Working with your HiPPO
Data / analytics can be both liberating and restrictive but the one thing it will always do and do well is ensure we remain commercially focused. I was at a clients HQ for the first time 2 weeks ago and this quote summarises my belief about business and why being commercially minded is fundamental to success: “We need freedom to shape our future; we need profit to remain free”. This quote is the one thing that can unite teams if understood and even help with the subject of my blog post. I spent a lot of my junior marketing days in data analysis tools like Omniture & Google helping to craft my story of how me / my team were performing and to show our contribution to the business, it rarely went as I expected in the early days, but I learnt and learned fast, here are 5 ways I found to help me that I…
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February 17, 2015
A tool for evaluating the customer decision journey
Today the consumer is like a bird, flying from branch to branch, collecting evidence each time they [sic] land[s]. Or maybe like 'a hawk surveying the scene and then swooping when the time (and price) is right.' (Dave Chaffey’s comment at the bottom of Danyl Bosomworth’s post)
There is no doubt that the consumer decision journey is still evolving as people adapt to ever changing technologies, and the corresponding online information sources for decision-making that are available... 'The average number of information sources used by shoppers doubled from 2010 to 2011', Professor David Bell.
This new approach to a decision journey attempts to highlight the complex and non-linear paths that people can take when discovering and purchasing products or services.
It's not a linear process any longer, so important to note when interpreting the journey, that a person can start at any…
Tools for benchmarking and comparing average media mix or percentage of different traffic sources between websites
Naturally all digital marketers want more (quality) traffic. This begs the question where do we find this traffic? What is our optimal mix of online media?
One approach to answering this question is to turn to the traffic sources report in Google Analytics. Where Google Analytics benchmarking once again presents your mix of referrers relative to others in your category. Your relative performance is shown under the Audience menu accessed via the Benchmarking option like so:
If you're not familiar with these, the four main traffic sources reported at this level in Google Analytics are:
Search traffic – This is separated into natural or organic and paid search (Adwords)
Referral traffic – This is traffic from other sites which have direct links to your site
Direct traffic – Direct traffic results…
How well do businesses really know their customers?
As consumer expectations for relevant content and offers grow as they experience top retailers such as Amazon, companies need to focus even more on customer experience through relevant communications.
When completing our Managing Digital Marketing in 2015 research we were interested to see how well companies do understand their customers since many respondents said that improving use of CRM and applying Big Data concepts was a priority for this year.
We asked businesses which of the classic segmentation and targeting techniques they used to target their customers using online marketing, for example targeted emails or web-based personalisation.
The results show that, overall businesses are long way from the 360 degree customer view and personalised customer lifecycle marketing that many have discussed for a long time.
As marketers we see a lot of examples about how we should improve…
Ideas on getting more creative in our marketing
What makes the difference between a good company, and a great one? Creativity. Fostering a culture of creativity in your business and your life will allow greater innovation, more effective problem solving, and a genuine competitive edge. When technology has made certain skills a commodity, it’s the creative, individual human elements that distinguish a successful business.
How to drive your creative marketing?
If you’re looking to inject some creativity into your life and your business environment, then take note.
1. Make your time work for you
William Blake, visionary poet and inspiration for many a creative type, put it simply: 'Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.'
Figure out how your brain and body’s natural rhythms work, and as best you can, listen to them and work with them rather than fight against them. Plan your day around your own…
A tool for reviewing the options for online customer acquision and monitoring for social media and other sites
You will have noticed that there's a fair amount of choice online for reaching and interacting with your audience, in fact it's overwhelming! You can't be everywhere, so it's important to prioritise which types of sites and partnerships you invest time and money in to try to gain visibility through outreach, partnering and advertising.
2015 update - introducing the Marketing Bullseye
Since we introduced the Radar in 2010 we have evolved it into the infographic shown below. In this update, we introduce the Marketing Bullseye Framework - a great new tool to review customer acquisition from Traction which has a similar purpose - see the end of the post for a description.
To help you review and prioritise, we developed the "Digital Marketing Radar" which gives a prompt on the different types of…
Does your digital brand really stand out from the competition?
Have you really considered the extent to which your online brand proposition provides something compelling to your audience on an ongoing basis? With the rapid acceleration in new technologies and channels to interact with generic and niche audiences, brands are having to adapt quickly in order to stay relevant and to their audience as well as to out-manoeuvre the competition.
For brands it is ensuring you’re playing to your strengths – are you trusted source or supplier which audiences continue to engage with over time? Are you retaining your authority within your sector and are you listening to your customers and aware of your competition? Developing a digital brand differentiation strategy is essential to retain brand identity and relevancy.
This post will focus on the concept and importance of creating ongoing engagement or 'lock-in' – explaining what it is, how it can be…
How Topshop used Instagram and Facebook to power the Topshop Fashion Catwalk
Topshop's 2014 social media campaign gives a good example of an integrating social networks. Topshop used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to bring their live London Fashion event to a social media audience. They enlisted 5 Topshop Instagram Bloggers and strong advocates to share their pictures and videos, inviting fans to post to the hashtag #Topshopwindow.
Brands appearing at the Fashion show shared photos from the catwalk and celebs at the show, under hashtag #TopShopUnique and some Designers even took the opportunity to release their new outfits, before they hit the catwalk.
The live event was streamed to the website so fans could 'click-to-buy' whilst watching the models on the runway in the latest fashions, and even download the latest music playlist. Social comments were shown…
Customers have similar traits but are not all alike and should not be spoken to with a single message in the same manner and tone. This was initially looked at in an earlier article ‘Talk to your customers or talk to your customer?’, but once the need to communicate with and not at all your customers is understood, providing different messages/offer/content using surface level details is a tempting approach, for example splitting the message by gender and/or age group.
This approach assumes that the surface level details represent the best groups of customers which will not always be the case. Looking at the sand in the first image at first glance all the grains seems to be identical with some obvious differences becoming apparent when a more detailed…
Why is attribution modelling important?
Ever since its birth in the mid 1990s, online advertising has been lauded as the most accountable advertising medium ever, but it has taken a while to live up to the promise... The early days of measuring online display campaign effectiveness based on click-through rates alone seem excruciatingly painful to recall for example!
Fast forward to 2014 and the latest online media spend figures show that digital media spend has increased dramatically, with predictions that Digital media will account for 75% of all marketing spend in 5 years. With this kind of money comes a responsibility to ensure media spend isn’t being wasted, or at the very least to find ways of explaining how just much value is being derived from it.
More advanced digital marketeers have started looking towards attribution modelling to help better understand what their budget is doing for them and how it can be made to…
