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November 11, 2014

Adjusting Your Marketing Strategies Using Insights from Analytics

Using basic analytics can help you maximize your marketing success.

Successful marketers know that the foundations of online marketing rely on data. But though your digital marketing strategies may be data-driven, you need to take the wheel every now and then and steer for yourself.

After all, marketing isn’t a “set and forget” game running only on automation; it’s a game of innovation drawn from sources of inspiration – or in this case, your data.

Sources of Actionable Data

So where do you find these wellsprings of inspirational data? Google Analytics and Webmasters tools are two starting points. These free tools are quite powerful, given that you know what to look for with them. Even Hootsuite and similar dashboards that aggregate multiple channels (in this case, channels of social media) can also be treasure trove of actionable info for your marketing.

If you use multiple marketing strategies in your campaigns, you can cross-reference your data with these tools to check for any anomalies or similarities that confirm the effectiveness of your campaign tactics. This information also allows you to show the effectiveness of your marketing programs to any senior management that asks.

Reading between Data Lines

These tools will rarely point something out to you on their own; instead, they’ll show you pattern that you’ll need to look for in the underlying factors that they reflect.

The key to turning data and patterns into insight is similar to our natural behavior of reading between the lines. For instance, analytics can show you your customer’s acquisition behavior flow (how your visitors may land on one page on your site, go to the next, and the next, and then exit), but it’s up to you to look for the insights from that information.

For instance, it’s easy to see high performing landing pages and any poorly designed (or written) exit pages, but you can dig deeper than that. Let’s say some landing pages are magnets for new visitors, while some attract returning visitors and lead to increased page depth and purchases. You may want to adjust that first landing page to link to the second, and also add some compelling new copy to that page as well in order to persuade new visitors to hop into the engagement bandwagon that your returning visitors are returning to.

You may want to also check your keyword targeting. For instance, what keywords are your successful landing pages optimized for? Do they appear in your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) lists for those keywords? Is the first landing page a suitable “brand discovery” or “awareness” page? Is the second landing page targeting keywords for searchers further down the sales funnel? If so, you want to be sure your visitors are finding and reading that second landing page as well.

Adjusting Marketing Strategies and Tactics in Real Time

These insights that are drawn from actionable analytics can redefine your marketing strategies in real time – for the better. No automated systems can come to these conclusions for you or make good judgment calls on adjusting your campaigns without your intervention.

So what sort of actionable data from analytics can result in positive adjustments of your marketing strategies?

Here are a few you can look for:

Unexpected sources of referral traffic – this may indicate timely interest between the search engine referring your visitor and your landing page which you can leverage for a longer relationship between your pages.
Surges in keyword performance – Check for seasonal patterns, related news breaks, and other online phenomenon that may be affecting your keyword performance and then tweak your campaigns to ride the trend or counteract it (if it is detrimental, e.g. a very negative news break is sending traffic your way)
Increases in social referrals – You may have an influencer doing you a favor by sharing your content with their network. You’ll want to be sure you establish a stronger relationship with this influencer.
Fluctuations in page depth or time spent – both are indicators of engagement. These metrics show you how your current audience may or may not be interacting with your content. This gives you the insight you need to add additional content or adjust your current content.

Bottom line: online marketing strategies should be data-driven, but they also need a human touch in order to maximize your potential for success.

Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.

You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com

Categories : STRATEGY

Posted by DBC Digital on

November 4, 2014

SEO Marketing: Tips for Improved Success

SEO and Results Pages

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been around for as long as search engines, and in all that time the practice has been tied to “search engine results pages” (SERPs). As a result, SEO marketing has always been the primary method to get to the top of SERPs.

The problem with this, however, was that it meant SEO had no directly measureable impact on revenue. The disconnect between search optimization and a company’s bottom-line meant that return on investment (ROI) was not guaranteed, but based on a numbers game.

The game said that if we increase web traffic by X%, we should expect to increase our conversions by some factor of X% as well.

Today, with widely-evolving algorithms from search engines phasing out the success of previous SEO tactics, optimization is gradually expanding its role beyond visibility and ranking.

Refined Keyword Targeting

As our clients know, a primary success tactic in SEO is keyword targeting, and one of the most effective strategies of keyword targeting is to focus on “long-tail” (multiple-word) keywords, guaranteeing lower bounce rates, higher conversion, and everything-in-between thanks to being able to analyze our search user’s intent.

This long-tail concept can be broadened to apply to keyword targeting in the various types of user searches including:

Navigational search – When users on search engines are looking for direction rather than for a specific piece of information, they perform a navigational search to get an idea where to get the information they need. In this case, in order to be found, clients should use broad keywords that are targeted on content focusing on brand awareness and visibility.
Informational search – A bit deeper into the visitors’ journey, users search for something specific in order to get more details about what they want to acquire. Exact term keywords and some long-tail keyword targeting come into play here.
Transactional search – Used by visitors ready to perform transactions, long-tail keywords aligned with “purchase intent” words are used in this stage.

“Funnel Linking”

While SEO hasn’t changed much since the inception of SEO– just a few tweaks and adjustments primarily due to designers trying to game the system, that doesn’t mean you can’t innovate.

For instance, any blogs or other articles that you optimize for navigational searches don’t need to be separate from informational or transactional searches. You can connect their dots by making them relevant to each other. For instance, combining a call-to-action designed for one type of search with another type used for a different search and then linking them together can boost your results.

This “linking funnel” achieves a few things for optimization:

Better keyword targeting (CTAs with links can contain targeted or context-building keywords)
A more coherent internal link structure for search engine crawlers
Better overall context for the website and the subject matter it covers, thanks to the above keywords approach

Targeted Visibility

SEO has matured from being just a bait and link game to being a part of your inbound strategy, with a much more direct influence on your bottom-line.

The benefits of this funnel linking becomes clear when you put yourself in your customers’ shoes.

Imagine a prospect conducting a navigational search. This prospect will find your content in SERPs, then will read it and find your CTA inside it to access additional material on the same topic. This helps push your customer down your sales funnel.

Regardless of the type of search your prospects are doing, as long as your keyword targeting and funnel-linking are aligned with your customer’s journey, your prospects will discover a convenient way to find more valuable information and eventually make the decision to purchase from your business.

Indeed, SEO has gone from search engine optimization to search experience optimization. As an integral part of the digital consumer’s journey, search is nearly as inevitable as purchase – even in B2B companies.

SEO will continue to play an important role online, especially now that it’s about creating more than just visibility, but it will be a streamlined, improved search experience.

Conclusion

In summary, SEO is increasingly becoming tied to User Experience (UX) development and to conversion optimization: practices that can have a direct impact on your business’s bottom-line.

For more on inbound internet marketing ideas, visit http://blog.dbcdigital.com/blog-0/bid/183593/Can-I-Do-My-Own-Inbound-Marketing

Otherwise, to learn more, give us a call at (303) 357-5757 or send us an email at dbc@dbcdigital.com

Greg Sherwood

DBC Digital

Categories : STRATEGY

Posted by DBC Digital on

August 26, 2014

Combining Data and Intuition to Improve Your Marketing

Combining Data and Intuition to Improve Your Marketing

Your digital marketing isn’t losing you money, but it’s not hitting it’s goals, either. As a business leader, you understand that there are opportunities you’re missing out on, and that a strategy shift is needed.

Knowing is half the battle, but how do you go about implementing changes? The risk of making your marketing performance worse is a real possibility, and the path to better campaign results isn’t clear. Intuition may suggest one approach, but you shouldn’t ignore the recommendations made by data insights. Here’s how to reconcile intuition with data wisdom.

How Intuition Can be Counter-Intuitive

Business leaders come into their positions by demonstrating solid decision-making skills. By and large, any person owning or managing a business has experience making big decisions, often times with limited information and no guarantees. If you’re managing an established organization and have been doing so for some time, it’s perfectly reasonable to think you have the insights needed to choose the optimal path for your business.

So if it isn’t broke, then why fix it? It’s as simple as looking at your bottom-line. Businesses don’t look at their profits as being in the black vs. being in the red. Profit margins matter, and companies constantly want to improve them. But the simple decisions you make now will ultimately affect whether that margin increases or declines over time.

No business leader is perfect, and the risks of making bad decisions are significant. Without throwing away intuition entirely–which most leaders aren’t willing to do, anyway–it’s crucial that managers and executives understand that their process is flawed. Just like an improved profit margin, optimized decision-making should be a constant goal.

Why Data Offers Reliable Insights

Data analysis can account for many, many different variables–many more than intuition can consider at any one time. By using complex algorithms, or even just simple key performance indicators like conversion rates, traffic volume, cost-per-referral and other metrics, businesses can get a simple, quantifiable readout of how their digital marketing is working.

The fallacy of data isn’t the approach, but rather the incomplete ways in which data analysis is pursued. Ultimately, data is analyzed by tools built by humans. How variables are weighed and assessed influences the end result–the recommendation offered by that data.

Change up the formula, and the recommendations might change. This is why it’s so important to choose the right key performance indicators and other metrics to evaluate your digital performance. At first, intuition is what will drive this process–you will choose KPIs based on your goals and your current strategy. But over time, data feedback will help you weed out the weaker metrics while demonstrating which ones truly represent your larger success.

The Trick: Using Both to Cover Up Weaknesses

The problem with endorsing either intuition or data-directed decision-making too much is that neither is perfect. Just as intuition can be misguided, data is often incomplete. Building a comprehensive data set that accounts for every little variable is the ultimate goal of data analysis, but such a solution doesn’t exist in practice.

Instead, true success can be found by using both in concert with one another. When intuition and data both make the same recommendation, you’re likely on the right track. When the two sides disagree, it’s important to take a critical look at both approaches and consider what might be missing from the equation.

Regardless of which recommendation you follow, track the results and use your own observations to reflect on what went right or wrong regarding you intuition or data-based decision. This is the best method of either fine-tuning your own business intuition or tweaking your current approach to compiling and analyzing data.

If you’re ready to use data to make better decisions for your business, don’t delay. Contact DBC Digital to get started today.

You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, STRATEGY

Posted by DBC Digital on

August 21, 2014

Customer Experience: The Most Important Digital Success Factor

In most commercial fields, consumers have more options now than ever before. They can shop anywhere–in another city, another state, even another country–to get exactly what they want. As a result, consumers are increasingly less willing to compromise on what they want, because they figure they can find something similar at a competitor.

This might not surprise most businesses. But what some professionals might not realize is that the differentiating factors for consumers are changing. Once price and product ruled the day, but now those variables are taking on less prominence as consumers seek out a better customer experience–and businesses are being forced to adapt.

The Declining Value of Price and Product

It wasn’t so long ago that brick-and-mortar shops were terrified of being put out of business by big Internet retailers like Amazon and Wayfair. Those online operations benefited from lower overhead and, as their volume increased, more economical shipping methods. This created pricing advantages that physical operations couldn’t match.

To some degree, those fears have been stifled. Mountains of data tell us that consumers still like to shop in stores and examine products in-hand before they make a purchase. And minor savings often don’t outweigh the attraction of owning an item that day, instead of waiting several days for shipping.

As those pros and cons of physical vs. digital purchasing start to balance themselves out, other factors are becoming more critical to winning over consumers and building a reputation. Increasingly, the top differentiator is the customer experience.

Customers Want an Experience, Not a Service

Shopping isn’t just a necessary habit. For many, shopping is also an experience they want to enjoy. Stores like Wal-Mart, CostCo and other big-box stores may offer unbeatable prices, but their experience offers nothing memorable, either. This works because their goal is to draw in consumers who are primarily concerned with price, availability and diverse purchasing options.

Most businesses can’t compete in this area, though, so their incentives for consumers must be different. This means building a customer experience that shoppers will appreciate and enjoy. Whether it’s improving the checkout process, building a more interactive shopping experience, establishing loyal customer incentives or other features, businesses need to do more than simply offer products at an affordable price.

The good news is that experience development is practical in both the physical store and the digital marketplace.

Keys to Delivering a Strong Digital Experience

With a little brainstorming, businesses should have no shortage of ways they can enhance the
customer experience on their websites or shopping apps. For example, there are basic tasks like building an optimized mobile version of your retail website, simplifying the checkout process and offering rewards points for shopping online.

Even aesthetic qualities such as the ease of navigation, features that offer shopping recommendations, and strong customer relationship management through social network, can all produce a discernable uptick in customer satisfaction. One simple trick to direct this work is to follow the emerging practices of your competitors and other online retailers, and to survey regular customers on what they do and don’t like about their online shopping experience.

Brands can also leverage mobile devices to enhance the physical shopping experience by developing apps with store maps, special mobile coupons and even augmented reality to help the store come alive. When these strategies are deployed, customer satisfaction should increase, and brands will see an increase in revenue performance.

Building a rewarding experience may not be easy, but it can create advantages your competitors will struggle to match. If you’re ready to give your customers a new way to engage your brand, contact DBC Digital today.

You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com

Categories : PRINTING SERVICES, PUBLIC RELATIONS, STRATEGY

Posted by DBC Digital on

August 7, 2014

Growing Your Business Through Social Media

Social media is so uniformly prescribed to every business these days that it’s easy to forget why we’re all there in the first place. For all the times managers are told that they must develop a multi-platform social presence, some inevitably feel the pressure to do so without fully grasping the results.

But the product of social activity is always better when companies have a clear vision of their goals and how social media utilizes them. Without this understanding, social activity occurs blindly–companies post regularly and follow best practices, but they don’t know what metrics to follow or what their activity even produces. While these benefits are influenced by your strategy–meaning everyone’s results will differ based on their goals–here are the general benefits that make social media such a valuable online campaign.

A Continuous Connection with Your Consumers

Businesses always want to keep a fresh connection with their existing clientele. Email newsletters and other campaigns can help accomplish this, but social media offers a much stronger connection because your brand can reach those consumers on a near-daily basis. And when you are active on social media, your followers aren’t only past customers: you’re also producing content for prospective customers, including individuals following you just out of a general interest in your company.

It sometimes takes weeks, months, even close to a year before your social activity really gains traction, but the value of each additional follow is significant. It gives you another potential consumers–and thus future sales–and it increases the visibility of your brand. For any small-to-medium business, both opportunities are critical.

Strong Brand Visibility

Sales may be more quantifiable, but any good business understands the importance of branding. Great logos, mottos and other branded material can offer fantastic value, but only if consumers get to see that branded content. When you post to social media, you are guaranteed that this branded material is viewed on a daily basis. In a sense, you’re simply using social media to beat your brand into consumer heads. It might sound like a broad approach, but it works.

Referring Warm Prospects to Your Business

Some of social media’s value is the same thing that has helped inbound marketing catch on. To some degree, social networking performs the first steps of a sales pitch. If a consumer comes directly to your business after following you on social media, they’re likely already sold on your brand and your reputation. Content can help direct them to your website or other properties where selling and conversions occur. These warm prospects take much less work to bring them to the point of a conversion. If you employ a sales staff, this reduces their workload and increases their efficiency. And if you don’t, then you’re leveraging social media to provide valuable sales work you aren’t getting otherwise.

For Small Businesses, You Can’t Beat the Price

Money talks, and that’s why social media is great for small-to-medium businesses. If you’re limited in terms of marketing funds, social media campaigns can be run for little-to-nothing. With a little education on social strategy, a business manager can easily handle social responsibilities for about 15 minutes each day. Even if you don’t get the results a social media manager can provide, the returns will be significant since you won’t be spending any extra. Meanwhile, you can test out social strategy, and as the results come in you can decide whether an additional investment might offer even better returns.

Don’t let your competitors pass you by on social media. Talk to DBC Digital today and get started on the path to a winning digital strategy.

You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com

Categories : MESSAGING AND DESIGN, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, STRATEGY

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