Marketing automation is worth more than a process that advances analytics capability. It has a growing important value in a business strategic plan. Businesses struggle to organize their marketing, typically due to running separate social media, email, and platforms. The effort yields individual results to each platform, but can overlook multichannel opportunities or personalization which more customers crave.
Marketing automation addresses that need by consolidates marketing planning and reduces "clutter" from managing separate media. Planning how to automate can highlight where a message may not need to be repeated as well as how to repeat other messages that are valuable for the customer. The planning with marketing automation as a core function saves time and, when done right, improve marketing results.
Automation has a particular value for small businesses. Small business owners and their employees are busy, leaving a limited time to analyze analytics reports repeated. Marketing automation can streamline resources by automating marketing tasks.
There are three tips small and medium sized businesses can follow to prepare for adding marketing automation features.
YouTube Analytics is increasingly valuable as YouTube's comments and metrics are increasingly scrutinized
Sometimes redesigning a suite of technological products is like redecorating a house. Once you start with one room, you end with more rooms redecorated to complete a look.
Google was certainly redecorating their house a few years ago. After a revamped Google Analytics solution, along with a search engine updates for mobile search and the even more ballyhooed Google Plus platform, Google released YouTube Analytics, an analytics platform for YouTube managers that replaced Insights and was a significant response for the emergence of increased mobile video viewing in the marketplace.
eMarketer released an article noting the growing rate of mobile video watching. Total US Online viewers reached 158.1 million in 2011 - that’s more than 50% of the US population. In the article, PaulVerna, eMarketer senior analyst, noted the significant sources for the trend.
“Audience growth over the next four years will come from all demographic segments, but it will be more pronounced among preteen children, older boomers and seniors. These groups have traditionally lagged teens and younger adults in their video viewing activity, but the gaps will start to close as the market matures.…”
Add Verna’s statement to YouTube’s current recognition as one of the largest search engines. Mix those points with Google’s introduction of mobile-centric features in its online search engine, and you have a recipe for YouTube Analytics.
You can find my first impression of YouTube Analytics in my All Analytics post. Since that post was issued, a few new protocols have been added to impact the value of YA metrics. Google has focused on requiring YouTube viewers to have a Google account to comment on YouTube videos. Comments are also sorted by relevance than the date posted. The creator of video has higher priority for relevancy, follower by commentators who are signed in a Google Plus account.
The interesting responses has been from YouTube "users" who do not wish to be logged into a Google account to provide their commentary. They are suspicious of Google with respect to privacy and simply do not want to complicate their right to speak anonymously. This CNN post summarizes the complaints. Furthermore, a report from Digital Trends noted that Google uses YouTube "superflaggers" to identify abusive comments.
The comment-clensing strategy is meant for more than reducing off-color comments. The strategy also supports YouTube's increased influence in entertainment as a source for new music or information on movies. Nielsen ratings and Billboard, two long-established measurement agencies in television and music, include YouTube views into their metrics.
From an analytics perspective, this development reflects today's digital effort to clean data sources. To make better sense of the metrics analyzed, data quality is essential. Removing poor comments on YouTube reflects eliminating the "poor data" from comments. Comments can be analyzed for better understanding what videos appeals to customers, though an argument can be made for having an opt-out for those who want to comment and debate without everything on a Google-controlled platform.
Businesses that use YouTube heavily may want to add comments in their privacy policy regarding how their YouTube channel is moderated. This may not win the anti-Google plus-signin crowd, but it can assure those who do check in that the channel is managed in a way that will earn their trust.
Businesses create customer-centric attention when analytics is combined with unified communications. Multichannel reports - analytics reports on varied referral sources – is one set of analysis that can be done with analytics.
The potential value from multichannel reports lies in organizing the influences to a business. It can also aid a business relying on unified communications. The reports can produce a variety of options for a multitude of productivity and operational concerns.
First a few words on unified communications, otherwise known as UC. Simply put, it is a protocol set in the browser to provide video conferencing on the cloud without the use of a plugin. The business advantage is being able to communicate to partners and employees more easily across multiple devices.
While UC is steadily growing in usage among business organizations, tech savvy users have become more agnostic about which device they use for their daily tasks. They switch devices from one activity to another, being frictionless in being productive. In fact, Clickz noted device agnostics as a 2012 consumer trend. The trend is based on a tipping point of smartphone capability established in 2011.
This means businesses looking to connect with customers with UC must consider where the consumers are accomplishing their tasks digitally. It also shows how multichannel reports become handy. Multichannel reports identify the sequence of visitor touch points to a conversion activity. Thus these reports can rate different channels as significant contributors to conversion goals, as opposed to last click attribution – the assumption that an action from one channel is the main contributor to conversions.
A conversion path analysis from multichannel reports can influence a number of operations. Here are a few examples:
One example is evaluating online touch points against an assumed sales funnel process. An organization can review the number of interactions against its sales cycle. The review can imply ways to speed sales activity, such as providing better sales information upfront to the most responsive segments.
A second example focuses on the sequences in a conversion path. The sequences can show UC users where it should engage with customers digitally. Most multichannel reports reveal the sequence that happen before a conversion – a segment can, say, start with a mobile-related search, arrive to a site, leave, and then through Instagram return directly to a page. A customer care team can send mobile messages with one set of reminders prior to a conversation and separately send tweets containing general tips. The coordination of message types can simplify interaction, which can lead to faster communication or eliminate calls that can cost response time for more complicated matters.
A third example, API usage, can organize how data is consumed within an organization. Knowing which data to use can be a continual challenge. Most analytic solutions include multichannel report metrics in an API. This permits data visualization in a dashboard, one that can combine data from a number of sources. The unique advantage is that incorporating multichannel-related data will permit correlation of online conversion data with offline sales data and UC-related cost data to reveal a more complete picture of ROI. Thus multichannel reporting can guide how communication metrics are monitored and managed relative to business value.
Success from these examples do require cross management of teams. Imagine a customer service team coordinating with the marketing group that is responsible for the social media accounts, and you get the idea. But with that idea in place, multichannel reports and analysis provides a means to make an organization as customer centric as possible. The right analysis can reward a business with an empowered UC program responsive to customer demands.
Some businesses still struggle with basic starting point to using Bing Ads or Adwords. we covered a few in this Prince-inspired post. Here are a view ideas for deciding where an ad should be placed and what
1. Target your ad to a location in which your business serves or decide on a specific product that you want to run in your ad words campaign.
Many businesses mistakenly use page search as a general ad. Instead of the need to plan your ads according to the products and services at the offer. Adword groups can then be planned around a product permitting you to select keywords appropriately.
2. For location, take a look at where your traffic to your website reflects branding .
This should include looking at branded keywords and search, as well as direct traffic since this for flex a branding of your business.
3. Set your budget against your product margins as a starting guide to value your ad.
Most paid search managers use automatic or manual settings for the maximum amount of daily spend. Consider your product that you advertise again suspend. The margin on each product in the ad can be an indicator of how much value your getting from the spend. For example if your product margin is $5, it means that a spend above $5 may not giving value; You've spent more in your campaign click to gain that $5 margin from a sales.
4. For Effective Bing Ads and Adwords, Improve Your Quality Score
Quality Score is essentially a means to monitor keyword reputation. The Quality Score is based on four key factors:
To increase quality score, you should look to optimize keywords, focusing on optimizing the ad groups to improve ad text. For Adwords, use the Keyword planner to aid choice in what to use in a landing page content and associated ad.
5. Write ads according to the platform associated with the campaign group. That may sound too basic, but media platforms have nuances that dictate how an add should be written. For example Facebook ads appear based on a user activity preferences in the profile. So a Facebook user who like skiing will probably see an ad for ski. This differed from Bing and Adword ads, which appear based on keywords in a search query.
6. Start with metric basics
Metrics that are typical in a paid search campaign are:
6. Finally, consider your campaign objectives. Objectives from a campaign can range from increasing site traffic, increasing brand awareness, and increasing ROI for site conversion goals such as e-commerce or downloads
This All Analytics video takes a quick look at tag management. Tag management is becoming more essential as third party sites raises the number of sites where an ad will be displayed. This makes tag manager essential for complex campaign needs. For more on tag managers, check out the Zimana blog article Vetting Analytics Tags . In the meantime, enjoy this video from All Analytics.
To be successful in business these days, small and medium businesses must become students of applying transparency at the right points within a business digital strategy. This has been due to customers increasingly using online search and social media to determine a purchase decision. Thus businesses can examine analytics data to reveal how its digital transparency online influences that sales decision.
Influence has been emerging as an crucial measurement to be monitored. It affects the approach a business takes towards meaningful analytics strategy and igniting ongoing debate about how to define digital influence from a post or ad.
Do you think influence online is overemphasized? You may want to consider these changes as a signal of influence's value:
Influence is becoming a great strategic value, drawing businesses to increase their reliance on social media and digital marketing tools. Forrester has also noted in its report US Interactive Marketing Forecast that digital marketers expect to spend $4.4 billion by 2016. That spend indicates investment in sending a message in front of an audience. Furthermore, this burgeoning interest reinforces the benefits analytics brings to business, and drive further overall interest in analytics beyond discussion of website technicalities.
A business desiring to measure influence must also provide proof that validates customers’ interest in them. That means being transparent with operations that are relevant with a potential customer. People want to learn more about whom they are doing business with online. Badges and rating have thus gained mindshare of website visitors. The end result is visitor who may repeat a visit. Increased repetition of visits can turn a fence-sitting customer into an actual customer.
Rajeev Malik, co-founder of KikScore, an online rating system bought by Google in 2012, references his start up as an example of how influential online confidence badging can be through the transparency of its rating system. KikScore offered a rating system that displayed a confidence badge of key policies and services displays credibility information for a small business. The score was meant to raise the trustworthiness of a business, increasing the likelihood of converting website visitors into sales or leads.
In an email exchange with me, Malik showed me the key information that visitors look for in transparency.
As stated earlier, there will be much debate about what influence measurement truly means and how it connects to business decisions. Ultimately the importance of transparent rating systems and influence online can not be underestimated. Managing a Klout score, for example, has gained traction - and rancorous debate - among marketing critics.
Analytics is rooted in Greek language. The word means "breakdown". What we choose to breakdown has changed from what we know a few years ago, and we need to continue our vigilance in developing the right message in our digital marketing that reflect transparent business values.
