MarketingSherpa Blog

What is marketing data really? When used right, it’s not just numbers that tell you what happened.

That is what I like to call the “newsman approach” to marketing analytics – information that simply sums up previous customer behavior.

You don’t want to be the newsman. You don’t want to be Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams. You, dear marketer, must look to the likes of Al Roker and Willard Scott. After all, it is the intrepid weatherman that discusses not only what already happened, but what is going to happen.

I discussed with Scott Hutcheson, Content Director, Paramore, how to effectively use marketing data to look beyond a simple gut reaction to numbers to find out what they can tell you about future customer behavior in this, the most recent episode of MarketingSherpa Marketing Research in Action …

In this episode, Scott and I discussed research from the MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report, which is sponsored by Paramore…

00:42 – Up is good, down is bad? Not so simple. Don’t settle for gut reactions to your marketing analytics. Scott and I discussed non-analytical decision-making strategies. 

4:44 – What can you learn from page views? Scott and I discussed content marketing metrics tracking.

  Read more…

Often, the best ideas for our content come from the MarketingSherpa audience,  such as  this note I received from Steve, “There was a very good graphic in a recent post from Rand Fishkin. I think it would be interesting for you to add some ‘quantitative metrics’ to this.”

Let’s take a look at that graphic …

I reached out to Rand, who is the CEO of Moz, to get a little background on the chart, which looked almost like a yin and yang of modern marketing to me.

“The items in red aren’t necessarily all terrible things you shouldn’t do,” Rand said.

“Interruption marketing can be well done, but as the graphic notes, there’s no flywheel effect generating momentum, and these channels/tactics, on average, lead to higher costs of customer acquisition. In some markets and for some companies, that may be a fine tradeoff, but it should always be a conscious one,” he explained.

Today on the MarketingSherpa blog, we’re providing a mixture of quantitative metrics, case studies, how-to articles and other resources to help you improve your own inbound marketing efforts by learning more about how your peers are effectively using these tactics …

SEO & PPC

Local search has had the biggest positive impact on marketing objectives, with 54% of marketers indicating so, according to the MarketingSherpa SEO Marketing Benchmark Survey.

How to Switch to SEO, PPC Strategies to Increase Leads: 10 Steps to Triple-Digit Lifts

Local SEO: How geotargeting keywords brought 333% more revenue

PPC Marketing: Two accidents reduce cost-per-lead 20%

Opt-in Email Lists

Only 39% of marketers maintain an opt-in only subscriber list.

Email Deliverability: How a marketing vendor with 99 percent delivery rates treats single opt-in lists vs. double opt-in lists

Read more…

In a recent MarketingSherpa webinar, I interviewed Eric Webb, Senior Marketing Director, Corporate Marketing & Brand, McGladrey, about his impressive work with the accounting firm’s content marketing.

You can now watch the video replay of that webinar – “Content Marketing: A discussion about McGladrey’s 300% increase in content production.”

But most of the questions I asked him weren’t my own, they were from you. In fact, we got tons of your questions about content marketing, and Eric has been kind enough to answer some of them here today on the MarketingSherpa blog.

Even better, Eric also provided you a tool his team used to help with its 300% increase in content production. Click below to download the template …

Submission form – with example

And now, your questions…

B2B online lead gen as a topic. – Mor, online marketing manager

Eric Webb: We use content to generate leads 70% of the time. Via Demand Generation, and social media, we promote specific content that resides behind a form. We may ask qualifying questions as well to help discern where they are in the buy cycle.

To do this, you need to repackage the topic to leave a breadcrumb of content that helps you accelerate the sales process. You may have a white paper which shows they are in discovery of the issue, then a podcast with a client and a case study. If they download these, they are likely more interested and are considering or feel they can benefit in some way from the solution.

Finally, a self assessment or an offer for a free 30-minute talk with the expert tells you they are truly interested and deserve a call.

Creating content for niche industries and clients – Maddie, marketing analyst

EW: I recommend looking to industry publication editorial calendars for ideas, clients and outside speakers.

Specific metrics and related incentives for the content creation team, please. – Marshall, CEO

EW: For content, the metrics we most watch are clicks and downloads, or form conversions if behind a form. We don’t necessarily offer an incentive except recognition for the SMEs (subject matter experts) on how the content they create is performing. But, you clearly could offer an incentive based on form-conversion leading to an opportunity.

How much content is necessary? – Christian, director of marketing

EW: Depends on your objectives – if you are just trying to build awareness, then you may measure retweets, likes or +. You could also look at a benchmark of current visits to a section and just say 10% above that. But ultimately, you have to determine what your objective is.

How do you re-purpose other’s content? – Christian, director of marketing

EW: We do curate content to help fill out a section and drive more time on site or to attract more people. But only the first paragraph and then we link out to their site. Otherwise, we look to vendors or partners to provide some of their content in totality.

Besides social, blogs and email – any other outlets? – Christian, director of marketing

EW: Networking sites like LinkedIn updates and groups. Partner sites, publications and association sites; some of our most clicks come on the heels of someone commenting in a news article and providing a link to our content. Slideshare. Reddit. Digg.

I love the idea of creating energy around content for SMEs and am looking forward to learning more about this. – Dee, founder

EW: Basically it comes down to being able to provide a breakdown of specific metrics by each content piece (clicks, downloads, form fills and opportunities). Develop a monthly report to show the value that the content is creating and highlight the author. Also, if you have a PR group, get them to promote the author as an expert, showcasing their content to reporters.

How quickly do you plan from idea generation for content to getting it up and available? – Nick, manager

EW: It depends on the topic. A blog post is usually a few days, depending on approvals required, but a white paper can be weeks and months, especially if it’s a regulated industry. We try to get teams to use content calendars and think at least three to six months out by assigning topics to SMEs.

How to develop a thought leadership culture in the workplace? – Kim, senior email marketing manager

EW: I noticed a change when you could report the metrics. And, with our marketing automation system, we now are close to showing a measure of influence of total revenue and direct attribution of particular campaigns and content offered to opportunities.

Explaining how your audience buys – their buy cycle – and then being able to show how they read through content to ultimately filling a form and wanting to engage helps as well. Consistency is key.

Read more…

At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, I interviewed our keynote speaker – Jay Baer, President, Convince&Convert – about the book he was writing. Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is about Help not Hype will be released in two weeks, so we’re sharing that interview with you now …

A few key takeaways from Jay …

1:00 – Brands have to compete with customers’ friends and family on social media and in email.

1:27 – So how are you going to compete with friends and family? Just be useful.

1:41 – Make your marketing a benefit, not a burden.

2:16 – Hilton Worldwide’s instruction to employees monitoring social media – “Pay attention to Twitter. If you can find a place you can help, just help.”

3:02 – The difference between helping and selling makes all the difference.

To register to win your very own shiny new copy of Youtility, sign up this week for the MarketingSherpa Weekly Book Giveaway.

Related Resources:

B2B Social Media: Jay Baer discusses social media ROI and Facebook likes [Video]

5 Ways to Deliver B2B Marketing Content that Sells (Without Sabotaging Sales) (via Convince&Convert)

Value Proposition: How to use social media to help discover why customers buy from you

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

“It is absolutely necessary. Don’t base your marketing on assumptions and allow your customers to identify your success.”

— Alex Corzo, Manager of Brand Integration, Orlando Health

How important is value prop testing?

The case studies at Optimization Summit 2013 reaffirmed the importance of value proposition testing for me. For example, through testing, Jon Ciampi, Vice President Marketing, Business Development & Corporate Development, CRC Health, learned his customers craved trust, not luxury. He reinvented his lead funnel based on this insight, changing everything from his company’s landing pages to his team’s call scripts.

So, how can you discover your value proposition?

At Optimization Summit, my colleague Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, shared “How You Can Use Email to Discover the Essence of Your Value Proposition (in 5 Simple Steps).”

But email is just one channel for testing value proposition. So, in the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, we asked…

Q: Which methods have been the most effective at testing your value proposition? Select up to three responses.

We also reached out to our audience, and asked for their value proposition testing tips. The lowest response in the chart, offline advertising (in this case, using cold calling), received the most passionate response, as you’ll see below…

Different tactics work for testing (and challenging) different aspects of your value proposition

For example, you can’t test the “secondary aspects” of your value proposition with PPC advertising because of obvious limitations, but it’s an ideal method for finding out what are the strongest motivators (“primary aspects”) of your value proposition.

It seems many people forget landing pages aren’t as objective as they might think. The traffic source affects expectations (and who comes to your page). So, one aspect of your value proposition might appear to work best, but really you only know what those visitors respond to.

For example, you sell supplements and you’re running an ad at a site focused on marathon running. You get visitors interested in extreme endurance. Your landing page should then focus on endurance. In other words, if one aspect of your value proposition is about building endurance, that’s what will appear to be the most important aspect of it. But if the traffic came from a bodybuilding site, you’d better focus on other aspects or at least frame your value proposition differently.

— Peter Sandeen, Online Conversion Specialist

Cold calling

In a business-to-business setting, I make a few hundred cold calls myself.

By the time I finish those calls, I know with a fairly high degree of confidence whether there is a need in the marketplace for what I’m offering.

Since I make those calls myself, I also have firsthand evidence of whether the value proposition resonates with prospective buyers. Only after do I allocate marketing dollars to communicating the message.

I know this method is “expensive,” but I’m a founder, so for me it’s about making the time and for that reason spending on marketing first would be more expensive.

Anyway, guess what I’ve found over and over again trying this approach in a variety of B2B situations? If the value proposition doesn’t include making them money or saving them time, it probably won’t resonate!

— David Chevalier, Co-founder, SalesBlend

And more cold calling

In my opinion, there is no substitute for David’s approach of having the founder or equivalent making enough cold calls.

Using senior execs to personally do testing is still not cheap, but really talking to that many prospects is not only priceless but an incredible kickstart to building pipeline for the sales that follow the test.

— Chris Beall, Chief Product Officer, ConnectAndSell

Related Resources:

Digital Marketing: B2B marketers can get fresh, new ideas from B2C

Digital Marketing: How to craft a value proposition in 5 simple steps

To Call or Email? That is the Question

A common question we often hear about social media is “I put some social media elements onto my page and have not seen much of a difference …”

I’m sure you can relate, because social media icons are everywhere. On landing pages. In emails. Heck, I even saw some on a billboard while I was driving the other day.

Now, on behalf of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their investors, I’d first like to thank you marketers of the world for all of that free co-op advertising.

All kidding aside, let me throw the questions back at you to help you get the most value from your sharing icons. In today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we’ll focus on three questions you should ask yourself about your company’s use of social media icons.

Question #1. Should we be using social media icons?

All jokes about free advertising aside, most marketers likely will find some value in using social media icons. And, here’s the key. While the value might not be great, it is likely higher than the cost.

Because, frankly, as marketing tactics go, simply slapping a few social media icons or sharing buttons on a landing page is fairly easy to do.  Almost any value you get creates an ROI since it is higher than the minimal cost involved.

For example, AT&T added Facebook and Twitter icons into an email newsletter.

This was one small part of a program that helped the AT&T Developer Program increase its Twitter audience 136% and Facebook audience 113%.

Of course, as you’ll see in the case study above, the team at AT&T did much more than just add a few icons to an email to get that lift. But since the cost, in both IT execution to add the buttons and real estate on the email, was likely so low, and it certainly couldn’t have hurt their efforts, why not add social media icons?

Well, here’s why not. For most brands, the answer is simple: not every brand needs or should be using social media icons and sharing buttons. For example, I interviewed Steve Parker, Vice President, Direct Marketing, firstSTREET, in the MarketingSherpa webinar “Optimization: A discussion about an e-commerce company’s 500% sales increase.”

“In our case given our target market, you’re looking at an age 75+ customer, they’re not big social users. And, the ones who are on social media, they really just want to see pictures of their grandkids and their kids. So they’re not going to be as interactive in the social world. So from our standpoint, it’s pretty low on the priority list. There are no social buttons on this website,” Steve said.

He went on to share, “We’ve tested a little bit of that on some of our other properties. As baby boomers, the younger part that grew up with some social media lives grow older, yes, that will get more important. For my particular target market at this point in time, it doesn’t help.”

Question #2. Which social media icons should we use?

Ask your audience in direct conversations, in surveys, through customer service interactions and other customer-facing employees: what social networks do they use?

Then, be present on those platforms. See how they’re using social media.

And, look at your analytics.

Here on the MarketingSherpa blog, you’ll notice the prime social sharing button we use is from Twitter.

That’s because when we looked at our analytics, more inbound traffic came from Twitter than from any other social network.

You might also notice, at the bottom of our blog posts, we have social media sharing icons as well. 

That’s because the rest of our inbound social network traffic came from LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Delicious and Digg.

Your analytics won’t be foolproof. Over time, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy (we receive more Twitter traffic because we encourage the audience to share on Twitter), but combining your analytics with active listening to your audience through many means will at least get you in the ballpark of how they want to interact with your brand using social media.

Read more…

Technology is fantastic. But, it’s not magic.

Marketing analytics can be extremely powerful. However, just like any other tool or technology, it takes hard (and smart) work to turn data into knowledge.

So, in the MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report (sponsored by Paramore), we asked marketers …

Q: What were your organization’s most frustrating challenges with marketing analytics in 2012?

Then, we asked your peers what they thought about this marketing research. Here’s what they had to say …

Interpretation of data

What is interesting is that the top two challenges are related to the interpretation of data, not the collection of data.

We have finally turned the corner on the basic blocking and tackling of data consolidation through technology and processes, and now the most important challenges are focused on how to effectively use the analytics for improved decision making.

It has taken a long time to get to this point, but it is encouraging to see that 42% of respondents stated that acting on data to improve marketing performance was their #1 challenge, followed by combining data from multiple sources to draw correlations and make predictions (41%).

Integrating systems and siloed data finally has fallen to the bottom as most marketers have the technology and tools to do this process. Now we have to do the hard part and make the data talk to us, guide us, and give us insights.

– Cyndi Greenglass, Senior Vice President, Strategic Solutions, Diamond Marketing Solutions

Read more…

“What gets measured is what gets done.” So says the old business maxim, at least.

We wanted to know what marketers get done, so to speak, so in the 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report, we asked…

Q: Which of the following are you involved with tracking, analyzing or reporting on for your organization?

We asked the MarketingSherpa community about these results, and here’s what they had to say …

Managing through measurement

These results highlight the indifference, or perhaps lack of experience, when it comes to tracking marketing, especially social media marketing.

As these channels can be tracked offline (via call tracking) and online, via dynamic numbers and email tracking, it still seems as though there are trackers and non-trackers in terms of marketing specialists.

Even with a nudge effect of marketing across several channels, the ROI of these nudges is important and should be tracked.

The old adage of “managing through measurement” is still important and not having accurate measurement to call upon leaves marketing specialists arguing based on their opinions rather than facts. (And, that’s a sure way to the exit door).

– Boyd Butler, Consultant

Read more…

“Hey, look at me!” While strolling down the Las Vegas Strip during Email Summit 2013, I couldn’t help but notice all of the flashy signs, and individuals, trying to get my attention.

The challenge is equally difficult (although hopefully less gaudy) in the modern inbox, so in the MarketingSherpa 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked …

Q: Which of the following tactics is your organization using to improve the relevance and engagement of email content delivered to subscribers?

We asked your peers how they could use this data …

Segment email campaigns based on sales cycle

Stage-based marketing is the future. Breaking your marketing down to map to a consumer’s research cycle means understanding they will do research in multiple sessions, and at each session, be looking for different content. Best practice will suggest that you will need to engage with them in two or more different sessions, so you will need two or more stages.

Content needs to be short and targeted. Having a single large document is no longer best practice. Content should be targeted to each stage of the research cycle, and be easily consumed in under five pages.

– Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Evangelist, ExactTarget

How closely integrated are your sales and marketing departments?

I would have loved to see another question asked: How closely integrated are your sales and marketing departments? From my experience, those using segmentation and trigger-based emails are those who make sure that marketing and sales are closely aligned. A lot of the triggers “look” like they come from the sales team based on Web behavior with the ultimate objective to drive conversion, of course.

– April Wilson, Director of Analytic Products, RevSpring

Read more…

No marketing tactic is an island, so in the MarketingSherpa 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about which marketing channels they are integrating with their email marketing …

Q: Which marketing channels does your organization integrate with your email program? Select all that apply.

As usual, we asked your opinion of this research …

Mobile integration requires investment

A question is raised in the blog about the poor representation of mobile in email integration. That’s because the top two mediums hog up the highest share of the marketing budget, with the balance to the next three. Mobile integration requires new planning and visual strategy for which there is very little or no dollars left.

– Shailesh Merai, Creative Lead, Omesa Creative Studio

In the MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week article in which this chart originally appeared – “Marketing Research Chart: Marketing channel email integration” – Brad Bortone, Senior Research Editor, MECLABS, asked, “Are you surprised by how poorly mobile integration placed in this chart, when compared to other tactics?”

Shailesh chalks the reason up to investment, or lack thereof, in mobile. From his experience, most budget goes to the top two integrated tactics (75% of marketers integrate the website with email, 56% integrate social media with email).

According to Shailesh, the rest of the budget goes to the next three most integrated tactics with email – 40% of marketers integrate email with events (for example, tradeshows and webinars), 35% with blogs and 31% with search engine optimization and/or pay-per-click advertising.

This leaves only 21% of marketers integrating email with mobile.

To help you secure the budget and resources you need, here are a few articles to show your marketing and business leaders the benefits of mobile email integration, along with the challenges you need resources to overcome …

Mobile Email Marketing: iPhone-targeted landing pages boost conversion rate 40% for Ritz-Carlton Destination Club

Mobile Email Marketing: 50% more app downloads from device-targeted ads

Email Marketing: 58% of marketers see mobile smartphones and tablets most impacting email

Mobile Marketing: 31% of marketers don’t know their mobile email open rate

Read more…