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Startup marketing guide

Need to start putting that entrepreneurial marketing plan together? Although the “PR” section is not as relevant as it used to be, this is an excellent startup marketing checklist. Here we go:

The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing

Starting a business is exhilarating. Unfortunately, the “build it and they will come” theory doesn’t hold much weight and those overnight success stories you hear about are often the result of behind the scenes years of hard work. Simply put, startup marketing is a unique challenge often times because of the limited resources, whether it’s time, money or talent.

You have to be sure every effort, no matter how small, is well-planned and flawlessly executed. And to make it even more difficult, the traditional marketing strategies don’t always work.

Startup marketing is a whole different science. How so? The secret is properly combining the right channels: Content Marketing and PR.

So, starting from the beginning, here’s the complete Startup Marketing Manual.

Foundation

The Startup Foundation

Before you start laying bricks, you need a solid foundation. A successful startup marketing strategy follows that same principle. Before you jump into marketing your startup, make sure you have the following bases covered.

1. Choosing a Market

It’s easy for startup founders to believe the whole world will love their products. After all, founders eat, sleep and breathe their products. The reality is that only a small portion of the population is interested in your product.

If you try to market your startup to everyone, you waste both time and money. The key is to identify a niche target market and go after market share aggressively.

How do you choose a market? There are four main factors to consider:

  1. Market Size – Are you targeting a regional demographic? Male? Children? Know exactly how many potential customers are in your target market.
  2. Market Wealth – Does this market have the money to spend on your product?
  3. Market Competition – Is the market saturated? As in, are their many competitors?
  4. Value Proposition – Is your value proposition unique enough to cut thru the noise?

2. Defining Keywords

With a clearly defined market, you can begin building a keyword list. You’ll use the keyword list primarily for blogging, social media and your main marketing site. Essentially, you want to build a list of words or phrases that are highly relevant to your brand. Ask yourself this: What would someone type into Google to find your startup’s website?

Start with a core keyword list. This is a list of three to five keywords that completely summarize what your startup does. For example, Onboardly’s core keyword list is: customer acquisition, content marketing and startup PR. Your core keyword list should be based on your value proposition. What is it that you’re offering customers?

Tip: Your core keywords make excellent blog categories.

Now you’ll want to expand your core keyword list to include secondary keywords. Secondary keywords are more specific. Take “content marketing”, the core keyword from earlier, for example. Secondary keywords might include: corporate blogging, blogging best practices, email marketing how to, etc.

Use free tools to find the keywords already sending traffic to your website. Then run your core keywords through Google’s Keyword Tool and Uber Suggest. The best keywords found through those tools will be identified by low competition and high traffic. In other words, a lot of people are searching for them, but few results are displayed.

3. Defining Success

Success is different for every startup. Maybe success is 500 new signups per month for Startup A while Startup B thinks success is $50,000 in revenue per month. Whatever your idea of success may be, define it early and define it rigidly.Write it down or send it to the entire team. Just make sure everyone you’re working with knows your definition of success and is prepared to work towards it.

Be sure to stay consistent. It doesn’t matter if you’re defining success by signups, revenue, profit or anything else you can think of. What does matter is that it’s tied to real growth (no vanity successes) and that it’s measured the same way each month. For example, don’t define success as 500 new signups one month and then $50,000 in revenue the next. Pick one definition and commit to it.

4. Setting Core Metrics

Just as you shouldn’t indulge vanity success, you shouldn’t indulge vanity metrics.Eric Ries refers to working with vanity metrics as “playing in success theatre”. While vanity metrics are appealing, if only to your ego, they are useless. They are not tied to real growth, meaning you won’t know if your startup is a roaring success or total flop until it’s far too late.

Be sure your core metrics are accurately measurable and specific. For example, let’s assume you’ve defined success as 500 new signups per month. You might measure the conversion rate of three calls to sign up. The idea is to have a few highly valuable metrics based on actions taken throughout the customer acquisition funnel (e.g. signups, newsletter subscriptions, eBook downloads). Don’t try to measure everything. Focus on the key indicators of success.

Tip: Record baseline metrics right away so you can easily determine your growth.

5. Estimating a Conversion Rate

The next step is to assign conversion rates and values. Consider newsletter signups, for example. 100 new newsletter signups per month could be incredible growth if your conversion rate is 20%. That is, if 20% of your newsletter subscribers become paying customers. If your conversion rate is closer to 1%, those 100 newsletter signups might be insignificant.

Estimate (based on historical data) your lead conversion rate. Now do the same to estimate the lifetime value of a customer. If you know how many of your leads convert and how much those conversions generate for your startup, you can assign values to goal completions like newsletter signups. $2,500 per month from your newsletter is a lot more indicative of success than 100 new newsletter signups.

6. Setting a Budget

At the end of the day, it all comes down to the money. How much can you afford to spend on your startup marketing strategy? Remember that while inbound marketing leads cost 61% less than outbound marketing leads, they are not free. Set a budget early in the game and accept that limitation.

“57% of startup marketing managers are not basing their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis.”

More importantly, carefully plan how you intend to divide that budget. Maybe your blog has been your most powerful tool to date and you want to invest 40% of the budget on it. Or maybe you want to spend 35% of the budget to develop a new eBook or online course. Just be sure you have the logistics settled before you start spending (or you might just lose your hat).

Social Media

social media

Social media is one of the most popular ways to promote your content and reach influencers. Since a great content promotion plan brings potential customers to your website and influencing the influencer can generate thousands of new leads, social media is invaluable to startups. Of course, there are a few tricks to get the most out of it.

1. Choosing the Right Social Media Networks

Startups tend to choose the social media networks they engage on without much strategy. The two most common mistakes are trying to master every network and trying to master certain networks just because the competition is doing it. If all of your competitors are on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you should be too, right? Maybe, but maybe not.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest and now Instagram, are some of the most popular social networks today. All of them can be great content promotion and community building tools, but they all have unique characteristics. Facebook, for example, is typically powered by your existing customers who enjoy visual posts like pictures and video. Twitter, on the other hand, is often powered by potential customers who respond well to links (e.g. blog links).

Each social network ‘works’ differently, as in, how the community takes, interprets and digests your sharing and content varies. Reddit is often referred to as a very guarded network and detests spammers. Unlike twitter, here you can’t just schedule various messages every day. The content you share in Reddit has to be specific and unique to the categories you choose. Reddit, like other networks, requires a slower approach. You can’t just jump on, run some ads and expect people to upvote all your content. Be mindful of the network and community you are trying to reach, it may not be in the social space you first thought.

Tip: Consider the demographic of the social network itself. Take Tumblr, for example. Tumblr caters to a young, laid-back audience that loves sharing inspiring quotes and funny pictures. If you’re targeting this audience, don’t spend your time on LinkedIn.

2. Defining the Best Times to Post

The idea that there is a perfect time to post a tweet or Facebook update is a myth. If you’re targeting teenagers, mornings and nights might be the best times to post during the school year. During the summer? That’s a whole other story. There simply is no universal “perfect time to post”. There are, however, some best practices (according to Dan Zarella). All times are EST.

Facebook:

  • Saturdays are best.
  • 12 p.m. is the best time to share.
  • 0.5 posts per day is the best frequency.

Twitter:

  • 5 p.m. is the best time to get a retweet.
  • 1 to 4 link tweets per hour is the best frequency.
  • Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays are best.
  • 6 a.m., 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. are the best times to tweet in terms of clicks.

3. Using a Keyword List

Now it’s time to put that keyword list you created earlier to good use. When it comes to social media, you’ll use your keyword list to maximize your engagement efforts. If you’re marketing an online shopping club for families like MarilynJean, you’ll want to ensure you’re having family and shopping focused discussions on social media.

The easiest way to do this is to use a social networking management tool likeHootSuite. That way you can setup search streams of your core keywords. Using MarilynJean as an example, one of their streams might be for the keyword “online shopping club”. They’ll be able to monitor all of the conversations happening around that keyword and join in. More importantly, MarilynJean will solidify a reputation in the space.

Tip: Use your keyword list to help target any online ads you may be running.

4. Creating and Using an Influencer List

As mentioned above, one of the best marketing techniques online is to influence the influencer. It will take a long time for your startup to develop a highly influential relationship with thousands of people. Instead, focus on connecting with the people who already have that influence.

“78% of social media users said posts by brands influenced their purchasebehavior moderately or highly.”

For example, MarilynJean might look to connect with a famous celebrity mother via Twitter. If that mom loves what they’re doing for families and tweets about them to thousands (if not millions) of loyal followers, MarilynJean will see a huge surge in both followers and traffic.

Tip: Journalists and community leaders are great influencers as well. Don’t limit yourself to celebrities, who can be very tricky to connect with.

Build your influencer list with a bit of market research. Start by finding popular blogs in the space. Who writes for those blogs? Who owns them? Search for your core keywords on Twitter. Who appears in the results? Who are they following?

Remember that a high follower count is not always a good indication of influence. Look for how engaged their followers are and their follower to following ratio.

5. Setting Up a Blog

Setting up a blog can be quite simple. It’s a matter of downloading the software, uploading it to your server and following the setup instructions. WordPress, for example, is free and offers many amazing plugins. One for example, is Yoast SEO. Start by installing Yoast, a SEO plugin that will help Google and other search engines locate and rank your content. (Other great plugins include Akismet, Calendar, and featured posts) Then, setup the basics like blog categories and tags.

Once the back-end of your blog is ready to go, think about the curb appeal. How does your design look? Ask a professional designer to help you design your blog or give it a small revamp. Then invite ten friends to check out the design and offer feedback. You’ll get a feel for the aesthetic appeal. Remember, design is important as it relates to user experience, but it shouldn’t be all consuming. Your blog is about publishing really great content, at the right time to the right people. Your design should simply enhance that experience.

Be sure your design is also functional. Ask yourself these questions:

  • If I stand back and squint my eyes, does my call to action still pop?

Do I have:

  • Search functionality?
  • Social media information and sharing functions (e.g. Twitter feed, Facebook plugin)?
  • A blog subscription and RSS feed option?
  • Featured images on my blog’s homepage?
  • Social sharing buttons on each blog post?

Note: While WordPress is not the only blogging platform, it is one of the most widely used.

Startup PR

startup PR

PR remains a mystery in many startup circles.

When’s the right time to tell people about your startup? Is there value in getting early coverage on industry blogs? What message is going to resonate with writers? How can you maximize the press coverage you do get and translate it into sales? Should I hire a PR firm to help me out?

The good news is it doesn’t need to be such a mystery. Fundamentally, it all boils down to this:

  • What to say.
  • When to say it.
  • Who to say it to.

1. Craft Meaningful Positioning Statements

Much like a great elevator pitch should lie in the mind of any entrepreneur, a series of engaging positioning statements is vital. And while constructing two sentences may seem easy, crafting effective statements is quite the challenge.

Start by identifying what the product is and how it will affect others. Think of the product as the solution created to solve a worldwide problem. This is an important measure to remember when marketing and selling the product. Don’t think of it as selling a product. Think of it as solving a problem. Lastly, who will care about your product?

  • What is your product?
  • How will it affect others?
  • Who will care?

Positioning statements combine these three key factors into two sentences that are used to market the product and pitch it to the media. To ensure success, it is important that these statements not only articulate what the product is capable of, but that they clearly describe its value proposition as well.

2. Define Your Startup Sensitivities

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” – Sun-tzu

By identifying competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, one can better understand how to market one’s product as better. Why is their solution to the universal problem their product solves better than those before it?

Be creative. Use spreadsheets, visual imagery or lists. Harness all of the information available on the product and its competitors, and study it. Look at each closely and determine strengths and weaknesses. If there are others who have an edge, then look at an angle where they are lacking.

Creating “the next social network for penguins” might be your ultimate passion, but be conscious of the fact that you’ve got a remarkably short span of time to engage writers when pitching them. Focus on the one (or two) strongest aspects of your value proposition (what your customers love about you most) and lean heavily on those hooks to gauge media interest.

3. Identifying the Right Writers for a Media List

The importance of identifying who will care about the product is not only relevant in terms of crafting positioning statements, but in identifying the right writers for a media list as well. Any media outlet employs a number of qualified writers capable of telling the story, but you should be careful to pitch only writers who will be the best fit for your product. Though time-consuming, this simple step should never be overlooked.

Determine key media outlets of interest then search for stories with similar themes or relevance to your own. Look at the writers who’ve covered those stories.

Always pitch the right writer for your story. For example, if your product is exclusively for iPhone, don’t pitch a journalist who only reports on Android products.

“Build your network before you need them.” ~ Jeremiah Owyang, Partner and Industry Analyst at Altimeter Group

Once you have identified the writers to connect with, utilize social media to engage with them. Build relationships and ask of nothing. Set up private Twitter lists of the writers of interest, and actively respond to them and retweet their posts. Make friends with them!

Relationships with writers are not always easy to build, but the effort to achieve them can mean great story coverage and the opportunity to be covered again in the future. Even if you are not in a position to leverage journalists or writers, you should still be connecting and making those relationships. In due time, they will always benefit you and your startup.

4. Creating a Press Kit

The key to a successful media launch is rooted deep within a killer media kit. Begin by identifying the items needed:

  • Media Advisory
  • Logos & Screenshots
  • Founder Bios & Photos

A media advisory should include all major points that are important to the product, the company and its success. It should include how the product is changing the world and why it is important. More importantly, it should be written and directed towards who will care. The “pitch” should be included in the headline and/or the first paragraph of the release. This is an excellent opportunity to use your positioning statements from earlier.

Include brief and necessary background information on the company and its founders. Enough to offer a taste of the team behind the product. By offering quick stats at the end of the media advisory, writers are given a brief snapshot of the company. Include:

  • Company Name
  • Website
  • Twitter Handle(s)
  • CEO & Co-Founders
  • Launch Date (if applicable)
  • Fees (if applicable)

Be conscious of time restrictions or sensitivities. Is there an embargo present or a set launch date and time?

Remember, most writers will merely skim a media advisory. By ensuring that a media advisory is tight and effective, you’ll increase the chances of story coverage.

Always offer the media options to use as supplementary visuals to accompany the story. Include company logo(s) and relevant screenshots of the product. Anything that offers a glimpse of features and capabilities is appreciated.

Provide a brief biography of each founder and respective photos. What is the driving force behind the company and how have their beliefs shaped it to become the success it is now? Include any tidbits of information that writers could use.

An important takeaway is that your press kit can be your ultimate weapon in securing great coverage. We recommend using a personalized Dropbox folder orGoogle Drive for each journalist you approach so that you can easily share by inviting them to the folder. It’ll also confirm when they join or view the folder – confirming interest – and hopefully that a story is about to be written.

5. Reaching Out to Journalists

Engagement with journalists prior to reaching out is key. When interacting with writers beforehand, you should request to send information on a story that may interest them. As previously mentioned, by building a relationship first, this request doesn’t come off as insincere. Writers may still decline, but by continuing to build on the relationship created, you could potentially convince them to accept in the future.

Content Creation

content creation

With a blog setup and your PR in full swing, it’s time to kick content creation into high-gear. Managing a blog and other forms of content can seem daunting, especially to not-so-great writers. Fortunately, four little steps will give startups the information they need to get serious.

1. Creating a Topic List

You’ve got a good looking blog designed and a great content promotion strategy, but something’s missing. Oh right! The content.

Before you dive right in and start writing, create a topic list. The perfect topic list is based on your core keywords for SEO purposes. Using your core keywords on your blog builds your startup’s credibility with search engines. Start by brainstorming ten topic ideas around each of your core keywords. Where possible, use your keywords in the titles, but not where it feels unnatural.

With between thirty and fifty topics, you can start thinking about writing. But first, put all of these ideas into a calendar. When will each be published? Who will write them? Are any of them in progress? A blog calendar helps you track your topics from conception to completion. Gantt charts are often shrugged off, but for the purpose of properly managing an editorial schedule, they are extremely helpful. Check out the multitude of templates and spreadsheets available for free online like: 90-day calendar, a Google Doc template, or these free guides from Bob Angus.

Tip: Be sure to add descriptions to your topic ideas. You might not remember your main points when you go to write the post three months from now.

[ALSO READ: OUTSTANDING FREE TOOLS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT]

2. Knowing What Types of Content to Publish

There are four main types of content to be published (excluding blog content). Like social networks, each one has unique advantages and disadvantages. Consider your options carefully, always keeping your target market in mind. And remember:don’t try to do a little bit of everything right away.

  • eBook/Guides: Information products are huge. Offer a free eBook in exchange for a name and email address. Just like that, you have a new lead. You know they’re interested in your product because they were interested in the eBook and now you have their contact information. Now, follow up. Ask their opinion of the eBook and open the door for conversation.

“Information products have the best margins. If you can get them into a subscription, then you’ll have monthly reoccurring revenue.” ~ Dan Martell, Founder of Clarity

  • Webinar: Hearing your voice and engaging with you live gives your customers (and potential customers) a sense of ease. Webinars capitalize on this! Cross promote your webinar on your blog. Also, have someone on your team live tweet during the webinar using a custom #hashtag. At the end of the webinar, after providing real value to the attendees, post your contact information. It’s a simple, interactive way to generate new leads.
  • Newsletter: Email marketing is far from dead, despite what you might have read. Make subscribing to your newsletter quick and easy. Don’t go overboard with your email blasts though because if you overuse the connection, you’ll lose it. For the same reason, you’ll want to ensure every newsletter offers real value and is not just an excuse to push a new product. Try offering a discount, a promotion, industry news, or a contest – whatever!
  • Video: If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how much a video is worth. Keep it simple by having an explainer video created or by shooting an introduction video. Put the video on your startup’s homepage and/or blog. You might be camera shy, but statistics show that most people would rather watch than read.

3. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is vital for startups. First of all, guest posting on a popular blog is a great way to build your reputation in the space. Second, having someone influential guest blog on your startup’s blog is an easy way to drive traffic.

Start by looking for outgoing guest blogging opportunities on the top blogs that are writing for your target market. Most blogs will accept guest posts openly, so look for a writers’ page or contributors’ page. If you’re having trouble, track down the blog owner or editor on social media. Ask to email him a first draft of your blog post idea. Just make sure it’s high-quality and 100% original.

Once you’ve built a reputation, it will be easier to find influencers willing to contribute to your startup’s blog. Create a writers’ page of your own or reach out to select influencers individually via social media or email. When the guest post is published, be sure to ping the contributor so she can promote the post to her whole network.

4. Capturing Emails

Email subscription has been mentioned a few times already. Capturing emails can be divided into three categories: email submits, newsletter subscriptions and blog subscriptions. Email submits could come from eBook downloads or similar offers. Newsletter subscriptions are just that: people interested in reading regular updates and content from your startup. Blog subscriptions are straightforward as well.

Email submits and newsletter subscriptions are best managed by tools likeMailChimp, which allows you to easily send well-designed custom emails to leads. Blog subscriptions, on the other hand, are best managed by tools like Feedburner, which allows you to automatically notify leads when you published new blog content.

Test and Iterate

test and iterate

By now, your marketing strategy is in full motion. Of course, no one gets it perfect on the first try and there’s always room for improvement. That’s where testing and iteration comes into play. Remember back to the core metrics and definition of success from earlier. Keep those two things in mind here.

1. Setting Up Analytics Tools

The key to measuring success is a great analytics tool. If you need a no-frills solution, check out Google Analytics. It’ll give you the basics and, over time, you will learn to master the somewhat complicated behind-the-scenes mechanics of it. If you want something more user-friendly and advanced, tools like KISSmetrics are always available.

Your experience setting up your analytics tool will be different depending on the solution you choose. However, all analytics tools will have you insert a snippet of code on your webpages, which allows them to track visits and events. Be sure to look for analytics tools that are committed to preserving fast load times, likeMeasurely. Some codes leave visitors waiting for the website to load, which can increase bounce rate dramatically.

2. Measuring Against Benchmarks

Earlier, you recorded your baseline metrics, which you’ll use as benchmarks going forward. Ideally, you’re measuring week over week and month over month growth. If you make the mistake of waiting for solely month over month data, you could be too late. Each week, compare your core metrics to the week before. Some give and take is normal. Each month, do the same. Here, you should look for consistent growth.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” ~Peter Drucker, Management Consultant

When you see significant growth or decline, be sure to attribute it to some event(s). For example, a tweet that went viral or a newsletter that was a huge disaster. Isolate what you did differently and either replicate it or avoid it going forward. Don’t just measure your data – act on it!

3. Brainstorming Creative New Ideas

While tweaking what you’re already doing is great, coming up with brand new ideas is even better. It’s not enough to only iterate and optimize what you’ve been doing. The most successful startups are always trying creative new things. Maybe a social contest, a funny video, a new online course, a clever PR angle – the list is endless.

Many of your new and innovative ideas can easily fail, but the few that succeed will be well worth it. Never get complacent! As a startup, the name of the game is agility, flexibility and thinking forward.

Best Practices

best practices

What are the industry experts saying? What are the top startups doing? Here are three startup marketing best practices.

1. Sell the Solution

Too many startups focus on the problem instead of the solution. It makes sense, of course. Founders design a solution for the problem, which makes the problem a founder’s first love. Unfortunately, it’s the solution that appeals to potential customers. Realistically, there are hundreds of products that could solve the problem of, for example, low productivity. What makes your solution the perfect choice?

2. Have a Compelling Story

Storytelling is a powerful sales tool. Just ask Seth Godin! If you have a compelling story, use it. How did you come up with your solution? Did you struggle in the beginning? Are you still struggling? Use your story to differentiate yourself from the competition. Startup marketing is all about the customer and establishing an authentic relationship. Having a relatable story to tell is a fast-track.

3. Use All Your Resources

Your team is arguably one of your biggest marketing tools. Their passion for what your startup is doing is called evangelism. Use it to your advantage. Send them out into the world excited to tell your startup’s story to anyone they meet. But don’t stop there. Ride the buzz from a trending topic by writing a blog post on it or creating a video about it. Run a contest around a major holiday to drum up some hype. Be sure you’re not overlooking any marketing resources, big or small.

Conclusion

Startup marketing is a complex science. Some great ideas have failed due to a lack of media attention and customer awareness. Others have gone under thanks to a poor strategy. Still, other great ideas have spiraled to billion dollar fame! Well, founders everywhere can stop searching for that elusive secret to startup marketing success. It’s simply the sweet spot between content marketing and PR.

About the Author: Renée Warren is the Co-Founder of Onboardly, a company focused on helping funded technology startups be more visible and acquire more customers. They do this through Content Marketing, startup PR and Social Media. Subscribe to their blog here!

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Analytics? Let’s defer to Avinash Kaushik

:Want to get up to speed on the world of digital analytics relatively quickly? Follow Avinash Kaushik‘s blog Occam’s Razor. He writes and speaks on analytics in way that is easy to grasp and you can start implementing some great ideas right away. Here’s a recent post:

Speed, Focus, Smart Insights: 5 Google Analytics Custom Reports FTW!

SplitsStandard reports stink. Custom reports rock!

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are quite familiar with this sentiment. I’ve expressed it often. 🙂

The primary reason is simple: You are unique. Your business is unique. Why would a report created for everyone work for the special someone that you are?

There are other great reasons as well.

Custom reports allow you to deeply focus (by eliminating the rif-raf metrics and dimensions, they save time and show just what you want). When shared, custom reports allow you to deliver deeper relevance. Custom reports allow you to package up entire datasets for deeper analysis.

I’ve shared a whole bunch of custom reports in the past. You can download them into your Google Analytics account via one click (along with some lovely Advanced Segments and a Dashboard). Just go to the GA Solutions Gallery and click Import: Occam’s Razor Awesomeness.

You can download a bunch more, that are not yet in the bundle above, by following the links at the end of this post. Seven more! The include single custom reports that replace all/most current standard reports in GA on Mobile, Content, Paid Search and Acquisition. Your life will be simpler. Grab the above, then grab the ones at the end of this post.

Today, I want to share a few of my recent favorites that solve day-to-day challenges in clever ways.

But, before we go there I want to share an important concept. Many custom reports are wrong because we mess up the fundamental data model in analytics. We mis-align metrics and dimensions across Users, Session, Hits. If you want to create accurate custom reports (or apply advanced segments), this post is mandatory reading: Excellent Analytics Tip #23: Align Hits, Sessions, Metrics, Dimensions!

With that life-lesson out of the way, here are the super-cool custom reports that truly unlock the power of Google Analytics…

If you use Adobe or IBM or… you’ll find these concepts to be extremely relevant. They all allow you to create deeply custom reports, so just recreate them there. If your digital analytics tool does not allow you to create these types of reports, ditch it before it gets you fired!

In each of the above five amazing custom reports, you’ll learn various techniques – how to create a flat report, how to use filters, how to create micro-ecosystems of data, just get cool visualizations you can in PowerPoint, etc. – and you’ll have a link you can click on to download the report directly into your Google Analytics account.

Here we go….

1. Hostname [Domains with your GA code]

This report demonstrates the power of getting something out of Google Analytics that you might know exists there.

There are many metrics and dimensions in GA that are hidden because they are not in any standard report.

I suffer from the problem that tons of people scrape the content from this blog and repost it as if it were their own. Silly problem (and an ineffective strategy for the scrapers). I was worried that if they scrape the content from my blog, they likely scrape my GA code as well and now I have polluted data!

There is a simple way to understand the impact, create a custom report to draw out an otherwise hidden GA dimension: Hostname.

Here’s my custom report…

hostname custom report google analytics

I wanted to capture how many sessions and users were being “added,” I wanted to know their bounce rate (ha!), and some sense for how deep the engagement might be on their site (as I have set up some behavior goal-types on my GA account and also, hurray, assigned goal values!).

Here’s the resulting output… a simple and effective report that caused me to step off the ledge…

hostname custom report data google analytics

So, yes, people are scraping content. It is not a big deal.

So the Sessions and Users numbers are tiny – completely ignorable. (This is why I think it is such a distraction to have Analysts wrap themselves into a pretzel and spend a ton of time and custom coding to “eliminate internal company traffic.” Look, just grow the pie, just do better marketing. Make the internal traffic so small that you can ignore it!)

I’ll admit it hurts a bit that their bounce rates are so much lower than mine. 🙂

On a serious note, some of these values are ok. For example, translate.googleusercontent.com shows users who are reading the blog via Google Translate and are likely non-English speakers. If this number is big, consider providing translations. Just check each source to see if you need to be worried. And, in my case even if the number are 10x more, I would not really worry in context of the 1.2 million overall Visits.

Custom Report Download: Just grab the Occam’s Razor Awesomeness bundle, the report is in there.

Bonus: There’s lots of goodness that is hidden in Google Analytics. Explore here: Dimensions & Metrics Explorer

2. Social Media Performance Analysis

This report demonstrates the power of custom reports to reduce the time you spent hunting and gathering.

Let’s say you want to analyze your social media performance. At the moment you will have to go to the Acquisition folder, and at the very minimum look through all these reports to pick out the best bits…

google analytics acquisition reports

That’s a lot of stuff, right? The All Traffic folder has Social spread out in Channels, Treemaps, Source/Medium and likely in Referrals. In the Social folder you’ve got lots of other stuff (which might be un-tied to All Traffic), that you likely need some time to internalize.

For most people, you don’t need all this digging around. You can create one destination where you, and everyone in your company, can wallow in the trough that is social data!

I call reports like this one micro-ecosystems. It brings together everything you need in one place. (There’s a Paid Search micro-ecosystem you can download at the end of this post.) We have three tabs of data. The first one gives you the overall end-to-end picture (Acquisition – Behavior – Outcomes). The second one will focus on analyzing content performance on our site from Social traffic. The third one will be on device analysis (because of our hypothesis that so much of Social consumption is mobile!).

Here’s what the first tab, ABO, looks like in the configuration mode…

social media custom report definition

Always, always, always, no matter what you report, ensure you have acquisition, behavior and outcome metrics. You’ll see all three above.

I want to know what Social Network people are coming from. I want to know Users (valiant imperfect effort at people!) and how often each User comes (acquisition metrics). How much content they are consuming (I use session duration only on rare occasions due to time imperfections) and do they get what they were looking for are go hunting (behavior metrics). Finally, what value was delivered to my business (even for a non-profit such as myself, an outcome metric).

To aid further discovery, I’ve created a drilldown for country to optimize my social participation.

Do notice the clever use of the filter (Social Source Referral Exact Yes) above. I want to give the Google Analytics team big love for this life saver. It was deeply frustrating to keep track of social networks (they come and go every day!). Now with Social Network dimension and Social Source Referral filter, you don’t have to worry about it. Uncle Paul is keeping track of it on your behalf! Give him a hug next time you see him.

Here’s the delightful report…

social media custom report ABO

I can easily see all the sources I would expect, and some I did not expect. Again, this is thanks to Uncle Paul’s clever mappings. I can see that Pocket drives most repeat visits, and people are most curious (5% internal search rate). They are also delivering the highest Per Session Goal Value.

I’ve never expressed much engagement with Stack Exchange (or Quora), clearly a mistake I need to rectify.

It also confirms some truths I already knew, Twitter and LinkedIn. But I have stronger numbers for some metrics, but it is clear I can do more to increase the Per Session Goal Value. (I would do that by creating advanced segments for, say Quora and applying that to my Goals Overview report and comparing it with Twitter and LinkedIn.)

Before I go there, I can click on the network I’m most interested in and see where the traffic is coming from…

social media custom report ABO country

There are huge differences for me between Twitter and Facebook. Insights I will use to shift my participation on both channels.

Such a simple collection of metrics and dimensions, such lovely immediate insights.

The second tab is more fun. We always worry about our tweets and posts and reshares when it comes to Social. We don’t analyze what people are interested on our site (mobile or desktop) enough. So, here’s the tab configuration…

social media custom report content analysis

I’ve switched the dimensions so that I look at the Landing Page first, and then drill down to which Social Network is most effective. For metrics, I’ve chosen Unique Pageviews and Pageviews (remember pages are hit level metrics, don’t pick Users and Sessions, they are session level dimensions). Then Page Load Time and Bounce Rates – interesting contrast, right? Finally for outcomes I’ve picked Page Value (remember, it is imprecise to measure session level metrics like conversion rate, goal completions, for hit level dimensions like pages).

Here’s the gorgeous beast…

social media custom report content analysis data

First, look at the contrast between Page Load Time and Bounce Rate. Even accommodating for the fact that Page Load Time is sampled and could always be measured better, there is a lot of goodness here. Work for me to think about and my IT Team (one person 10% of the time!) to action.

The thing I’m most surprised about is the long tail of Social interest. I now write once a month, so much of the stuff above is old. This is a good reminder. Most Social strategies consist of spamming the fresh and moving from fresh to fresher to freshest. Forgetting the truth above. The value in monetizing the old (and still relevant and valuable).

It is also clear above that certain types of content delivers higher value outcomes for my little business here. That in turn will help me figure out what to amplify using social channels. Fewer Google Analytics posts, more broad marketing and business consulting posts! Goodness. I should stop writing this one. 🙂

Tactical and strategic insights. Lovely.

I can also then drill down specifically and optimize for each Social Network by clicking on any of the posts above…

social media custom report content analysis data detail

A new layer of insights.

It should not matter that my insights and guidance above are for a content site and you have an ecommerce website. On Social we create content (hopefully that informs, entertains, provides utility – my mantra for social success). You can use the same process, for your hardcore ecommerce money making venture, to identify actionable insights.

Lastly, remember the hypothesis that most Social consumption is mobile?

I have a tab called Device Analysis to help me dive deeper into people’s behavior by device when it comes to Social, here are the ABO metrics…

social media custom report device analysis

Turns out that at least for me, the prevailing wisdom is not true. Yes, mobile, mobile, mobile and mobile. I hear you Gurus. But, my report does not bear that out. I need to ensure my social strategy is Desktop, Phone and then Tablet (I have to admit this small number was a big surprise).

This will influence the content I’ll write (length, type, images, etc.), and it will influence the promotion I might do using advertising options (for example, as Edgerank chokes all of us, I buy ads on Facebook to share my content, above data helps me target that better).

My Device Analysis report has a built in drilldown. Just pick the platform, click. Here’s the report for Mobile…

social media custom report device analysis detail

It was really fascinating to see the goal completions and conversion rates for Apple vs. Samsung. They did not go with what the prevailing wisdom was. If I were a real business I would use these insights in my ad-targeting strategies. But, I’m too poor (other than FB above), so this report is just for demonstration purposes for me. You can, and should use it though as a part of your Social Media Marketing strategy.

Custom Report Download: Log into your GA account, click: AK: Social Media Performance Analysis Report

Bonus: The very best use of custom reports is when you apply relevant advanced segments to them. This is how you find really rich insights. For example, I found it extremely useful to look at the broad cluster of Social Traffic and contrast it with Users that became Loyal to the website…

social media custom report advanced segments

A much smaller number than you might expect, but these are golden people to me, a part of theavinash army of analysis ninjas! I learn from what works for them, and try to get more of them.

I would not get to this if I did not use advanced segmentation.

3. Business Outcomes Analysis

This report demonstrates the new amazing metrics in Google Analytics, thanks to Enhanced Ecommerce, and the new wonderful ability you have to understand the business outcomes delivered from all those cookies/visitors/users.

All you people (like me) with non-ecommerce websites, hang in there. See the second tab below, that’s for you. We’ll come back to it. Patience padawan!

I don’t like having more than six or so metrics (as you’ve seen above, and will below). Humans and only take so much in at one time. But in this case, more to demonstrate the power, I’m going to go a bit overboard.

For my ecommerce business, I’ve chosen my acquisition, behavior and outcome metrics…

google analytics business outcomes analysis ecommerce

We start with Users. So far so good. Deep breath.

The first new metric is Buy-to-Detail Rate, it measures the number of products purchased per number of product-detail views. I love this, and think of it as an efficiency metric. (Do you know what % of Sessions contained a Product Detail page view?) Product Adds to Cart and Product Checkouts are just what they imply. Clever new behavior metrics.

Ecommerce Conversion Rate, Transactions, Average Order Value and Revenue are buddies you already know so well.

I worry that Analysts are way too locked into Adobe or Google Analytics’ monthly view and rarely look at longer term performance. Partly because the graph on top only looks at one metric (and that too over 30 days unless you change it, dang!).

Hence, the dimension I’ve chosen to look at is Month of Year. I want to compare my key metrics over time. I’m also using a new dimensions not enough people are using, Traffic Type, and of course finally, our long-time lover, Source/Medium…

google analytics business outcomes analysis ecommerce dimensions

My resulting report is so sexy, :), that I have to break it into two pieces to show you clearly in the limited pixels I have available here. You’ll see it all as one report when you download it below.

Here are my acquisition and behavior metrics. It would be super convenient if the team at Google would be so sweet as to actually say June-15, July-15, Aug-15, but we push on regardless. You can see the three months and the trend of the various key metrics…

google analytics business outcomes analysis ecommerce data1

Aug-15 is partial above, so that explains the low number. But, June is unusual. While we got lots of traffic in July, it was clearly irrelevant to the ecommerce business because the Buy-to-Detail ratio was significantly lower.

The other signal is the June’s much traffic also had higher Add To Cart and Checkouts.

Is grabbing as much traffic as you can all it’s cracked up to be? Maybe not.

Here’s the other half of the report (because I love you so much, I’ve added the Month dimension here manually)…

google analytics business outcomes analysis ecommerce data2

You can see the other end of the story here. So far in Aug we are either trending with the June numbers or doing better. Bodes well for this month. But, really calls into question what the heck were we doing in July!

It is rare that we look at all key metrics trended like this over time. Hence, I love the above report.

I can choose a month, July since I’m so curious now, and I can drill down to Traffic Type…

google analytics business outcomes analysis ecommerce traffic type

You can see the key metrics trended for each channel. You can clearly see the important patterns above (what the heck is going on with Paid Search and Display!).

The big difference for me was Referral, in contrast to the other month. And, now I have the capacity to drill down and look at the Source/Mediums for that Traffic Type…

google analytics business outcomes analysis ecommerce source medium

YouTube… I’m going to kill you! What the heck man! Why are you not selling stuff for me!!! Reddit, you’re up next.

(All kidding aside, YouTube is a See-Think channel, it is supposed to be bad at Do. More: See-Think-Do-Care business framework.)

I can compare and contrast and it took me only a very short amount of time to discover what was going on in July, and now I can fix it.

I want you to try and imagine how long looking through three levels of drilldowns across eight metrics and three months of data would take in standard Google Analytics report. Wait. That’s a waste of time. Download the above report instead.

Custom Report Download: Log into your GA account, click: AK: Business Outcomes Analysis

I’d promised to share a non-ecommerce version of the above report. And, here it is…

google analytics business outcomes analysis non-ecommerce

I’ve simply added a second tab to the ecommerce report.

I can’t use the same metrics, but I’ve kept the spirit alive in choosing my metrics as Users, Goal Conversion Rate, Goal Completions, Goal Value and Per Session Goal Value.

I dare you to be more obsessive about outcomes!

I’ve kept the dimensions exactly the same, because I’m recommending the same type of analysis as the above ecommerce version.

Here’s my beautiful report…

google analytics business outcomes analysis non-ecommerce-data

To make the non-ecommerce tab work you’ll need two things. 1. You’ll need to have identified goals for you site. (And if you have not, really, what are you doing on the Internet?) 2. You’ll need to have identified the economic values for those goals.

If you do, your report will be just as beautiful as mine above. And, you can do the same analysis that our e-com brethren are doing above. Including the relevant drill-downs to Traffic Type and Source/Medium…

google analytics business outcomes analysis non-ecommerce-data-referral

It is really, really cool that while serving the world with our content, we can also ensure that long term survival of our digital adventure.

Custom Report Download: Log into your GA account, click: AK: Business Outcomes Analysis

4. Campaign Cost Analysis

This report demonstrates something that will most likely won’t work for you, but something I desperately want you to care about if you want your business to really win. The reason your boss is not more in love with digital, dare I say, is what this report is demanding you do.

We usually measure the outcome of our web strategy using things like conversion rates and revenue. We just did that above!

But, that is just sales. What about getting closer to measuring profit? Or, at least revenue net of marketing or acquisition costs?

You’ll agree with me that that makes a lot of sense, right?

Yet, we rarely do it.

The problem is not the capability in the web analytics tools we have. The problem is our willingness to just do it.

Let’s establish that cost is important.

Here’s my custom report that helps my clients understand the truly end-to-end view of performance of their digital marketing campaigns…

campaign cost analysis custom report setup ecom

Except for the first one, I suspect you know the other metrics quite well. The first one is the one I’m most interested in.

The dimensions are Source/Medium, then we drill down to Campaign, and then by Device Category (as there are massive differences in performance once you get to Mobile and Tablets).

Here’s how the report looks like when you have all the data flowing in as it should…

campaign cost analysis custom report ecommerce

You can see how much money you spent, how often you showed up on the advertising channel, how many people ended up on your site, resulting in what number of sessions (Clicks and Sessions never tie, if they are close, just move on). Then you get to the interesting bits, focus on performance (Click-Through Rate), Cost-Per-Click, and Per Session Value.

The contrast between the last two are particularly important.

If you are paying $1.33 per visit to your site, is the value of $1.66 sufficient to deliver a net positive outcome? Especially, after accounting for your salary?

I kid a bit of course, but this is a deadly serious matter.

Most of the time, we don’t think about this carefully enough.

Notice the red arrow above. We only have cost data for 4.35% of the sessions. This is really poor because, in this case, over 35% of our traffic comes from Paid efforts (Email, Display, Social, Affiliates, etc.).

We can only answer smart questions about one: Paid Search.

This is shameful.

  • You can import cost data for all your Paid efforts into Google Analytics. For: Email.
  • Billboard if you have cleverly added a url there.
  • Display.
  • Social.

See an actual example of how to import non-Google ad data into GA.

Please invest the time in doing this. Your boss is going to love you infinitely more (because they will make decisions an order of magnitude smarter).

Custom Report Download: Log into your GA account, click: AK: All Campaigns: Cost Analysis: Ecom

I’ve also created a slightly tighter version of this report for non-ecommerce websites, because cost is important to all of us. As I’d mentioned above, I run some ads on Facebook to get FB to show my posts to more people who like my brand page on Facebook.

Here’s the report configuration…

campaign cost analysis custom report setup non-ecom

Just a bit more focused on the metrics side, with the same dimensions and drilldowns.

Here’s the report from a non-ecommerce blog, who uses email marketing to stay in close contact with it’s Think and Care audience clusters…

campaign cost analysis custom report non ecom

The cost data for the email campaigns was uploaded into Google Analytics, and you can easily see how the end-to-end picture helps us understand the complete value that email marketing provides. Look at that CPC! Sweet.

You can get this type of data for all your campaigns, and I urge you to invest in that.

Custom Report Download: Log into your GA account, click: AK: All Campaigns: Cost Analysis: Non-Ecom

#5 Key Metrics: Map Overlay Visualization

This last report demonstrates using custom reports for purposes it was not really created for, creating a nice visualization.

I present a lot, internally and externally. Hence, my objective is to try and simplify the data presentation as much as I can. In aid of that goal, one strategy I use is to pull out the Map Overlay view in Google Analytics to show the data.

What do you think of this…

key metrics map overlay dashboard

There is such little space in this blog to see four different sets of data well. Yet, I bet you can see lots of interesting trends and patterns above. Pick the same states (dark ones or your fav state…) and look across. Interesting, right?

Here’s the most obvious one. Traffic is so lop sided (California and Texas), and yet Per Session Value and Avg. Session Duration is so much more diverse! Are we simply getting sub-optimal traffic from California? And, why not more from Nevada? And, what is going on in the middle of the country in terms of time spent? What is up with that square state, and why don’t they spend more money with us when they do spend time?

Really nice. And, no numbers.

Clearly, this is more for presentation (after you’ve already done the analysis, and have some of the answer above). But, in front of a group of people, your boss, perhaps it is all you need to move focus away from data and to shift it to having a discussion.

I snagged the four pictures above from a simple custom report I’d created for this purpose…

map overlay custom reports

I’ve used the Explorer report type in all reports above, in this case I’ve used the Map Overlay.

I’ve set the Zoom Level to Country, and set it as the United States. You can change both to your needs (World, Continent, Sub-Continent, Country).

I’ve further set the dimension to Region. Again, you can set it to your needs (Region, City, Metro).

This report is here so that you’ll make your own clever use of the Map Overlay, but also to inspire you to take away the data as much as you can when you are done with your analysis. Your job is to not impress people with your data, you job is to drive the discussion forward about what to do and what the business impact will be from those actions.

Custom Report Download: Log into your GA account, click: AK: KPIs: Map Overlay Visualization

Bonus: Speaking of data visualization, more inspiration for you: 7 Data Presentation Tips: Think, Focus, Simplify, Calibrate, Visualize and, the even richer and more amazing, Data Visualization Inspiration: Analysis To Insights To Action, Faster!

So there you go, five new custom reports (six actually) that I hope will bring a new layer of insights to your company, while speeding up the time it takes to get to those insights.

Custom reports are a powerful tool in your arsenal, I hope you completely ditch the standard reports and build your Analysis Ninja-dom on these micro-ecosystems.

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you have your favourite custom reports? The ones you can’t live without? If so, would you please be so kind as to share links to them below so that we can all benefit? What:

  • Changes would you make to any of my five custom reports above to make them even more effective?
  • Can I take away?
  • Might I add?
  • Is there a clever strategy you use that I have not?

Please share your custom reports, your suggestions, your critique and your lessons from the front-lines via comments below.

Thank you.

PS: As promised, here are seven more custom reports I’d shared earlier on this blog…

Download the Page Efficiency Analysis V2, Visitor Acquisition Efficiency Analysis, and Paid Search Performance Analysis reports here: 3 Awesome, Downloadable, Custom Web Analytics Reports

Download the Paid vs. Organic Search Performance, PPC Keyword/Matched Query, End-to-End Paid Search reports here: Google Analytics Custom Reports: Paid Search Campaigns Analysis

Download the Content Efficiency & Keyword Drilldown Ecommerce report here: Produce Actionable Insights: Mate Custom Reports With Adv Segments!

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How the Navy SEALs train for leadership excellence

On Leadership – continuing the Navy SEAL theme…

Although producing excellence, incentivizing excellence, incorporating new ideas from the ground and leading by example is a matter of life and death with SEALs, organizations who wish to remain competitive can adopt the same strategies. Originally posted on HBR.

MAY15_28_98185616

Almost every world-class, high-performance organization takes training and education seriously. But Navy SEALs go uncomfortably beyond. They’re obsessive and obsessed. They are arguably the best in the world at what they do. Their dedication to relentless training and intensive preparation, however, is utterly alien to the overwhelming majority of businesses and professional enterprises worldwide. That’s important, not because I think MBAs should be more like SEALS—I don’t—but because real-world excellence requires more than commitment to educational achievement.

As an educator, I fear world-class business schools and high-performance businesses overinvest in “education” and dramatically underinvest in “training.” Human capital champions in higher education and industry typically prize knowledge over skills. Crassly put, leaders and managers get knowledge and education while training and skills go to those who do the work. That business bias is both dangerous and counterproductive. The SEALS can’t afford it. “Under pressure,” according to SEAL lore, “you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. That’s why we train so hard.” When I see just how difficult and challenging it is for so many smart and talented organizations to innovate and adapt under pressure, I see people who are overeducated and undertrained. That scares me.

So I reached out to Brandon Webb, an innovative SEAL trainer/educator, and CEO of Force12 Media for real-world perspective on what industry could learn from a special operations sensibility. Webb, who served in the Navy from 1993 to 2006 and radically redesigned the SEAL training course curriculum, graciously shared his insight about what works – and what fails – when effecting a training transformation.

A member of Seal Team 3, Webb became the Naval Special Warfare Command Sniper Course Manager in 2003. This was a precarious time. The SEALs leadership recognized that technical excellence—better shooting and better shots—didn’t go nearly far enough in addressing the complex environments and demands that would be made upon sniper teams in wartime deployments in multiple theaters. The wartime challenge demanded better collaboration, greater situational awareness and more strategic application of cutting edge technology for the war-fighter. The post-9/11 environment demanded it. In response, some of the radical changes that Webb designed are the following: He broke the class into pairs, assigning mentors to boost support and accountability; he created classes that explore and explain technologies giving participants greater insight into the physics and underlying mechanics of their equipment; and he adopted the “mental management” techniques of Olympic world-champion marksmen, which we were at first reluctantly but then enthusiastically embraced. The results impressed the war-fighting community. SEALs like Marcus Luttrell (Lone Survivor) and Chris Kyle (American Sniper) observed how that course transformed their field capabilities and effectiveness.

“Our instructors were teaching better, and our students were learning better,” Webb noted in The Red Circle, his 2012 SEAL memoir. “The course standards got harder, if anything—but something fascinating happened: Instead of flunking higher numbers of students, we started graduating more. Before we redid the course, SEAL sniper school had an average attrition rate of about 30 percent. By the time we had gone through the bulk of our overhaul, it had plummeted to less than 5 percent.” And as he told me in a recent email exchange, he accomplished this by drawing from many diverse areas outside the military: “We took best practices from teaching, professional sports, and Olympic champions, and we made our course one of the best in the world in a very short period of time…” Webb noted. “We re-wrote the entire curriculum and saw our graduation rate go from 70% to 98% instantly, and hold there…”

Webb explicitly emphasized four transformational training themes. They’re neither obvious nor cliché. Unfortunately, I rarely see them in Fortune 1000 training programs/executive education or elite MBA programs.

1. Produce Excellence, Not “Above Average”

The first describes where Webb simply would not professionally go. “Being very good wasn’t good enough,” Webb declared. “Training programs shouldn’t be designed to deliver competence; they must be dedicated to producing excellence. Serious organizations don’t aspire to be comfortably above average.” “I honestly don’t even want to focus on good or competent,” Webb wrote, “it’s not in my nature and I don’t want to be part of any team or organization that is willing to set this standard. ‘Aim high, miss high,’ and you can quote me on that.”

In other words, training divorced from excellence is mere compliance. It is more “box ticking” than human capital investment. Is “above average” training really worth the time, energy and expense? A kaizen—continuous improvement—ethos is one thing. But customer service and leadership training that only enhances rather than transforms capabilities and skills doesn’t buy very much.

Webb’s hardcore perspective poses an existential challenge to most organizations’ views of human resources. Do they really want training to empower and bring out the best in their people? Or does everyone train with the tacit expectation that excellence matters less than being a bit better? Webb wonders whether most companies are serious about what training can and should mean.

2. Incentivize Excellence Not Competence

This links directly to his second theme around “getting the incentives right.” Even if the training itself is world-class, organizations need recognition and rewards systems that explicitly acknowledge and promote excellence. And, says Webb, also need the courage and integrity to reposition and replace those who can’t—or won’t—step up.

“For training to work it has to be effective and incentives have to be in place (financial, personal growth, promotion, etc.) for training to be effective in the work place and in order to get employee ‘buy in,’” Webb notes. “I’m a big fan of economist Milton Freidman… it’s as simple as creating alignment through incentives and that’s what we did by creating an instructor/student mentor program. The instructors had accountability (they would be evaluated on their student’s performance) which created the right incentive for them to pass. This made a huge difference. Plus we switched to a positive style of teaching and we saw our graduation rate rocket up.”

Should training overwhelmingly focus on skills enhancement? Or must it be managed to build better bonds and relationships throughout the enterprise? Webb unambiguously champions both. The training transformation made the SEALs culture more open to innovation and exchange. Incentives aligning and facilitating accountability improved the entire organization, not just the trainees.

3. Incorporate New Ideas from the Ground

This amplifies Webb’s third theme: successful training must be dynamic, open and innovative. Ongoing transformation—not just incremental improvement—is as important for trainers as trainees. “It’s every teacher’s job to be rigorous about constantly being open to new ideas and innovation,” Webb asserts. “It’s a huge edge, sometime life-saving, to adopt a good idea early and put it into practice…As an instructor I learned that you are never done learning, and your students can be a wealth of information, especially when guys like Chris Kyle would come back from Iraq and make recommendations on how to better train students to the urban sniper environment. We incorporated this type of mission brief back and actively sought out this knowledge from the SEAL sniper’s who were returning from places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa and other not so friendly places. Then we would take this knowledge and incorporate it into our yearly curriculum review; if important enough, we’d make the change within weeks. That’s how fast we could adapt our course curriculum and get approvals.”

4. Lead by Example

Getting better at getting better is a vital organizing principle for learning organizations. Arguably Webb’s most passionate training theme is the one that reflects his battlefield experiences, not just his training triumphs. The most important training behavior a leader can demonstrate, he asserts, is leading by example.

“Leading by example means never asking your team to do something you aren’t willing to do yourself,” Webb writes. “This can’t be faked, do it right and your team will respect you and follow you. Don’t do this, especially in a SEAL team, and you are doomed as a leader. I’ve seen it happen, and careers ended when it did. Lead by example and watch your team elevate you with their own accomplishments.”

If your organization cares about innovation or transforming customer service or being data-driven, how do you lead by example? In Laszlo Bock’s otherwise superb Google-based book on performance analytics—Work Rules!—the phrase “lead by example” is nowhere to be found. That’s both a pity and opportunity missed because, as Webb stresses, leading by example is what truly empowers small teams and teamwork.

“I’ve seen small teams accomplish incredible things in training (my times at the sniper school) and combat (Afghanistan and Iraq),” Webb recalls. “In Special Operations environments and top business environments, you have the privilege of working with people who just get the job done at all costs. They are self-motivators. Even if they don’t have the know-how, they will figure it out and just make it happen. It’s amazing to have a whole team that thinks this way, and to see what they can accomplish.”

There are no panaceas. The level of motivation, dedication and self-sacrifice the SEALs demand from themselves and each other goes far, far beyond what most businesses and business schools should ever ask, let alone expect, from their people. But that said, for leaders and managers who truly care about their people and their customers, the SEALs training template deserves to be taken seriously. No one rightly doubts the vital role education plays in creating and sustaining economic competitiveness worldwide. But it’s long past time that CEOs, boards, business schools and universities revisit what world-class training should mean, as well.

By: Michael Schrage

Original POST on HBR

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A Navy SEAL’s 4 tips to boost mental toughness

Mental Strength – Amazing post on mindbodygreen, an absolute must-read:

guy, running, beach, fitness

I’ve had a 20-year career as a Navy SEAL, 30 years of martial arts training and more than 15 years of yoga practice and teaching to warriors. If there is anything I can teach you, it’s how important your mental strength is, over any physical ability you may possess. The mantra of mind over body is true — you can do anything if you set your mind to it. Here are a few tips to help you build mental toughness, the body strength comes later:

1. Focus on yourself first.

Self-awareness is a place to start building what I call your “unbeatable mind.” Greater self-awareness will help us avoid making the same mistakes over and over, and allow us to get aligned for serious forward momentum.When I was younger, I was a daydreamer. If you asked me to describe what my future looked like, I would have given you a blank stare. This is not uncommon.A journal is a good place to establish self-awareness. Even if it’s just 10 minutes a day, find a quiet place where you can avoid disruptions. Do some deep breathing to center yourself and then spend some time candidly reflecting on who you are and where you are in your life. Do this every day and build it into a reliable habit, like brushing your teeth.
 
2. Figure out your purpose.My investigation into integrated training and optimal performance propelled journeys into CrossFit, Tai Chi, Chi Gong, Pranayama, remote viewing, visualization, mindfulness meditation, Apache Sacred Silence, Tibetan mantras, Ninjutsu, and San Soo / SCARS.All of these practices had a large impact on my worldview, the way my mind works, and my performance benefited because of it all. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help determine if you’re on the right or wrong path:

  • What have you been conditioned to think you’re supposed to do with your life?
  • What do you think you are really supposed to do with your life?
  • What do you feel you are really supposed to do with your life?
  • Is there a tiny voice of doubt deep within you suggesting you are on the wrong track?
  • Is that same voice nudging you forward with the sensation that you are on the right track?
  • What ONE thing do you think you are here for? What ONE thing would you focus on if you had nothing holding you back?
  • What would you do differently if you knew you had one year to live?

So what do you do with the insights that follow? For me, it was a powerful self-realization that motivated me to leave a career path that was eating me alive. Asking myself these questions provided guidance and enabled my pursuit of what was my true dream: To become a Navy SEAL.

3. Determine your path.

Developing skills like discipline, dedication and acquiring a capacity for high-performance first requires tuning in to your true self. A path with heart will be authentic to your true self. Not some muddled version of what others think is best for you, but the real you.

This was my situation years ago, my lack of clarity and self-awareness had me chasing goals imposed on me by others, like a life of corporate success on Wall Street. I felt like I was on the wrong path and the only way I got back on track was by becoming more self aware. Start off with the questions listed above and see where they lead you.

4. Support your new purpose with a healthy lifestyle and the support of others.

For many, if you’re life is on the wrong path, you don’t have the energy to make a fitness program part of your daily life, or to fuel yourself with ahealthy, energizing diet. A consequence of poor self-awareness is that a life rut will claim your spiritual, mental and physical health.

A platform of self-awareness that leads to a renewed purpose in life will ultimately require you to take care of your body in a complimentary way. The good news? You’ll be so fired up about being on your true path that energy will no longer be a problem. The key is to harness this energy and commit to a fitness lifestyle (both exercise and nutrition!).

If this is a problem area for you, don’t do it alone. Perhaps the most important attribution to the Navy SEALS is the prominence of the word “team.” Find a group of like-minded others to who will support you. This is how you not only get on the path, but stay on the path.

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Author: Mark Divine

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Why no one pays attention to your marketing

Moz is one of those companies that really understands that sharing great information and helping others to understand (“Youtility” as Jay Baer calls it) the intricacies of digital marketing puts them on the map as accessible professionals. Rand Fishkin often contributes to a feature called “Whiteboard Fridays” which are always worth a watch/read. Below is just one of a number of really terrific posts.

Ever mass-deleted a bunch of impersonal emails from your inbox? Brand fatigue is a real threat to your marketing strategy. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why brands become “background noise” and how you can avoid it.

Why No One Pays Attention to Your Marketing - The Painful Pitfall of Brand Fatigue Whiteboard Friday

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat a little bit about why no one is paying attention to your brand, to your marketing. It’s the perilous pitfall of brand fatigue.

Brand fatigue sucks

So you have all had this happen to you. I promise you have. It’s happened in your email. It’s happened in your social streams. It’s happened through advertising in the real world, online and offline.

I’ll give you an illustration. So I sign up for this newsletter. I decide, “Hey, I want to get some houseplants. My house has no greenery in it.” So I sign up for Green Dude Houseplants’ newsletter. What do I get? Well, I get a, “Welcome to Our Newsletter.” Oh, okay.

And then maybe the next day I get, “Meet Our New Hires.” Meet our new hires? I’m sure that your new hires are very important to you and your team, but I just got introduced to your brand. I’m not sure I care that much. To me, you’re all new hires. You might as well be, right? I don’t know you or the team yet.

“Best Summer Ever Event,” okay, maybe, maybe an event. “Edible Backyard Gardens, you know, I don’t have a backyard. I was signing up for a houseplant newsletter because it was in my house. “See Us at the Garden Show,” I don’t want to go to the garden show. I was going to buy from you. That’s why I’m online.

Okay, thanks.

How to cause brand fatigue

It’s not just the value of the messaging. It’s the frequency that it happens at. You’ve seen this. I’m on an email list that I signed up for, I think it’s called FounderDating. It’s here in Seattle. I think it’s in San Francisco. I thought it was a really cool idea when I signed up for it. Then I have just been inundated with messages from them. I think some of them are actually worthy of my participation, like I should have gone to the forum. I should have replied. I should have checked out what this particular person wanted. But I get so much email from them that I’ve just begun to hit Delete as soon as I get it.

We’ve actually had this problem at Moz too. If you’re a Moz subscriber, you probably get a new email every time a new crawl is completed, and a campaign is set up, and you have new rankings data. Some of that’s really important, right? Like if you’re paying attention to this particular site’s rankings and you want to see every time you get an update, well yeah, you need that email. But it’s actually kind of tough to opt in to which ones you want and with what frequency and control it all from one place.

We have found that our email open rates, engagement rates have actually drifted way, way down over time because, probably, we’ve inundated you with so much email. This is a big mistake that Moz has made in our email marketing, but a lot of brands make it in tons of places. So I want to help you avoid that.

1) Too many messages on a medium

Brand fatigue happens when there are too many messages, just too many raw messages on a medium. You start to see the same brand, the same name, the same person again and again. Their logo, their colors, the association you have, it just becomes background noise. Your brain goes into this mode where it just filters it out because it can’t handle the volume of stuff that’s coming through. It needs a filtration mechanism. So it starts to identify and associate your brand or your logo or your name or a person’s name with “filter.” Filter that out. That goes in the background.

2) Value provided is too low or infrequent to deserve attention

It also happens when the value provided is too low or too infrequent to deserve attention. So this might be what I’m talking about with FounderDating. One out of every maybe five or six messages, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that was interesting. I should pay attention to that.” But when it becomes too infrequent, that same filtration happens.

Too few of the high value messages means you’re not going to pay attention, you’re not going to engage with that brand, with that company anymore. All of us marketers will see that in the engagement rates. No matter the medium, we can look at our numbers and see that those are going down on a percentile basis, and that gets really frustrating.

3) The messaging can’t be effectively tuned or controlled by the user

So this is the problem that Moz is having where we don’t have that one email control center where you say how often you want exactly which messages updating you of which notifications about which campaigns, and newsletter and da, da, da. So your message frequency is either all the time high or very high and so you’re, “I don’t like any of those options.”

Very frustrating.

How NOT to cause brand fatigue

Now, I do have some solutions and suggestions. But it’s platform by platform.

Email

Start very conservative with your email marketing and highly personal. In fact, I would actually recommend personally sending all the messages out to your first few hundred users if you possibly can, because you will get a great rapport that you develop individually with person by person. That will give you a sense for what your audiences like and what kind of messaging they prefer, and they’ll know they can reply directly to you.

You’ll create that highly-engaged experience through email that will mean that, as you scale, you have the experience from the past to tell you how often you can and can’t email people, what they care about and don’t, what they filter and don’t, what they’re looking for from you, etc. You can thenwatch your open, unsubscribe and engagement rates through your email program. No matter what program you might be using, you can almost always see these.

Then you can watch for, “Oh, we had a spike.” That spike is a good thing. That means that people were highly engaged on this email. Let’s figure out what resonated there. Let’s go talk to folks. Let’s reach out to the people who engaged with it and just say, “Hey, why did you love this? What did you love about it? What can we do to give you more value like this?”

Or you watch for dips. Then you can say, “Oh man, the last three email newsletters that we’ve sent out, we’ve seen successive declines in engagement and open rates, and we’ve seen a rise in unsubscribe rates. We’re doing something wrong. What’s going on? What’s the root cause? Is it who we’re acquiring? Is it new people that signed up, or is it old-timers who are getting frustrated with the new stuff we’re sending out? Does this fit with our strategy? What can we fix?”

Be careful. The thing that sucks about brand fatigue is a lot of platforms, email included, have systems, algorithmic systems set up to penalize you for this. With email, if you get high unsubscribes and low engagement, that will actually kill your long-term chances for email marketing success, because Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s various mail programs and whatever installed mail your targets might have, whatever they’re using, you will no longer be able to break through those email filters.

The email filter that Gmail has says, “Hey, a lot of people click Unsubscribe and Report Spam. Let’s put this in the Promotions tab.” Or, “Hey, a lot of people are clicking Report Spam. You know what? Let’s just block this sender entirely.” Or, “Gosh, this person has in the past not engaged very much with these messages. We’re going to not make them high priority anymore.” Gmail has that automatic high priority system. So you’re getting algorithmically turned into noise even if you might have had something that your customers really cared about.

Blog or other content platform

This is a really interesting one. I would strongly urge you to read Trevor Klein from Moz’s blog postabout the experiment that we and HubSpot did around how much content to produce and whether lowering content or increasing content had positive effects. There are some fascinating results from that study.

But the valuable thing to me in that is if you don’t test, you’ll never know. You’ll never know the limits of what your audience wants, what will frustrate them, what will delight them. I recommend you don’t create content unless you can have a great answer for the question, “Who will help amplify this and why?” I don’t mean, like, “Oh, well I think people who really like houseplants will help amplify this.” That’s not a great answer.

A great answer is, “Oh, you know, I know this guy named Jerry. Jerry runs a Twitter account that’s all about gardening. Jerry loves our houseplants. He’s a big fan of this. He’s particularly interested in flowering cacti. I know if we publish this post, Jerry will help amplify it.” That’s a great answer. You have 10 Jerrys, great. Hit Publish. Go for it. You don’t? Why are you making it?

Watch your browse rate, your conversion rate, and conversion rate…. I don’t mean necessarily all the way to whatever you’re selling, your ecommerce store products or your subscription or whatever that is. Conversion rate could be conversion rate to an email newsletter or to following you on a social platform or whatever.

You can watch time on site and amplification per post to essentially get a sense for like, “Hey, as we’re producing content, are we seeing the metrics that would indicate that our content marketing is being successful?” If the answer to that is no, well we need to retool it. It turns out there’s actually no prize for hitting Publish.

You might think that your job as a content producer or a content marketer is to make content every day or content every week. That’s not your job. Your job is to have success with the metrics that are going to predict and correlate to the strategies you need as a business to acquire customers, to grow your marketing channels, to grow your brand’s impact, to help people, whatever it is that your mission is.

I highly recommend finding your audiences’ sweet spot for both focus and frequency. If you do those things, you’re going to do a great job with avoiding brand fatigue around your content.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media

Last one is social. I’ll talk specifically about Twitter and Facebook, because most things can be classified in there, even things like Instagram and LinkedIn and the fading, sadly, Google+ and those sorts of things.

Twitter, generally speaking, more forgiving as a platform. Facebook has more of those algorithmic elements to punish you for low engagement.

So, for example, I’ve had this happen on my personal Facebook page where I’ve published a few things that people just didn’t really find interesting. This is on my Rand Fishkin Facebook page, different from the Moz one. It turns out that that meant that it was much harder for me next time, even with content that people were very engaged around, to reach them.

Facebook essentially had pushed in. They were like, “You know what? That’s three or four posts in a row from Rand Fishkin that people did not like, didn’t engage with. The next one we’re going to set the bar much higher for him to have to climb back up before we decide, ‘Hey, we’ll show that to more and more people.'”

Lately I’ve been having more success getting a higher percentage of my audience into the impression count of people who are actually seeing my posts on Facebook by getting better engagement there. But that’s a very challenging platform.

Users of both, however, are pretty sensitive, nearly equally sensitive. It’s not like Facebook users are more sensitive. It’s just that Facebook’s platform is more sensitive because Facebook doesn’t show you all the content you could possibly see.

Twitter is just a super simplistic newsfeed algorithm. It’s just, who posted last. So Twitter has that real time kind of thing. So I would still say for both of these, aim to only share stuff that gets high engagement, especially as your brand.

Personal account, do whatever you want, test whatever you want. But as your brand’s account, you want that high engagement over and over again because that will predict more people paying attention to you when you do post, going back and looking through your old social posts, subscribing to you, following you, all that sort of thing, considering you a leader.

You can watch both Twitter Analytics and your Facebook page’s stats to see if you’re having a dip or a spike, where you’re having success, where you’re not.

I actually love using Twitter and a little bit LinkedIn or Google+ to see what gets very high engagement and then I know, “Okay, I should re-share that on Twitter because my audience on Twitter is very temporal.” Two hours from now it’s going to be less than 1% overlap between who sees a Twitter post now and who sees a Twitter post 2 hours from now, and that’s a great test bed for Facebook as well.

So if I see something doing extremely well on Twitter or on Google+ or on LinkedIn, I go, “Aha, that’s the kind of thing I should post on Facebook. That will increase my engagement there. Now I can go post and get more engagement next time and build up my authority in Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm.

So with all of this stuff, hopefully, as you’re producing content, sharing content, building an email subscription, building a blog platform, you’re going to have a little less brand fatigue and a little more engagement from your users.

I look forward to chatting with you all in the comments. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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