Drive for show, putt for dough on TaylorMadegolf.com

As the world’s largest golf equipment retailer, TaylorMade-adidas Golf brand has a formidable challenge of keeping the attention of fickle consumers.  "Every golf-equipment company is just one bad decision away from losing substantial market share," says golf industry analyst Casey Alexander (Newport, 2013).  Through a series of risky management and brand strategy decisions, aggressive marketing, and a laser focus on new product development, TaylorMade was able to secure the top spot from brands such as Callaway, Titleist, & Ping.  In 2012, TaylorMade secured 47% of every dollar spent on woods (Newport, 2013) - that’s a pretty healthy market share.  Staking the claim as the “#1 Driver in Golf” is a powerful position to have in the mind of consumers.  

But have you bought a golf club recently? Golf club technology terms might cause even the more skilled golfer’s eyes to glaze over, let alone a newbie to the game.  The golf club purchase today is a highly involved purchase.  Consumers will typically go through the standard learning model, consisting of a “learn - feel - do sequence” (Belch & Belch, 2014).  Golfers will research various clubs, try them at a driving range, golf course, or in a retail store, and talk to golfing peers throughout the decision process.  For a company like TaylorMade, how do you deliver the in-depth club technology information, which is often a key point of differentiation, when consumers’ attention spans are waning.  When the average person gets distracted in 8 seconds and 81 percent of people only skim the content they read online (Kim, 2015), a website can be a tough place to convert the sale in a highly involved purchase.  

In recent years, TaylorMade has revamped their e-commerce website and introduced supporting digital properties to gather data to support their retail growth.  One of the tools they use to enhance their website visitor data is their Irons Recommender, a short 5 question interactive tool that gathers information related to the the golfer’s skill level and product preference.    

The data collected here provides rich insight into their visitor behavior that can be used to for remarketing campaigns and to refine segmentation.  It also provides insight into gaps in their product line.  For example, what if they receive more responses in the 25+ handicap segment who are prioritize “Forgiveness and Distance” in their top 2, does the current product line meet this consumer’s needs?  Is there a blind spot in their product line that due to high brand awareness they should address?  

“An estimated 84 percent of communications will be visual by 2018” (Kim, 2015).  As consumers’ attention spans shorten, integrating visual into e-commerce experiences will be an imperative.  TaylorMade is staying ahead of the curve and leveraging the use of video on their site to increase engagement and influence purchase.  The highly visual product experience pages “help funnel golfers towards sale by capturing the energy and tactile thrill of the in-store experience” (Blitz Agency, 2015).  Here is one example of a product page showcasing their PSi irons.  The page incorporate multiple interactive experiences, with each event generating another point of visitor data.  Shooting a 360 degree product demo videos with two of the world’s best golfers is not cheap content to produce, but by analyzing how it impacts the path to purchase, the marketing team can justify and optimize their video content. 

TaylorMade also knows that the best online customer service needs to compare with the best offline experience.  “44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a Web site can offer” (Levin, n.d.). Along with a product recommender, there is also a product specialist pop-up box.  Not only does this help TaylorMade address customer concerns immediately, it provides another source of actionable insights.  The chat stream data can be analyzed to understand customer pain points.  Is there something intuitively wrong with the website user experience? Is there a missing piece of product information? Is there an unmet need in the marketplace?  For goal conversions, TaylorMade can also analyze the data to understand where the chat box is most impactful along various goal paths.        

TaylorMade is also connecting with the customer on the course through the launch of a new app, in partnership with Microsoft, on the Microsoft Band platform.  On the surface, the tool provides consumers deep data analytics on their golf game. myRoundPro will allow golfers to track their scores, golf game stats, and performance over time.  For TaylorMade, the tool becomes a walking golf equipment user laboratory.  “...we wanted to see how players were performing on the course. We were curious, for instance, how many times a player hit 3-wood during a round, and where their drives typically ended up — little questions we didn't know the answers to at the time” (Wall, 2015).  The data collected will allow TaylorMade to gather an enormous array of golf consumer performance data on the course and connect it to website behavior user data.  I could read the marketing claims now, “The new JPi irons from TaylorMade helped golfers improve their shots gained by 23%!”  Because the myRoundPro tool is not just for TaylorMade equipment users, it will allow TaylorMade to gather rich data on golf consumers that can be used to refine their buyer personas, target ads based on golfing behavior, leverage geotargeting, and identify new product needs based on shot performance.     

After reviewing the TaylorMade website, there were two recommendations that come to mind. 

1. Present an email capture modal lightbox.  I was never presented with a call to action that would allow the brand to continue the engagement, especially by capturing my email address.  This is an easy micro-conversion that could lead to macro conversions.  There is a link on the site for an email sign-up, but I would recommend a lightbox sign up form to nurture potential customers by capturing a visitors email address proactively.    
2. Social engagement.  I recommend integrating both brand and user generated content from their social channels into the website to improve engagement and bring word of mouth marketing onto the branded site.  Links to their social channels are buried in the bottom right corner of the site, and would seem to only encourage exit rates.  TaylorMade could take a page out of the PGA Tour playbook and repurpose their content into a fan hub on the TaylorMade site by using a tool like Livefyre.  This would increase time on page and allow for other goals and micro-conversions to be placed amidst this content.  

In the e-commerce world, the leaderboard is a crowded space.  TaylorMade is staying on top of their game so far, matching their digital experience innovation to their golf equipment innovation.  

References:

Belch, G. E., & Belch, M. A. (2014). Advertising and promotion: An integrated marketing perspective (10th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.

Blitzagency.com (2015). Case Study: TaylorMadegolf.com.  Retrieved from http://www.blitzagency.com/taylormade-golf-case-study

Kim, L. (2015, November 23). 16 Eye-Popping Statistics You Need to Know About Visual Content Marketing.  Retrieved from http://www.inc.com/larry-kim/visual-content-marketing-16-eye-popping-statistics-you-need-to-know.html

Levin, L. (n.d.). 5 Reasons Why Live Chat is The Untapped Potential for Your Business. Kissmetrics [Web log]. Retrieved from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/live-chat/

Newport, J. (2013, February 10). How TaylorMade made its move. Wall Street Journal (Online). Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324900204578286173274533026

Wall, J. (2015, September 3). TaylorMade unveils myRoundPro analytics platform. Retrieved from http://www.pgatour.com/equipmentreport/2015/09/3/taylormade-roundpro-analytics.html

I’m OK with Data Creepiness

I don’t know about you, but things have gotten pretty creepy around here.  Personally, I’m ok with it.  I’ve been getting served remarkably coincidental ads, not based on my web activity, I get those too, but there have been a few ads seemingly served just from data on my phone and conversation activity.  For example, I was speaking to the babysitter when she arrived at the house about ordering pizza for my kids.  The next email in my inbox was a coupon from Domino’s.  How did they know that?!  This is the world we live in today, an always on, always connected, convenience focused world driven by data.  My data - and Google is the puppet master.   

Shhhhh, they’re listening

Now I don’t know if Google is listening in to my phone conversations (more on that later), but they have crossed the line several times in their quest to gather more information about you and me.  Just recently, in a case that was appealed by Google to the Supreme Court, “Google has admitted that its camera-equipped Street View cars inadvertently captured emails, passwords and other data from unprotected wireless networks as they drove by” (Chang, 2014).  Oops.  The Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal case by Google and upheld the federal court ruling. Google has agreed to delete the data collected.

There was also “Cookiegate,” where Google ended up paying $40M  in fines in 2013 for allegations they placed unauthorized tracking cookies on people’s web browsers, essentially allowing them to bypass “the mobile Safari browser’s default “no third party cookies” settings” (Sterling, 2013).  Another oops.  

As it turns out, Google was accused of installing software that would allow them to listen in on conversations this past June.  I knew it!  It doesn’t take a wild imagination to realize Siri and “OK, Google” type functions could be configured to eavesdrop on command.  With a release of a new version of the open source browser Chromium, this is exactly what happened.  The browser was “stealth configured to send what was being said in your room to somebody else, to a private company in another country, without your consent or knowledge, an audio transmission triggered by… an unknown and unverifiable set of conditions” (Falkvinge, 2015).  That’s a big oops. 

Today, Google faces continued scrutiny regarding their use of data collected in relation to their free email service, Gmail.  While users accept the terms and conditions to use this service, there is still a question of privacy for the sender.  Did they opt in to have their emails sent to a gmail user scanned and indexed too?   “Google responded that non-Gmail customers had no expectations of privacy when sending e-mails to people who did use the service” (Kelly, 2013).  But just like Gmail users, Google’s patent affords it the ability to create profiles of non-users based on information collected from those emails (Epic.org, 2015).  

No, it’s not free  

Truthfully,  I had not given much in depth thought to the ethics of data collection and privacy.  It’s part naivety, ignorance, and indifference on my part.  As a user of these services, and other data collectors like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I receive immense benefits.  There is an economic tradeoff that I have made, as well as have the other 500+ million users of Gmail.  We all make our own choice to use these services.    

English poet Robert Browning has a well fitting quote for how I see the relationship between data collectors like Google and consumers - “Ignorance is not innocence but sin” (Browning, n.d.).  In the case of Google, reasonable effort should be made to inform users of how their data is used and readily provide opt-out functionality.  Unauthorized data collection, as in the case of Google Street View is wrong.  Their leadership can not be ignorant of how their teams create products and the related consumer data privacy implications.  Consumers have a responsibility to take protective actions too.  Remaining ignorant about the products and services you use does not indemnify you from responsibility.  Consumers should research (read: “Google”) these products and learn how they collect and use their data prior to becoming a user.  Google provides a very easy to use My Account sections, including a privacy check-up, which “will walk you through more steps one-by-one to make sure that you are sharing data you are comfortable with. It will also help you make sure your security and ad settings are up to date” (Thompson, 2015).  

If you’ve been wondering what Google knows about you, log into your account and visit this website http://www.google.com/settings/ads/.  This is the basis for how Google determines which ads you will be served in the course of using their platforms.  You can customize your interests and also opt out here. 

As both a consumer and a marketer, I benefit greatly from how Google collects data.  If Google did not monetize their data, I would not be able to enjoy YouTube, Google search, and Gmail for free.  These are tools I use almost hourly that make my life remarkably easier.  These tools could not remain free without the monetization of data.  What if you paid a transactional fee for every email sent or received via Gmail, or every Google search entry, or every cat video watched on YouTube?  This might change your behavior, which would change the behavior of advertisers, who go where the eyeballs are going.  It’s a cycle in which consumers play an active roll based on their behavior.  As a marketer, the availability of data allows me to deliver targeted, personalized ads which consumers find useful.  Aggregated website data allows for companies to not only monitor their website activity, but optimize for the best user experience.  In my mind, everyone wins.  For Google, they generated almost 59.06 billion US dollars from ads, which accounted for 89.5 percent of the online company's total revenues (Statista, 2015).    Based on our behavior, I think the vote is in on how most of us really feel about data and the value we receive from Google in exchange.  If Google crosses the line too far, the masses will vote again.  Until then, they’ll keep pushing the envelope to provide more value.     

The wave of the future       

This is just the beginning.  The Internet of Things(IoT) is a new tidal wave of consumer data.  Over the course of time, another exchange will be made by consumers (including me) over a broader array of connected devices and things - more data for more value.  The Altimeter Group recently conducted a survey called  Consumer Perceptions of Privacy in the Internet of Things.   Here are five of the key findings:

1. Consumers’ top concern: Who is seeing my data?
2. At least half of consumers expressed extreme discomfort with the use and sale of their data in connected ‘real world’ environments.
3. Consumers want more information and more engagement around privacy
4. Consumers demand value in exchange for their data
5. Technological awareness informs trust and influences consumer expectations for engagement (Shah, 2015)

Looking back on the last 17 years of Google’s history, I think Larry Page and Sergey Brin would just nod their heads at Altimeter’s report and say, “I could have told you that.”  IoT is just another link in the data value chain through which consumers and companies will navigate.  

As it was back in 1998, IoT is kind of the wild west as we hear of Tesla’s and refrigerators being hacked. Over time though, security and encryption will catch up.  Consumers have come to expect an optimal user experience through their years of web based experiences.  Companies and marketers used their data to continually enhance this experience, creating value along the way.  This same demand will propel the IoT evolution.  “IoT devices learn about consumers by observing their habits, tendencies, and preferences as well as their environments (data). Learning is based on behaviors and phenomena in the natural, physical world as opposed to the strictly online world” (Weinberg, Milne, Andonova, & Hajjat, 2015).  This is where it gets a little scary.  IoT data is more closely related to me as a person, my health records, when I went to sleep, what time I come home, are my doors locked, am I at home, or is my daughter at home alone.  “As IoT-related systems capture more of the entirety of a consumer's being in the form of data, it will be as if more of a person will be inside the Internet and is being passed around from machine to machine. Thus, respect for consumers’ being and their privacy is at the heart of the consumer experience with IoT. Consumers will consider and act on the tradeoffs associated with the conveniences offered by IoT and the costs and losses in privacy” (Weinberg, Milne, Andonova, & Hajjat, 2015).  I’m still ok with it, but I won’t be an early adopter.  

References:

Browning, R. (n.d.) Quotation details: quotation #29300. Retrieved from http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29300.html

Chang, A. (2014, June 30). Supreme Court rejects appeal by Google over Street View data collection. Forbes Magazine (Online).  Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-google-supreme-court-20140630-story.html

Epic.org (2015). Gmail privacy: FAQ. Retrieved from https://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html#23

Falkvinge, R (2015, June 18).  Google Chrome Listening In To Your Room Shows The Importance Of Privacy Defense In Depth. Retrieved from https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/

Kelly, H. (2013, April 1). Why Gmail and other e-mail services aren't really free. 

Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/31/tech/web/gmail-privacy-problems/

Shah, R. (2015, July 2). Do Privacy Concerns Really Change With The Internet Of Things? Forbes Magazine (Online).  Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2015/07/02/do-privacy-concerns-really-change-with-the-internet-of-things/

Statista. (2015).  Advertising revenue of Google from 2001 to 2014 (in billion U.S. dollars).

Retrieved from http://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/

Sterling, G. (2013, November 18). Nearly $40 Million Later, Google Ends “Cookiegate” Scandal. Retrieved from http://marketingland.com/nearly-40-million-later-google-finally-ends-cookiegate-scandal-65578

Thompson, C. (2015, October 21). How to see everything Google knows about you. 

Retrieved from http://www.techinsider.io/how-to-see-everything-google-knows-about-you-2015-10

Weinberg, B., Milne, G., Andonova, Y., & Hajjat, F. (2015). Internet of things: Convenience vs. privacy and secrecy. AMSTERDAM: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2015.06.005

The Analytikers Guide to Kissmetrics

As a marketer, the evaluation, selection, implementation and integration of marketing technology tools can be overwhelming. According to Scott Brinker, who publishes an annual marketing technology landscape supergraphic, the number of vendors nearly doubled from 2014 to 2015!  Even the web analytics space is getting pretty crowded (Brinker, 2015).

Regardless of which category of vendors you’re evaluating, it’s important to conduct a side by side comparison of your finalists.  Here we’ll evaluate the Kissmetrics Analyze web analytics tool and provide a comparison to Google Analytics.  Let’s get started.  

Kissmetrics: A Brief Review

Kissmetrics is a Software-as-a-Service(SaaS) provider of web analytics and conversion products.  Their core products are their Analyze and Engage tools, which when combined are designed to provide an easy to use, simple platform for marketers to understand their data, develop actionable insights, and increase conversions. “We show you what’s working and what’s not working, across devices. We help make better marketers who don’t get lost in the data, but rise above it with insights for smarter business decisions and timely customer interactions” (Kissmetrics, 2015).  The Analyze product will be the focus of this review.   

Features of Kissmetrics: Analyze Tool

The Kissmetrics Analyze tool provides seven fundamental reports to understand the behavior of both individual and groups from their first anonymous visit, through each conversion, to their lifetime value.  The reports included in the Analyze tool are:

1. Funnel Report: helps track conversions, understand roadblocks on the road to conversion, and which type of customers convert the best.
2. Cohort Report: shows how like groups of people behave over time.
3. Path Report: shows the quickest and most effective route customers take towards a website’s goal.
4. A/B Test Report: learn how changes to your site impact revenue.
5. Power Report: allows for advance segmenting and secondary views of data.
6. People Search: drill down to understand behavior at the actual individual user level.
7. Revenue Report: no secret here, this report shows revenue metrics by segment (Kissmetrics, 2015).

Analyze is an easy to use tool that provides quick access to actionable dashboard reports.  The tool provides a simple interface with very little training required to start producing useful reports. Kissmetrics is helpful to the marketer because it is geared towards providing insights into the customer journey (or path to purchase) and it consistently keeps goals and outcomes connected to the metrics.  I find it to be user and ROI centric.  With 93% of CMOs stating that they are under more pressure to deliver measurable ROI, Kissmetrics is certainly helping the cause. (Abramovich, 2015).    

Kissmetrics Analyze vs. Google Analytics

There are several difference between Google Analytics and Kissmetrics.  Let’s start with the price.  Kissmetrics uses a monthly subscription model starting at $200/month for basic access.  This entry level does not provide access to either the Power or Path reports.  Google Analytics provides an incredibly robust tool for free, and with some basic training and customized reporting, provides most of the same reports as Kissmetrics Analyze, and more. 

Kissmetrics lacks several key metrics that are fundamental for content marketers.  It does not track time on page, bounce rates, and exits.  While they both can provide metrics on visitors and visit, the cost of Kissmetrics makes it cost prohibitive unless you plan on digging deeper into funnels and A/B testing.  Off the shelf, Google Analytics provides more in depth general insights into your audience.  If you’re a content marketer, Google Analytics is going to provide you quick insights into the impact of your content with their Behavior reports and event tracking.  Kissmetrics requires developer involvement to create reports to show the impact of blog categories, content type, and social sharing.    

A major difference between the two tools is how each tracks the identity of your website visitors across devices and links that behavior together.  This identity crisis comes about because visitors often spend time on a page browsing content, reading about products, and watching videos before eventually registering with the website.  The question becomes, will the analytics tool track this activity prior to registration and link it to the registered user?  For Kissmetrics, this is an important question because their tools are focused on providing insights at the individual user level.  While there are advanced features and workarounds within Google Analytics to mitigate this to some degree, for those who are needing individual user detail, Kissmetrics is more accurate.  

Both tools recognize the importance of looking at cohorts of visitor behavior.  Cohort analysis allows us to see engagement or behavior of a particular segment over time.  This comparison analysis can be very insightful versus looking at traditional growth metrics.  I found this short video on cohort analysis helpful.  

While the GA Cohort reports are in beta, both tools are providing this type of report to show how user behavior changes over time in response to changes in your marketing campaigns, the competitor, your web site layout, or the market.  “For example, if you’re running successive 30%-off, 25%-off, and 20%-off campaigns as a holiday approaches, you can see how different metrics like Revenue per User and Transactions per User compare among the groups of users you acquired on the dates each campaign ran” (Google, 2015). 

As you start to take a deeper dive into funnels, goals, and goal paths, there are also a few notable differences.  In terms of funnels, Google Analytics only starts tracking data after the funnel is set-up, whereas Kissmetrics will track historical data.  This is even more important when you account for the time to purchase/convert and the growing omnichannel buying behavior of consumers.  If a customer visits your website several times over the course of 2 weeks, Kissmetics can knit that data together to provide a full customer acquisition journey, whereas Google Analytics will treat each of those visits as individual sessions, calculating an actual conversion only if it happens on that same visit.  However, the Multichannel Funnel Reports in Google Analytics provides better insights into how the consumer interacts across each channel and how those interactions impact the conversion.  For both Kissmetrics and GA,  the funnel reports require the marketer to develop a hypothesis and plan to set-up the conversion goals.  You still need to use your brain to develop insights and make recommendations to eliminate the path to purchase “roadblocks.”  It is important to remember that the tool does not take the place of action.   

You Still Have to Ship It. 

This brings me to my closing thought regarding this comparison.  The founders of Kissmetrics state that “data exhaustion has always been our conundrum to solve” (Kissmetrics, 2015).  When you open up the Google Analytics tool there are over 80 potential reports to learn and explore.  For me, this is an overwhelming amount and for many it can lead to “paralysis through analysis.”  In the words of Seth Godin, “The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing” (Kristiansen, 2013).  Both of these tools allow a marketer to develop a hypothesis, gather data to validate, and develop a course of action in order to change the outcome.  Never going past the data analysis and insight development step is expensive. At some point, you have to develop an action plan and ship it, regardless of which shiny new tool you are using.   

References:

Abramovich, G.(2015, January 9). 15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Marketing ROI. Retrieved from http://www.cmo.com/articles/2015/1/6/15_stats_marketing_ROI.html

Bernd, L. (2013, March 6). Cohort Analysis: An Introduction - Whiteboard Wednesday. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCtS6xA79fI

Brinker, S. (2015, January 12). Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2015). Retrieved from http://chiefmartec.com/2015/01/marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-2015/

Google. (2015). Analytics help: Use the Cohort Analysis report. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6074676?hl=en

Kissmetrics. (2014, August). What is the Difference Between Google Analytics and Kissmetrics? Kissmetrics [Web log]. Retrieved from

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/google-analytics-and-kissmetrics/

Kristiansen, D. (2013, October 13). Top 10 Seth Godin Quotes From "Poke The Box". Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/danielcashk/top-10-seth-godin-quotes-from-poke-the-box-26823485

You can’t drive on one lane social media roads and get there

One Social Platform or Many?

The lure of social media platforms for marketers is strong.  Considering there are 560M users on Twitter and over a billion on Facebook alone (Bennet, 2014), the available reach and engagement opportunity is hard to ignore.  So should your brand jump into every platform headlong?  Most likely not all platforms, but an integrated, multi-platform strategy should be a component for every brand’s marketing plan.  

Social media marketing is becoming an increasingly important component of every brand’s marketing strategy.  For brands deciding to remain focused on just one social channel, it’s likely they’ll find themselves late to the party and playing catch up.  The top 3 digital areas marketers plan to allocate more budget on are social media advertising (70% plan to increase spend), social media marketing (70%), and social media engagement (67%) (Nanji, 2015).  If you don’t engage your customers across multiple platforms, your competition most likely is getting ahead. 

The process for determining which platforms to integrate into your marketing communications strategy should take into consideration your target market, the marketing objective your brand is looking to achieve, and the type of content which is most effective at influencing your customer to take an intended action.  Establishing “rules of engagement” will encourage thoughtful interaction that benefits the business, brand, customer, peers, and prospects at every touch point” (Solis, 2010). 

            Understanding your target market and how they engage on each platform is one of the most critical early stage planning decisions.  The process of building a buyer persona for your target markets, one that takes into account their social media behavior, puts the customer first and will point you in the best direction.  While not exhaustive, here are some categories to shape your buyer persona questions:

●     Demographic information i.e. age, gender, relationship status, ethnicity, nationality etc.

●     Lifestyle habits

●     Hobbies & Interests

●     Professional information

●     Social media usage

●     Shopping preferences (online/ in-store)

●     Challenges surrounding your industry/service/product

●     Factors that enable success in your role (Freeman Social Media.com, n.d.)

A component of your persona research should also include social listening and as Hubspot suggests, spend some time at the watering hole (Hubspot, 2015).  “Discover all relevant communities of interest and observe the choices, challenges, impressions, and wants of the people within each network” (Solis, 2010).  On average, a staggering 55M photos are uploaded on Instagram each day.  This represents a treasure trove of user generated content (UGC).  If your strategy is to increase brand awareness with UGC, this is a great platform to integrate with your website.  Already 63% of prestige brands link their Instagram account to their website and 54% to their Facebook page (Gillett, 2014).  Instagram provides a visual content focused platform allowing brands to give a glimpse into unique, behind the scenes moments.   "That is really what building a brand is about, not just showing the product but showing the story all around it" Gillett, 2014).  Brands need to determine how each watering hole can support their objective. 

With well researched buyer personas in hand for your target markets, a second consideration should be the customer’s buying cycle.  “The reality is that your target audience has different communication needs depending on which stage of the buying cycle they’re in. A customer-centric approach flips content creation from brand first to customer first” (Quesenberry, 2015).  If your brand is focused on gaining awareness and interest among consumers in the prepurchase stage, providing how-to content on YouTube may be an ideal strategy. 

If you’re a B2B marketer, LinkedIn is a platform many brands have used to showcase thought leadership and industry expertise.  The nature of this platform makes it highly effective for B2B lead generation.  One study showed LinkedIn to be 277% more effective than Facebook and Twitter (Corliss, 2012).  A successful multi-platform strategy aligns platform with content and buyer personas.  

            Another important benefit of executing a multi-platform strategy is the positive impact on SEO.  “Social conversations can inform keyword strategy, and search keywords can inform social content strategy. This process is a virtuous cycle because social engagement boosts search performance, which increases social signals and drives more social conversations” (Lee, 2013).  While Google may have declared social signals don’t impact search engine results rankings, “social is the new SEO because social networks themselves function as powerful and widely-used search engines in their own right” (Patel, 2014).  In addition, social pages which are optimized will rank high in SERP results, especially for brand names. 

If marketing budgets were bottomless pits of gold

            Since marketing budgets are finite, an important decision in creating a multi-platform social campaign is how much time and money it will require to launch and sustain each one.  As you allocate budgets, here are several things to keep in mind for success:

1.    Compare benefits with spend - know your ROI

2.    Earmark dollars for each specific channel

3.    Invest in content that is shareable

4.    Account for rising costs

5.    Leave room for programs and new opportunities (Braziel, 2015)

Budget dollars should be allocated towards channels that drive the most impact and deliver an ROI. “Creating highly shareable content that accomplishes a business objective is a craft, and you need to invest in the creation of it” (Braziel, 2015).  Marketing teams need to develop a content calendar and determine the total cost for each platform.

 In addition to affordability, the content plan needs to be one the team can sustain. “Once you start with a given cadence, you’ve made a content promise. If you can’t maintain that promise, it will quickly alienate your readers” (Greenberg, 2009).  The extent of a multi-channel campaign is dependent on the team's’ ability to adhere to a content calendar.  However, in the quest for generating content on a regular basis and integrating across platforms, it’s important not to forget to customize the content for each platform.  A brand could adapt content across platforms in the following way:

●     Twitter - share news and promotions

●     YouTube - entertain and educate

●     Pinterest - organize products around consumer interests (Quesenberry, 2014)

●     Facebook - share emotional brand stories and contests

It’s also important to remember that social media is intended to generate engagement and even conversations.  Brands must evaluate their ability to have dedicated community managers who monitor and respond to comments, handle complaints, and amplify user generated content on each channel that reflects that the brand is paying attention and interested.  In evaluating the number of social channels to use, a brand must evaluate their ability to identify and feed advocates and remember that “tools don’t build community - people do” (Momentum Marketing, n.d.).  All of this requires time.  In a recent study by Social Media Examiner, 64% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and nearly 19% of marketers spend more than 20 hours each week on social media.

The good news is that this same report shows this investment of time is paying dividends in reduced marketing expenses (Social Media Examiner, 2014).

Regardless of which channels are chosen in a multi-platform strategy, each one provides another opportunity to use analytics tools to monitor tactics, measure ROI, and adjust strategies.  Chris Sietsma from Convince and Convert provides 5 reports for social media on Google Analytics that will allow you to monitor and refine your multi-platform strategy:

1.    Use advanced segmentation to monitor traffic and user behavior exclusively from each source

2.    View conversions by source 

3.    Measure traffic to social outposts to understand how your website drives awareness of your social channels

4.    Create and deploy content experiments

5.    Use multi-channel funnel reports to understand digital attribution and show the value of social media in the sales funnel (Sietsma, 2014).

The days of driving on one lane social roads are over.  Consumers and B2B buyers are consuming content across a myriad of highways.  Take the time to develop strong personas, prioritize social channel development based on the audience and your goals, develop a content and staffing plan that is realistic and attainable, and use your analytics tools to avoid the traffic delays and roadblocks.            

References:

Bennet, S. (2014, January 20). Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn – Social Media Stats 2014.  Adweek Magazine: Social Blog [Web log]

Retrieved from http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/social-media-stats-2014/495727

Braziel, L. (2015, July 13). 5 Tips to setting your social media budget in 2016.  Retrieved from http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-strategy/5-tips-setting-social-media-budget-2016/

Corliss, R. (2012, January 30). LinkedIn 277% More Effective for Lead Generation Than Facebook & Twitter. Retrieved from http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30030/LinkedIn-277-More-Effective-for-Lead-Generation-Than-Facebook-Twitter-New-Data.aspx

English, A. (2015, July 20). Top 100 Global Brands on Youtube: 2015 update.  Retrieved from http://www.pixability.com/top-100-brands-2015/

Gillett, R. (2014, April 22). How the most successful brands dominate Instragram, and how you can too. Adweek Magazine (Online).  Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/3029395/bottom-line/how-the-most-successful-brands-dominate-instagram-and-you-can-too

Greenberg, M. (2009, October 20). Content is king of social marketing. MultichannelMerchant.com. Retrieved April 12, 2012 from http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/1020-content-social-marketing/

Lee, W. (2013, October 25).  SEO and social media alignment. Retrieved from http://searchengineland.com/seo-social-media-alignment-174775

Momentum Marketing. (n.d.). 5 keys to engaging and driving online community engagement. Retrieved from http://momentummediamarketing.com/5-keys-to-engaging-and-driving-online-community-engagement/

Nanji, A. (2015, January 27). 2015 Digital Marketing Budgets: Top Priorities, Metrics, and Challenges. Retrieved from http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2015/26900/2015-digital-marketing-budgets-top-priorities-metrics-and-challenges#ixzz3qwquVy7r

Patel, N. (2014, April 11). Why social is the new SEO. Retrieved from http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/04/11/why-social-is-the-new-seo/

Quesenberry, K. (2015, May 14). How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-marketing-plan/#more-83257

Quesenberry, K. (2014, December 8). Three Ways to Customize Content Across Social Channels for Greater Response. Retrieved from http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/26645/three-ways-to-customize-content-across-social-channels-for-greater-response

Seitsma, C. (n.d.). The 5 Top Google Analytics Reports for Social Media Marketers. Retrieved from http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-measurement/the-5-top-google-analytics-reports-for-social-media-marketers/

Social Media Examiner. (2014). 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Reprt. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2014.pdf

Solis, B. (2010). 21 rules for social media engagement. Mashable. Retrieved January 2, 2011, from: http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/rules-social-media-engagment/

Freeman Social Media. (n.d.). How to: Create buyer personas for social media marketing. [Web log]. Retrieved from http://freemansocialmedia.com/buyer-personas-for-social-media/

HubSpot. (2015, October 13). How to create personas. Retrieved from http://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts-user-guide-v2/how-to-create-personas

Where did she come from? The Importance of Referral Site Metrics

Across your marketing conference room wall are posted the top 6 customer personas who generate over 74% of company’s revenues.  Your third best customer is Olivia Ramirez.

Olivia Ramirez, aged 43, she’s a single mom who works two jobs to support her 3 elementary aged kids.  She’s concerned with how to provide her family a balanced meal for dinner each night with only 30 minutes to prepare the meal.  She has little time to plan her grocery store trips. When she shops at the grocery store she has hard time putting together ingredients quickly and within her budget.   

Your team is tasked with creating content to increase revenues from this customer.  Before you invest in the content creation work, start by understanding your traffic sources.  One place to begin understanding if your website is optimized for this customer is referring traffic.  Referring sites represents other websites that link to you, including blogs, industry associates, forums, competitors, and other places that might want to build a relationship with your business.  As part of your visitor acquisition strategy, “analyzing and optimizing your referral traffic is how you'll squeeze the most out of your marketing strategy and ad dollars, build a dedicated fan base and find partners that will help develop your audience” (Wallace, 2013).

            Let’s not forget that the key word here is “referral” and should be associated with word of mouth marketing.  According to the 2013 Nielson Trust in Advertising survey, “word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family, often referred to as earned advertising, are still the most influential, as 84 percent of global respondents across 58 countries to the Nielsen online survey said this source was the most trustworthy” (Nielson, 2013).  Who are your brand’s friends and family, the ones sending you the most traffic?       

            In terms of driving traffic to your site, your referral strategy is synonymous with your link building strategy.  Neil Patel provides 12 useful tactics for increasing referral links to your site.  “Most people seeking to build links never actually develop a link-building strategy” (Patel, 2015).  Due to the nature of Google’s algorithm, a solid referral strategy needs to be focused on researching and cultivating relationships with the right sites. “The truth is that five quality links from authority sites will weigh more heavily in your favor than ten mediocre links from generic sites” (Patel, 2015). Here are three of his tactics:

• Research Domain Authority and Page Authority
• Track people mentioning your brand and site
• Build relationships with media editors        

Each of these three steps should be made with the buyer persona in mind. As you established relationships with various influencers, blog, and media editors from high quality referral sites, here are several tips to grow the traffic from those sites:

• Work closely to gain additional mentions in upcoming posts
• Offer for them to do a guest blog post on your site
• Develop a referral program to share profit with them (Lazazzera, n.d.)

These are just several ways to generate referral traffic to your website that should be part of a broader acquisition strategy.

An important metric to include in your referral traffic evaluation is a referral to conversion ratio.  By utilizing your analytics tool to build segments by referral traffic source and setting up a related conversion goal with a monetary value, you will be able to measure the financial impact of your efforts.  "Segmenting your data doesn’t mean focusing on the glob but rather focusing on the specific. That focus helps make ideas actionable” (Kaushik, 2010). If your site’s goal is to sell shoes, you need to know which referring sites drive the most conversion revenues. This will allow you to amplify those efforts that result in the biggest impact. 

Now as your team moves forward in creating meaningful content focused on Olivia Ramirez, use the referral site metrics to measure the impact of your link building and content campaigns. 

   

References:

Lazazzera, R. (n.d.) Referral Marketing 101: 7 Tactics to Launch Your Own Referral Campaign. Retrieved from https://www.shopify.com/blog/15679636-referral-marketing-101-7-tactics-to-launch-your-own-referral-campaign

Nielson. (2013, September 17). Under the influence: Consumer trust in advertising.  Retrieved from http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2013/under-the-influence-consumer-trust-in-advertising.html

Patel, N. (2015, May 19). No Link Building Strategy Is Complete Without These 12 Tactics. Retrieved from http://neilpatel.com/2015/05/19/no-link-building-strategy-is-complete-without-these-12-tactics/

Wallace, T. (2013, Nov 27). 4 ways to optimize your referral traffic. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2013/11/27/referrals-metrics/#DCwvm1rrWaq3 

Tracking Events Along the Customer Journey

As customers engage with your brand, there are many stepping stones along the customer’s path to purchase for a marketer to track.  Goals for each brand will be different depending upon their business objective.  While the overall macro conversion goal should be aligned to the broader business objective, what are those other important stones along the way on which we hope to see some footsteps?  How do we know our buyers, prospects, members, or community are engaging with our brand along a proven path that leads to achieving that macro goal? Do we need to place a new stone down along the path?  This is the world of micro conversions and where tracking events plays a key role.  

In terms of your website, “Focus on measuring your macro (overall) conversions, but for optimal awesomeness identify and measure your micro conversions as well” (Kaushik, 2008).  It might look something like this:

While page views do give the marketer insight into visitor behavior, there are certain behaviors a website visitor may take on a page that do not trigger a page view.  This is where measuring Events becomes an important aspect of web analytics.  Google defines events as “user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load. Downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, Flash elements, AJAX embedded elements, and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to track as Events” (Google, 2015).

            As marketers, we all have come to the same realization, video is a critical and impactful component of content marketing strategies.  A Forbes Insights study of more than 300 C-level executives provides some compelling reasons for B2B marketers to use video.

●     65% have visited a vendor’s website after watching a video

●     53% have conducted a search to locate more information 

●     75% of executives indicated they watch work related videos at least weekly (Forbes 2010).

“Video provides highly tailored feedback, enabling marketers to learn what's engaging and what's not. If people are dropping off your 90-second video after 10 seconds, you'd want to know and adjust accordingly. If 80% stayed and watched to the end, you'd want to know that too” (Litt, 2013).  This is all enabled by the use of event tracking in web analytics tools.   

            If part of your B2B marketing strategy involves using case studies and whitepapers to influence and inform visitors, it will be important to understand which of these pieces of content is downloaded more frequently.  This is another micro conversion strategy which can be evaluated through event tracking.  The advanced event tracking parameters enables deeper insights based on filtering and segmenting reports in some web analytics tools (Feltman, 2014).  Connecting content downloads to referring sites might be an analysis to complete in order to evaluate PPC campaigns.  

Before you run out and begin measuring every event on your website, think through which interactions are most meaningful.  “If a click does not indicate a higher-than-average interest in your business, it is not going to give you any insights into how your top visitors operate,” says Ashley Kemper from Blue Fountain Media. (Blue Fountain Media, 2014).  Here are 4 helpful Do’s for setting up event tracking:

1.    Track meaningful interactions

2.    Categorize events intelligently - clearly define what type of interaction is happening

3.    Track events with meaning - Write down the top interactions a user can or should perform on the site.

4.    Use an event code configuration tool to simplify your life (Blue Fountain Media, 2014)

           

Event tracking is a helpful way to generate meaningful insights to shape and refine your buyer personas, show an ROI for your content marketing budget, and uncover which micro conversions best lead to macro conversions.

           

References:

Fettman, E. (2014, March). Google Analytics Universal Guide: Best Practices for Implementing and Reporting. Retrieved from https://www.e-nor.com/publications/ebooks/google-analytics-universal-best-practices-for-implementation-and-reporting.pdf

Forbes. (2010). Video in the C-Suite: Executives embrace the non-text web. Retrieved from http://images.forbes.com/forbesinsights/StudyPDFs/Video_in_the_CSuite.pdf

Google. (2015). Analytics help: About events. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068?hl=en

Kaushik, A. (2008, March 26).  Excellent Analytics Tip #13: Measure Macro AND Micro Conversions. Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip-13-measure-macro-and-micro-conversions/

Blue Fountain Media. (2014, August 2014). How not to set up event tracking. Ashley Kemper [Web log]. Retrieved from http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/how-not-to-set-up-event-tracking/

Litt, M. (2013, September 19).  How Video Plays a Crucial Role in the Rise of Content Marketing. Retrieved from http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2013/11651/how-video-plays-a-crucial-role-in-the-rise-of-content-marketing