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Create Analytics Reports For ALL Key Players

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So your organization has decided to delve into the world of digital analytics. You’ve done your research, talked to countless analytics professionals and consultants, and performed the song and dance to gain the support of the decision makers for measuring your campaigns. At this point you may be thinking that you are ready to hit the ground running, throwing analytics tracking tags every which way and setting up eye-catching dashboards and graphs. This is looking like a sure-fire thing, right?

Not So Fast!

Before you deploy your analytics tracking solution, let alone begin reporting, you’ll want to get a little more strategic. The beautiful thing about web analytics solutions is that they can be wielded to gather insights that will benefit virtually any department or role in an organization. It is important to understand, however, that even though these solutions can be very flexible and adaptable; this entirely depends on the measurement plan and reporting strategy that’s in place from the start. Laying a solid foundation in measurement is paramount to the success of all involved parties.

Regardless of what industry an organization is in, there are often multiple individuals with unique responsibilities when it comes to marketing and advertising. From marketing managers to copywriters to brand managers, the list can go on and on. Each one of these roles has their own set of responsibilities. With those responsibilities come unique challenges, which very well could be alleviated through increased visibility into marketing, website, and brand performance.

This is why it is a good idea to get these individuals into a room together during the early stages of measurement planning and laying out reports. These reporting capabilities may be great for your own purposes, but these benefits can extend well beyond that. Share the wealth!

Get The Wheels Turning

Now that you’ve rallied all of the right people together, it’s time to figure out what you will be reporting on and how you will be measuring it. I read a very interesting little blog recently that did a really great job of driving the point home that success with analytics comes from asking the right questions. Truer words have never been spoken. When meeting with your marketing, branding, and advertising personnel, be sure to get down to basics: Ask them what they think is a successful action a prospective customer can take in a campaign or on the site. Ask them what they deem as a valuable Key Performance Indicator. Their responses may not be ideal, but they will at least give you a direction to take when deciding what to measure, where to deploy tracking, and what to report on. This high-level feedback will also give you something to base those shiny visuals on when it comes time to develop graphs and performance dashboards.

One of the most important things to keep in mind during this entire process is that analytics reports can be extremely organic. Measurement models and reports can easily be altered to suit changing needs, campaigns, and marketing strategies over time. It might be a good idea to revisit this whole process quarterly or at least bi-annually to ensure that all of those data needs are still being met for ALL players. The key is to stay light on your analytical feet so you can anticipate and adapt accordingly.

What kinds of analytical challenges have you come up against in your organization? Leave us a comment and share your experience!

5 Lessons for Successful Internet Marketing

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Recently, I was reading an article in Advertising Age that highlighted the lessons from their CMO Strategy Summit. I would have to agree with the eight things that the article mentions, but I’ve created a modified list of 5 lessons that applied to internet marketing or digital advertising. Below are my 5 lessons that should be applied to internet marketing:

Challenging Internal Think

We need to challenge the “internal think” within our organization and marketing departments. In the world of internet marketing, the old ways of thinking need to be modified and must include collaboration. In order to be successful, many departments can no longer work in solos; otherwise campaigns are destined to fail. We must work together to identify the best solutions that help to achieve strategic goals & objectives. This shouldn’t just apply to agency clients but advertising agencies as well. Be sure to limit risk and identify opportunities to control them with challenging internal think.

Building Relations with PR, Finance and IT (be inclusive)

Don’t just get to know your CIO but also the heads of Public Relations, Communications, and Finance. Understand what they think about your approach challenge, and obtain feedback from them. Include your department heads into strategic discussions because everyone has a role to play with the marketing campaign. Be prepared to justify cost, forecast, and predict outcomes with Finance, and reinforce the role of IT within the scope of every campaign.

Experiment with Failure (Wisely) – A/B & MV Testing

Experiment with failures through A/B & Multivariate testing of all things digital. Create controlled experiments, develop hypotheses, identify sample sizes for statistical significance, run the test, and don’t stop testing. It’s not as expensive as it was in the past with the functionality of Content Management Systems (CMS), Google AdWords, Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, and other usability testing sites. Start gathering information and spend less time talking about it in meetings that don’t generate outcomes to reduce cost and improve marketing.

Local, Regional, and then National

It seem like every business thinks they’re a national brand, but they have challenges spending the national budgets. Grow locally, regionally, and then nationally to save money, measure your effectiveness, and apply your finds to new markets. If done effectively, you just might identify competitive advantages and target national markets that grow your business.

Measure & Value

Measure the effectiveness of your marketing tactics and provide a value for leads or sales. This should lead to better marketing, reductions in cost, and the ability to forecast and predict. Now, you’re speaking the language of the finance department and gaining credibility. It should also help to reinforce the value of the IT department.

These lessons should help to position your organization and team for successful internet marketing campaigns. I would highly recommend that marketing professionals take a look the CMO Strategic Summit’s 8 lessons.

Let us know if you have any lessons that you’d like to share. Good Luck!

3 Common Pitfalls in Content Marketing

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By now, you’ve probably heard about the benefits that come with incorporating a Content Marketing strategy. The ways content can enhance your business’s marketing mix, how it builds a sense of community with customers, the ways it shows off your expertise—the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t utilizing their content to its full potential. Below are the most common of these mistakes and tips on how you can avoid them.

1) It’s All About Me

Sometimes when a business decides it wants to jump on the content bandwagon, there is the mindset that the bulk of their content should be directly tied to their products / services, or that they should always try to sell something when they communicate with their audience. Unfortunately, this strategy often turns users away from your content rather than sharing it and coming back for more. The problem is that businesses often fail to step into their target audience’s shoes and think about what they like, care about, and expect from web content. People want to be informed, entertained, and assisted in solving a problem, not bogged down by constant self-promotion.

The Tip: Do your research & be customer-centric—think about who your audience is, use their feedback, and create content based on what’s important to them.

2) Nothing But The Facts

You may have heard the phrase “facts tell, but stories sell” before when it comes to Content Marketing. This point builds off the pitfall above in that users don’t want dry, isolated, or negative content; rather, they want stories. Stories have themes, compelling elements, room for engagement and interaction, and connections between them. The success of other marketing tactics, such as SEO and Social Media Marketing, rely on building content that users can relate to, find what they need, and pass on to others. This not only affects the way content is made, but also the way it is distributed.

The Tip: Have a theme & make connections—use stories to entertain, persuade, and engage with your audience.

3) Publish & Pray

In any new marketing endeavor, having a plan is essential. Not only can your business keep its efforts (and budget) organized, but it also projects a sense of reliability to customers. With your content, this step is even more important. Many businesses take a heavy-handed approach to their content, letting regular communications fall by the wayside. Customers don’t want to keep checking your site for new content only to find the same thing they saw the week before. In most cases like this, they’ll eventually stop returning. Applying an optimization plan (set a goal, plan, implement, measure, refine, & repeat) is a great way to look at the content creation process.

The Tip: Make a plan & stick to it—create a calendar for content to show that your business can maintain a high standard while enhancing your reputation to your audience.

What do you think of the pitfalls above? If you have any suggestions or questions about this list, leave us a comment below!

Picture This—The Role of Infographics in Content Marketing

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What are Infographics?

In short, an infographic is any visual representation of information. These large, creative images (see below for an example) can be found in a variety of places around the web, like on blogs, through some social networks like Pinterest, and on bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. For the purposes of Internet Marketing, an infographic is normally used to present a large amount or complicated data in an appealing and engaging way. And that’s the key to your business getting the most out of this kind of content—engagement with your target audience. The assumption always seems to be that web users are impatient—they won’t bother with a site if it doesn’t load after a few seconds, and they won’t take the time to read every word on a text-rich web page. To market in this environment, where users want information in (faster than) an instant, visual content like infographics just might be a way to slow people down and get your message across effectively.

How can I use Infographics for Marketing?

Just like any other visual-based piece of content, the marketing value of infographics lies in their portability, opportunities for sharing via social networks, and linking back to your business’s web site.

Portability: Once designed and completed, an infographic can be easily uploaded to an aggregator, repurposed in a presentation, highlighted in an email promotion, or discussed in an article, blog post, press release, or social media post.

Sharing: Your business’s online presence, reach, and credibility can all receive a substantial boost when users share your visual content. Because of their relatively small size and wide range of applications, infographics make for an inexpensive chance for your business’s content to “go viral.”

Backlinking: Just because any text content within an infographic can’t be crawled or indexed by a search engine doesn’t mean that these images don’t have distinct SEO advantages. Anyone that shares and/or publishes an infographic somewhere else typically links back to your business’s website; this link bait results in greater traffic and a higher search ranking.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see the benefits that can come not only from infographics, but from the integration of any visual content into your business’s digital marketing plan. The key is that the content has to be well designed. The best images are appealing and easy to understand, as well as informative and engaging. They can show your business’s expertise on a particular subject as well as increase your reach and web traffic. Finally, infographics are easily repurposed, shared by users, and serve as effective link bait for SEO purposes. For a business owner, it seems a picture can be worth much more than a thousand words.

Data Quality is Essential to Pharmaceutical Marketing Success

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Through my work with several financial services organization and pharmaceutical companies, one of the biggest issues I have noticed is with their data quality. These organizations typically have numerous data points such as web analytics, CRM solutions, email marketing platforms, sales information, etc. The challenge is that most of the business units don’t collaborate to integrate their data or to identify the best possible solution to integrate data. If you can’t agree to collaborate, it makes it even more challenging to manage data quality issues. At the same time, organizations have a tendency to use multiple data sources for the same information. Which source is providing the real picture?

Our team encountered data quality issues with a pharmaceutical client while developing monthly marketing metrics reports. We estimated that the data quality issues were costing them over $250,000 per year (if not more). The outdated web analytics solution wasn’t being maintained, so they had skewed SEO traffic, inaccurate referral sources, and limited functionality to integrate with their CRM solution, email marketing, or paid search campaigns.

Basically, they were blindly marketing to healthcare professionals and patients without any knowledge of what their target audiences were engaging with from a marketing perspective. Product managers were being held accountable for something that they had no visibility into, whether it increased new acquisitions or not.

Total Costs to the Organization:

  • Outdated Web Analytics Solutions: $250,000 per year (minimum)
  • Human Resources for Web Analytics Solution: $100,000 per year
  • Estimated Marketing Budget Total: $3,000,000 per year

Poor Data Quality + Poor Data Integration = Poor Decision-Making!

Data Quality isn’t just an issue for Fortune 500 companies. It is also an issue for smaller businesses where decisions can make or break them. Regardless of the size of the business, we still need to take into account the business requirements, technical requirements, reporting, and the impact that the data will have on the organization’s ability to create efficiencies and save time and money. There are significant costs associated with a lack of data and poor data quality.

Five Reasons to Monitor Your Internet Marketing Efforts

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Over the past several years, the greatest challenge facing internet marketers and web analysts has been convincing superiors and clients of the value of monitoring all of their web-based efforts. All-too-often, they will fire back with something along the lines of “Oh, we know how many visits we’re getting to the site.” This statement usually comes from an organization that has their overworked IT department “monitoring” their site’s activity. Little do these organizations know that the visits metric means little-to-nothing in the grand scheme of things, especially if you are not using it in unison with the countless other metrics that are available.

So perhaps you’ll be making a pitch to the higher-ups in your company about implementing a web analytics strategy, or maybe you are one of the higher-ups and are curious to see whether or not it’s worth it. Well, here are 5 great reasons to use web analytics to track your website and internet marketing efforts:

  1. Visits Don’t Mean Anything! As mentioned before, simply knowing how many visits your website received in a month does not mean you know how your website is performing. There are so many more metrics that should be considered that can be combined to yield more detailed and useful statistics about the website.You can have all the visits in the world, but if they’re not converting, then they’re practically worthless.
  2. Discover Where Marketing Efforts Should Be Focused. Not only can Web Analytics solutions uncover where your visitors are coming from, but it can also shine light on where your organization should be focusing its marketing and internet efforts.
  3. Know What Your Visitors Are and Are NOT Looking For. Paying attention to what pages and content your visitors are viewing most often can uncover what your consumers are actually looking for.Just the same, it can also show what visitors are less interested in, so you can save your company’s time and efforts in pushing the wrong products, services, or information.
  4. Monitor Traditional Marketing Effectiveness. Web Analytics isn’t just limited to seeing how well your website is doing or where your visitors are coming from. When implemented by web analytics ninjas, you can also see how effective your more traditional marketing methods are at driving traffic, and more importantly, conversions, to your website.
  5. Hone in on Your Target Market. Using methods like advanced segmentation and conversion tracking, you can identify who is spending the most quality time on your site and who is most likely to spend money. In doing this, a much clearer picture is painted of who your organization should be reaching out to the most.
There you have it- Five great reasons to seriously consider Web Analytics for your organization. In an economic climate like today’s, your organization cannot afford to turn its nose up to this, as monitoring your internet marketing strategies and efforts yields crucial insights into increasing conversions and sales.