Category: marketing

  • Digital marketing analytics: Avinash Kaushik

    Digital marketing analytics: Avinash Kaushik

    Digital marketing analytics on the web:

    See how digital marketing analytics can better inform your work. Read Avinash Kaushik. His website/blog Occam’s Razor on analytics is excellent. Be sure to sign up for his newsletter in the lower right hand of his website.

    Quotes:

    “The interesting thing about averages is that they hide the truth very effectively.”

    “Testing is the biggest no-brainer, and the killer of most stupid ideas… Testing is great because you can get the most important person’s opinion: the customer’s.”

    “Web is perhaps the cheapest and most effective channel on the planet right now. No matter what you do you can do it cheaper, faster and more efficiently on the web.”

    “Remember, a website is not a monolith that’s used by one type of people. Your job is to figure out what are all of the reasons that it exists for and find the best source to measure it.”

    “The web is inherently complex, every bit of it… And it changes every day. The tool is not the answer, it’s the people. Buy the tool you want, but remember the 10/90 rule [$10k in software and invest $90k in great staff] and invest accordingly if you want to win.”

    “On the web we all do a very poor job of understanding the customer needs and wants and thus their experience on our sites. …I am a fan of measuring Customer Satisfaction (were you satisfied with your experience on our site today), Primary Purpose (why are you here today) and Task Completion Rate (were you able to complete the task today).”

    “If you want to have life-altering web site gains, those won’t happen because you have improved one page on your site or a set of single pages in a silo.”

    “When you cross-breed a bunch of metrics to produce a hybrid ‘simple number’, the process, by design, hides insights, hinders the ability to understand performance, and almost never allows the management team to identify root-causes.”

    “If you are not spending 30% of your time in 2013 with data, you’ll fail to achieve professional success.”

    “Spend 95% of your time defining the problem and 5% of the time solving it.”

    “We have so much data on the web, we dive into the the data ocean hoping that magically awesome things will follow. They never do.”

    If you prefer the book:

    Read Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

    “I believe that most websites suck because HiPPOs create them. HiPPO is an acronym for the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.”
    ― Avinash KaushikWeb Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

    Finally, for more on Avinash Kaushik and digital marketing analytics on this site:

    Analytics? Let’s defer to Avinash Kaushik

    Yep, it’s another Kaushik post

  • Digital marketing needs to clean up its act

    Digital marketing needs to clean up its act

    (Does) digital marketing need to clean up its act(?)

    P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said what many digital marketers have been thinking for some time now. “The days of giving digital marketing a pass are over…It’s time to grow up. It’s time for action.” [We don’t] “want to waste time and money on a crappy media supply chain.”

    Almost immediately after reading that, I came across an article, 10 Things I Hate About Digital Marketing by Jerry Daykin.  Skeptically, he points out many of the potential pitfalls of digital.

    What do you think?

    “Digital is all around us and there’s never been a more exciting time in marketing. There’s also never been an easier time to completely waste your advertising budgets. Digital transformation is creating huge new opportunities to reach consumers and drive business objectives. But if you blindly believe everything you read in a marketing headline, or see presented on an event stage, you can easily be led astray.

    [You might also like, “What are the Greatest Concerns for Marketers Now?”]

    “The digital industry is sadly still full of misinformation, misguided gurus, false perceptions and perhaps even a few deliberate crooks. With so much constant change it’s hard for anyone to keep up. But in general, the traditional rules of marketing all still apply…”

    In the same post: “The answer to how much content you need to make is nearly always dependent on how much you can afford to promote to a big enough audience. That’s why content isn’t really king, it’s a democratically elected president which can win hearts & minds only if it has enough of a campaign to get started.”

    Read the rest of the post HERE.

     

  • Marketing Challenges: What are the greatest concerns for marketers?

    Marketing Challenges: What are the greatest concerns for marketers?

    I guessed number one of the marketing challenges correctly. See if you agree with this Hubspot post – updated to reflect recent business marketing research.

    7 of the Top Marketing Challenges Marketers Face Today

    Every marketer faces different challenges. Although we typically share similar goals, some teams are stuck on hiring top talent, while others are having trouble finding the right technology for their needs.

    [Also, read, “Want to Create a Fantastic Social Media Proposal?”]

    Whatever the case may be, there’s always at least one area that you can stand to improve. In other words, there’s always room to optimize the various components of your strategy and turn your marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.

    Curious about what kinds of obstacles other marketers are up against?

    To learn more about the challenges marketers face today, download the free 2016 State of Inbound report here.

    We polled thousands of marketers on the challenges they face, as well as the tactics they’ve used to meet those challenges head-on. Here are some of the most common challenges marketers reported struggling with … and their solutions.

    The Most Common Marketing Problems We Face, According to the 2016 State of Inbound Report

    According to our report, generating traffic and leads and proving ROI are the leading challenges marketers face. Here’s a look at this year’s data:

    SOI_blog_X-Top-Challenges-1.jpg

    Image Credit: The 2016 State of Inbound Report

    Let’s go through each of these top challenges and how marketers can address them.

    Read the rest HERE

    Written by Lindsay Kolowich | @

  • Outstanding free marketing tools you need to know about

    Outstanding free marketing tools you need to know about

    Free Marketing Tools… and More

    The amount of free marketing tools and information available for marketers, entrepreneurs and those bootstrapping a business is fantastic. However, it can be overwhelming to keep track of everything you might use now or down the road.

    After creating a comprehensive list of essential free tools for Entrepreneurial Marketing students, (available HERE) one student did a little extra research. She found an incredible list. Big shout out to these folks. It is a terrific resource and pretty well organized for everything from business, marketing, design & code, and productivity to learning.

    Click HERE for the list. The updated list contains new tools for website, branding, invoice, image editors, email management and more.

    IF nothing else, this is a great way to get familiar with the free tools available and help you to nail done the services you might want to pay for. There are some paid services I use regularly and perhaps those can be covered in a separate post.

    Again, don’t forget to visit the list of free marketing tools on this site.

    Finally, enjoy! If you have any questions on which tools I’ve used and might be best for you please contact me. Or leave a comment below.

  • Want to know more about that website? Use these free tools.

    For Free Insights on Digital Market Intelligence

     SimilarWeb is a fantastic digital market intelligence tool. Get an idea of how other websites are doing with a quick traffic overview and similarweb-logosnapshot of any website’s referrals. The free version also inlcudes search, social, display, content, audience, similar sites and mobile apps.

    Now, thanks to a heads-up from the folks over at Meltwater, here’s another great tool to discover impressions/reach on a site. It’s called Hypestat. Plug in the website and it pulls the daily/monthly breakdown of Unique visitors, pageviews, Alexa ratings and the value of the site in ad revenue dollars.

    Pro tip: For a quick average of reach you might get by placing content on the site. Simply take the number of unique visitors and multiply by 30.

    Here’s to numbers!