5 Tips For Making Your Data a Top Priority

Whether you’re a marketing manager for a private organization or a web analyst for a digital agency, you surely understand the great importance of data and the powerful insights it can yield. You've also probably encountered one (often frustrating) roadblock: The people around you just don't get it. The business analysts haven't gotten the historical data you requested. IT has adopted a "we'll get to it when we get to it" approach to installing tags on the website. Upper management doesn't share the enthusiasm that your department does.

These factors almost always lead to marketing inefficiencies for the long term, with your organization's proverbial marketing rear-ends hanging in the wind. Without quality insights, marketing campaigns cannot improve and are ultimately doomed to fail.

Tips for Success

So how do you go about creating a data-driven culture in your organization? Check out these tips to help convey the importance of data and insights:

1. Get Everybody On Board! – This is perhaps the most important item in this list! Measurement simply cannot happen without the complete support of the required parties in the organization. Make sure everyone, from IT to the decision-makers, knows what you are measuring, why you are measuring it, and how it affects them.
2. Establish Data-Gathering Policies & Procedures – You'll be measuring with the goal of gathering insights to drive business, so you will want to ensure that the data you're basing it all upon is of good quality. Establishing policies and procedures related to data and documenting them will take some time, but it will definitely pay off in the long run.
3. Identify KPIs Relevant to Your Audience – At this point you've caught the eyes of the necessary people in your organization. This is where you reel them in completely. Identify the Key Performance Indicators that matter most to each of them. This will differ according to their respective roles. You want to ensure they see the benefits of their work!
4. Create a Measurement Plan – Once you've identified all of the necessary KPIs, you must map out how you'll go about obtaining the data. Identifying opportunities for measurement and creating documentation for deployment are included in this step.
5. Get Hyped! – You've put all this effort into winning the right people over. Now it's time to get excited about it! Show them why they should be excited about the insights they'll be receiving. The more anticipation you build, the more likely you'll have advocates for the long haul.

Conclusion

So there you have it; 5 great tips for creating a data-driven culture. Some of them will be easier to accomplish than others, but all are possible with enough planning and communication with the right people. The benefits that can be reaped from them greatly outweigh the challenges. The insights that can be gained from complete buy-in and support can help drive business and improve campaigns well into the future.

Have additional tips? Share them in the comments!

3 Common Pitfalls in Content Marketing

By now, you’ve probably heard about the benefits that come with incorporating a Content Marketing strategy. The ways content can enhance your business’s marketing mix, how it builds a sense of community with customers, the ways it shows off your expertise—the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t utilizing their content to its full potential. Below are the most common of these mistakes and tips on how you can avoid them.

1) It’s All About Me

Sometimes when a business decides it wants to jump on the content bandwagon, there is the mindset that the bulk of their content should be directly tied to their products / services, or that they should always try to sell something when they communicate with their audience. Unfortunately, this strategy often turns users away from your content rather than sharing it and coming back for more. The problem is that businesses often fail to step into their target audience’s shoes and think about what they like, care about, and expect from web content. People want to be informed, entertained, and assisted in solving a problem, not bogged down by constant self-promotion.

The Tip: Do your research & be customer-centric—think about who your audience is, use their feedback, and create content based on what’s important to them.

2) Nothing But The Facts

You may have heard the phrase “facts tell, but stories sell” before when it comes to Content Marketing. This point builds off the pitfall above in that users don’t want dry, isolated, or negative content; rather, they want stories. Stories have themes, compelling elements, room for engagement and interaction, and connections between them. The success of other marketing tactics, such as SEO and Social Media Marketing, rely on building content that users can relate to, find what they need, and pass on to others. This not only affects the way content is made, but also the way it is distributed.

The Tip: Have a theme & make connections—use stories to entertain, persuade, and engage with your audience.

3) Publish & Pray

In any new marketing endeavor, having a plan is essential. Not only can your business keep its efforts (and budget) organized, but it also projects a sense of reliability to customers. With your content, this step is even more important. Many businesses take a heavy-handed approach to their content, letting regular communications fall by the wayside. Customers don’t want to keep checking your site for new content only to find the same thing they saw the week before. In most cases like this, they’ll eventually stop returning. Applying an optimization plan (set a goal, plan, implement, measure, refine, & repeat) is a great way to look at the content creation process.

The Tip: Make a plan & stick to it—create a calendar for content to show that your business can maintain a high standard while enhancing your reputation to your audience.

What do you think of the pitfalls above? If you have any suggestions or questions about this list, leave us a comment below!

3 Steps to a Successful Strategic PPC Campaign

Pay per Click can be a very powerful form of advertising. Google and Microsoft often brag about its amazing reach and how cost-effective it is. However, like everything else in business, if your PPC advertising efforts are aimless, then the profitability will most likely not be there. In order to not waste your time and money, here are 3 Steps (Strategy, Implement, and Optimize) to consider prior to running a Pay per Click Campaign.

1) Strategy

First ask the all important question: Why? What is your purpose of advertising online? This begins the strategy building process, which all starts with an overall objective – Increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive more sales, etc. This defined objective gives your PPC Campaign a focus. Next, decide how much you are willing to spend. Your budget is best set either monthly or daily. The final stage of the strategic process is setting specific and measurable Goals – i.e. to increase sales 3% month over month.

2) Implement

Now that you have an objective, budget, and at least one goal, the next step is setting up the Campaign. Before heading to Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter, you will want to do some research. A few questions to consider are – Who is your target audience (broad or niche), what are they searching (keywords), and where are they online (websites, Social Media, etc.)? With all of this newly found information, it is time to head to the most appropriate advertising platform(s) (AdWords, adCenter, Facebook, etc.) and set-up your PPC Account. Remember to include multiple ad copy variations, keyword match types, and landing pages for testing purposes, because it is never too early to begin testing to see what will be the most effective and efficient.

3) Optimize

Finally, your PPC is up and running. The last step is to monitor its performance and make adjustments accordingly. Re-visit your goal(s) and determine all your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), not just the final goal metric. For example, if your goal is to increase sales 3% month over month, your KPI’s would include:

• Impressions – Number of times the ad was shown
• Clicks – How often your ad was engaged with
• Conversions – Sales, Lead Generation, Phone Calls, etc.
• Cost – Cost/Click and Cost/Conversion
• ROI – Measure and show Profitability

Between checking the important KPI’s and continuously testing different elements (Ad Copy, Landing Pages, Keywords, etc.) of your PPC Campaign, you will be able to make the modifications needed to ensure that you reach your goals and objectives.



To summarize, Pay per Click can do wonders for your business, but you have to put work into it, rather than just running it aimlessly. Start with putting together a strategy. Use that strategy to guide you through the set-up and targeting process. Finally, stay focused on your business’s goals as you monitor, test, and optimize your PPC Campaigns. This simple, yet time-consuming and work-intensive 3-step process will help you build and manage an effective and efficient PPC Campaign.

Top 5 Features of Google Analytics Content Experiments (vs. Website Optimizer)

For about 5 years now, marketing professionals have been using Google’s Website Optimizer to run A/B tests and Multivariate tests on webpages. Google recently announced that Website Optimizer will be replaced with Content Experiments. Content Experiments offers similar functionality as Website Optimizer with a few limitations; however, I’ll highlight the top features that I think Content Experiments offers. Here are my top 5 features for Content Experiments when compared to Web Site Optimizer:

1. Experiment Integration within Google Analytics

Content Experiment’s integration within Google Analytics is much improved compared to Web Site Optimizer. Web Site Optimizer did not integrate with Google Analytics, which limited a user’s ability to obtain additional information about the test variations for each experiment such as time on site, bounce rate, or the possibility of segmentation.

2. Simplified Workflow with the Set-up Wizard

The simplistic workflow to implement an experiment is streamlined as well. The process went from 5 basic steps to 4 basic steps. The set-up wizard for the experiment clearly identifies where you are within the set-up process and the next steps. In addition, there are icons to help you throughout the process to understand what you’re doing.

3. Visuals of the Experiments within the Console

The simple workflow is enhanced with visuals of the experiment variations, which was not part of Web Site Optimizer. Within the console of Google Analytics Content Experiments, you can see exactly what your original design vs. the variation(s) will look like prior to launching the experiments.

4. Better, More Simplified Reporting

In my opinion, the reporting in Content Experiments is much better than before. Content Experiments provides high-level experiment detail at a glance (visits, days of data, status of the experiment, and percentage of included visitors). The conversion data is also much improved by providing separate columns for visits, conversions, conversion rates, and basic green & red arrows to compare the variation(s) to the original page. Finally, the look of the reports is now more consistent with the newer Google Analytics interface.

5. Rewrite the Variation URLs to the Original within GA Content Reports

By selecting to rewrite the URL variations, you can consolidate all of the traffic to your original and variation pages. These URLs will appear under the original page within your Content Reports. This ability makes the Content Reports easier to read and streamlines the analysis of the experiment’s impact on page metrics in addition to its data. This provides increased functionality with custom reporting and experiment segmentation.

What’s the BIG Deal with Content Experiments?

The simplified shift from Web Optimizer to Content Experiments will save companies and marketers’ time, money, and allow them to easily create testing experiments. Ideally, Content Experiments will reduce the amount of time to create experiments and simplify their data, making them easier to understand as well as more actionable. With more actionable information, companies and marketers should be able to improve their users’ online experience and generate higher conversions.

Get off the excuse bandwagon! Start experimenting for better lead generation and online sales, what are you waiting for? Leave your feedback on Content Experiments in the Comments section below!