s remarkable is that despite not actually selling any epilators we actually convert at a fairly high clip when we serve paid search ads for this keyword. We do sell something called a NoNo that’s similar to an epilator but we don’t have any actual epilators and we certainly don’t have a broad selection of brands and models of epilators.

This is a highly counter-intuitive set of empirical data. It goes against the grain of mainstream, “common sense” paid search marketing best practices that dictate strong assortment – or any assortment for that matter – as a prerequisite to favorable conversion. And yet there it is, staring at me, mockingly laughing at my intuition.

I love these moments, because they often signal an opportunity for true innovation and competitive differentiation.

Mind you, this doesn’t signal a paradigm shift in the way that we manage our paid search keyword portfolio. It doesn’t mean that we’re suddenly going to drop everything and start focusing on ranking organically for the term “epilator.” It just means that we’ve found a potential pattern in the big data logjam that is modern-day digital marketing that goes against traditional best practices and opens the door to measurably incremental ROI.

And that’s what enterprise digital marketing strategy is all about in my book