Testing. Many a marketer has thrown around the term multi-variate testing without being entirely sure what it is or whether it's within their reach. This is one of those areas that doesn't have to be complicated. It just means slowing down enough to confirm the testing construct and agree on what shall be tested. I think it gets complicated out of fear or lack of sureness on the best way forward.
It's one thing to have a matrix and another to have a robust testing system that allows you to auto-optimize based on results. Knowing where to start and how to scale means keeping everyone on board true to your intentions. If you haven't done the "slowing down" thing and taken the time to truly organize the situation at the outset and sync up on those intentions, your life as you know it will get muddied by a chaotic data picture.
Landing pages. This remains one of the most delicate, slow-to-adapt, aspects of digital marketing work. This is often due to all the interests involved on a website: sales, marketing, editorial, community, ad operations, merchandising, IT, and so on. The savvy marketer knows that the best landing pages deliver on brand, promise, relevancy and a swift path to conversation.
Data and site analytics often reveal the need for tuning or overhaul to service any of those requirements. And such change is not always easy to negotiate in a pool of cross-department interests that may not be as aligned as they should be when it comes to the site.
Further, if you want to engage in testing and optimization, there's no time for consensus-building on the fly. That has to happen up front, getting parties to agree that landing pages will be tested, tuned, overhauled, swapped and generally optimized to service shared business and marketing objectives. Yes, the thought of making that happen in your organization makes your eyelashes wilt.
Cross-media and custom metrics. In today's converged media world, establishing metrics is not as simple as rattling them off based on your marketing objectives. If you are crossing traditional and digital lines, you are dealing with measures that are not necessarily portable.
And, anymore, a real picture of your performance across key measures, customer segments and in service of different departments requires cross-referencing data and establishing custom metrics. Not every brain can deal with custom metrics. Hire or engage your talent well.