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Key Points To Know For Your Digital Marketing Strategy

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Without a well-planned digital marketing strategy, you can invest a significant amount of money and resources and end up with little or no return on your investment.

The problem is not with the marketing solutions themselves, as there are wide varieties available to help you build your brand, connect with customers and market at scale. A study conducted by Smart Insights shows that 47 percent of businesses are engaged in digital marketing but have no clearly defined strategic plan.

This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find your way through the maze of interconnected, real-time data powered Internet environment. A closer look at what it takes to see the necessity for the creation and investment of a digital marketing strategy is needed.

Making sure your marketing strategy and overall business goals are moving in the same direction is essential. Define your business goals, then create a construct that will help you reach them through digital marketing.

If your focus is on acquiring new customers, draw up a digital roadmap that will help you achieve the goal. This same thinking applies to every other part of your business plan: opening channels for new products or services and building brand awareness for specific market channels. Setting specific goals will flesh out your overall marketing strategy and work to determine your tactics, channels, messages, and who you should partner with to realize tangible, bottom line results.

Prioritize investment in technology

An outstanding customer experience is a key factor in determining the success of a digital marketing strategy. To accomplish this you need to prioritize your investment in technology, everything from marketing platforms to analytics tools. The best returns will be found when a marketing strategy is clear and dollars spent on technology translate into a positive ROI.

Determine your KPIs and data collection methods to achieve your business goal

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical to accurately deciphering customer data. It is easy with modern technology to amass volumes of data on customers. But of all the data, which is the most valuable? Working within the boundaries of a strategic digital marketing plan helps to determine the most important KPIs and the best data collection methods to achieve that goal.

Digital marketing quickly becomes complex, and often the result is increasing amounts of waste and duplication of effort. It is content to create, social media accounts to manage, and customer data collection to implement, all which add to the difficulty of an already difficult job. Knowing what your specific tasks and responsibilities are can be found in the digital marketing plan, so you have a point of reference that will enable you to avoid wasted effort and duplication.

Establish benchmarks and set goals to work on

Establish benchmarks and set goals to work on continually improving your performance. ROI is a key metric in determining when or if you should modify marketing strategies, and where to invest resources. A digital marketing strategy will be your guide in assessing which KPIs are the most important. According to Convince and Convert, some of the key KPIs are traffic, conversions, channel-specific traffic, and search trends. The more you know about what matters most, the more you can put the right analytics tools in the right place and create optimum data feedback loops.

Marketing technology and tools are evolving

Because data marketing tools are constantly evolving, it is important to be prepared to experiment with new approaches. Wearable technology and expanding social media platforms open the door for new technologies and approaches to be developed. Brands that are innovative stay current with new technologies and are proactive with their approach to testing out new formats and channels to see the responses from their target audience.

Digital marketing is at its best when it realizes its interdependence with the rest of the company and seeks to integrate and optimize its services. Multichannel campaigns can have their message amplified and integrate their efforts with traditional forms of advertising, achieving the results in collaboration with digital marketing.

Having a digital marketing strategy, like digital marketing itself is no longer an option for a successful company. Everything from looking for basic information about a company or product to looking for support and interacting with a business, customers are increasingly turning to a digital marketing presence.

Creating a focused campaign through the use of digital marketing tools is essential for defining your goals and avoid being pulled in too many directions. The result will be achieving your most important business objectives and a bottom line ROI that will reflect the wisdom of your digital marketing strategy.

Win the micro moments to be in front of your customers

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Many brands are working hard to get int front of their consumers and wanting to win every “micro-moments” brand have with them. Ever thought about how users even get to search for something and eventually arrive at your website?

We all do this in this age of the internet where we all use our smartphone to search stuff in the real world. And this video from Google shows those micro-moments where something triggers people to search.

What about your business? Is there something people encounter before making that journey, or micro-moments they encounter prior to visiting your website, or store? This is actually an important question business owners will need to ask, especially if you have a desire to acquire more customers or traffic to your site.

Take a moment to think your customer’s possible micro-moments. This video by Google is an excellent example that shows what I’m talking about.

For me, when brands get it micro-moments right, that means the friction for what I want to achieve or get out of the brand’s service is very minimal.

A great example would be Amazon. I can rely on Amazon to transact seamlessly. Desktop or on mobile or even with one click, and to make sure the shopping experience and transactions go smoothly.

It is not only the transactions but also following up with the order and its shipment status. These small things matter.

These small moments add up. I think that is why Amazon is able to be the defacto shopping site when people want to search, compare, and buy.

What about your brand? Are you guys doing a great job delivering your brand’s promise and awesome service that meets this generation of consumers?

How to Select the Right Digital Marketing Analytics Tools

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While a lot of us are working hard with digital marketing data to find that actionable insight, let’s not forget the importance of selecting the right digital marketing analytics tools.

I’ve talked to many people, including marketers, marketing managers, CXO, etc.  Many times, I come across about the discussions around tools.

Even cases where people talk data before it is even collected. This situation is what I refer to as:

Marketers firing before they aim their strategies to the target.

I come across this situation a lot from many marketers.  People talk about collecting data, or even tools or data vendors to purchase too many times.  Even blaming the tools for lack of data discipline.

It is very important to really start the planning, and define your business’s objectives and goals.  So that you have a clear guidance on what tools you need to solve your digital marketing problem.s

Maybe even before that, you have company’s vision and mission, that many employees are trying to contribute towards. Let’s make sure to recognize all of that.

In marketing, you have to have a plan and a goal. As you may know, Google Analytics and many other tools do well in providing click, event, traffic data on digital properties, but it is not until someone makes sense of it to bother digging deeper into it to find those “insights”.

This is why I like to refer to this process that I use to frequently approach optimizing the digital experience and run much more a/b tests while transforming the team into a data driven organization.

Just as if you’d ask a professional photographer, “what camera are you using to take that nice photo?”  What about his/her skills?!.

In a digital data world, I hear marketers talk about tools and data collection, but not enough to the action or the strategies built around the hypothesis generated from the analytics.

Something is really missing here.  Sorry, data is not going to solve problems, it is you or the people who need to solve the problem will.  With a massive amount of marketing technologies out there, marketers are saying that they’re not getting the full benefits of the data.

By the way, I’m not making this up.  According to Econsultancy’s survey on marketer’s top data challenge shows, the key theme is turning data into actionable insights.

I’m glad, happy, and proud to say that I have had excellent leaders who managed me, and it is such a blessing to have their guidance.

When I moved from Japan to California in 2006, I knew data landscape was changing and disruption was happening in the marketing space with the internet.

It was going to change how marketing and eCommerce adjust the course of the business, just like how traditional business analytics have done for businesses.

While data have become widely available and accessible, it has given a more fuzzy feel for marketers that they can wear multiple hats to do everything including (not limited to) sales, A/B testing, analytics, data management, media buying, etc. This is dangerous. When resources and expertises spread thin, especially while the direction is not clear, data is pretty meaningless.

Brainstorming and data discoveries are fun exercises. Yes, it is fun, but at the end of the day, we’ve all got jobs to help business perform. So at some point you really have to select the critical few must have data points that differentiate ‘great’ from ‘good’ to know data.

So, the tools and data, all of that good stuff should come from good planning and requirements,

I wrote this in my previous blog post “Converting Customer Behavior to Business”, but a lot of people follow the process of “Fire -> Aim”.

Instead of “Ready -> Aim -> Fire -> Debrief”. So if you really want to focus on the data, tools, that will bring insights to help your business perform, you have to know what you’re measuring for.

People need to understand what is the problem we’re trying to solve for the business.

One manager has mentioned to me (not in exact words..) “People working within constraints, even that means working very few resources, budget, or tools, people actually can learn quickly about what is missing and required to drive performance”.

That meant to me it is, there are very important critical few that you should be focused on and solve that problem.  Same goes with digital marketing analytics tools selection.

My basic suggestion that I recommend approaching selecting tool is following these steps:

  1.  Map and understand your business model.  How is your customer is going to engage with your business?
  2. Design your marketing funnel
  3. Select your marketing technology tools

For #3, I would look into the solutions around:

  • Quantitative data
  • Qualitative data
  • A/B testing
  • Capture, manage, known user information (CRM or Email Service Provider)
  • Data Manager (e.g. Tag Manager, automation tools, productivity tools)

These are super key to start with.

That is because when you have constraints you have to focus on the critical few to act quick and deliver results while really feeling the exposed pain points.  No fancy big data stuff here.

Quantitative Data

You want basic analytics around measuring your funnel.  Conversion rate, revenue, traffic, AOV, engagements, etc.

Qualitative Data

Quantitative by itself does not give you all the insights, you have to listen to your customers and have the capabilities to track and gain feedback from your customers.

A/B testing

Doesn’t have to be a tool, but idea is to track and use your analytics tools to measure your tests so that you can iterate on changes to improve your business performance.

User Information (CRM)

You need to be able to understand your customer by their name, email, address, profile, etc.  Typical web analytics tools aren’t designed to help you manage your customer data.  So you’ll need a tool to help you manage that.

Data Manager // Productivity Tools

Tools acting in silos aren’t very helpful.  There are tools out there that will help you track, scale your resource by automating many tasks you could be avoiding.  Like tag manager, automation tools like IFTTT or Zapier.

Only with many options, time, budget, and all that happy stuff, people will tend to lose sight, explore, and wonder off from the core problems.

To me, that made a lot of sense. In fact, I had to go through painful business transitions during the bad market conditions. Learned that focusing on the critical few helps you find the important things to work on and fix fast.

And when you have few goals with a very high bar to hit, then it creates a sense of urgency. Stressful, but a good one.  And it helps you prioritize and be selective about the tools you’ll need to solve the problem.

I think this is why Growth Hacking mindset is really interesting as fundamentally you’re collaborating with peers under the constraints of resources or budget. Then you really have to grow and perform, otherwise, startup’s fund goes dry.

So you end up picking that one or two KPI, putting heads down and optimize the crap out of it by looking at the important things that matter to gain insights, to then act on it.

Here is a great article about consumer insights on Huffington post “What Are Consumer Insights and How Do They Impact Marketing Effectiveness”. Article’s concept shows that it’s key to getting insights out of data, because a lot of time when analyzing data in web analytics tools, performing A/B testing reading the results, we as analysts are trying to find that story, and the “why” factors on why things have turned out a certain way.

Point is, consumer insights, having that mindset to think like a customer is important, so you’re not just saying things like “traffic is up because we spend more money on Google’ Paid Search Ads”.  So go beyond measuring traffic and conversion rate.

My favorite line of text from that article.

“Consumer insights provide understanding that leads to marketing on a more direct and personal level.”

We’re all obsessed with data and tools, but let’s really try to focus on the “why” factor and follow a process that makes sense.

See if that helps you set the right expectations and be part of the fun journey in finding that “insights”, and add awesome tools to your portfolio of capabilities after understanding what it takes to solve your business problems.

Key behaviors in marketing analytics career I learned

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I’d like to share some of my lessons learned from my career working with data in marketing, focusing around the things that I tried which I believe added value to the business.

  • Share what you have learned

In this field of analytics and marketing, it is pretty common to find people who have learned things keep those knowledge and insights for themselves as if that belongs to that person. This is not unique to people in analytics, but that is a pretty lame move in general. Your team and people working in the company are trying to perform, and analytics are important function of this entire business process. The biggest part of analytics people’s job is to support solving business problems through data, evangelize data and insights, support the business move forward achieving it’s goals. Without sharing the data and insights, there is no evangelizing.

Also when you assume what you have shared is being translated to others, don’t assume they have shared with others. Many companies have great internal resources and capabilities that allows employees to share what’s going on.  If not, then I’m sorry to hear that. In tools like Jive, it is important to create your own area and start publishing your learnings. You can always reference that source, and communicate to the wider audience. This is obviously not the only way, but the idea is try and find ways to share more than that one point of contact, boss, CMO, etc. What good it is to not share your awesome work and let it sit and decay.

  • Be curious, build a habit to find answers and apply

Every job, great jobs come with opportunities to learn. Sometimes it may come in a form of unexpected things you have to deal with, or things encountered through new projects, or even come by terminologies encountered through work place, experts, school, and peers. Never be shy to ask, there are no dumb questions. There is Google for us to search wealth of knowledge online as well, and we should take every advantage of it. Up until this point, I hope people do search for their own answers when encountered with questions that you want answers to. Curiosity in a dictionary states the meaning ‘a strong desire to know or learn something’, and for me, this is one of the must have behavior in analytics expert.

Another key thing is to ‘apply’. One of the common characteristics I see in successful people in any industry is that they don’t just consume things, but they apply their learnings and practice what is in their mind to help drive tangible or real impact. Example could be… don’t just talk about tools and wish it get’s purchased or implemented, find ways to bring in a proof of concept deal, and prove the value of the tool.

  • Communicate and be clear

Communicate your findings, but reserve for the insights.  Don’t communicate for the sake of communication.  When you communicate, you want to make sure you’re respecting every moment of people’s valuable time. What that means is, be clear as much as possible. Whatever you find through data, you don’t want that to be miss interpreted or taken action in a wrong way from what you originally recommended. If you have found something interesting, but not necessarily gives an answer to the business question, steer the communication to drive testing, or excite others to ‘test it out’.  A/B testing tools are so cheap now a days and it is no longer something we should be wait for. Clear communication needs to have a direction, and expected action or outcome that is lead by you.

  • Always be clear on the problem you’re trying to help solve.

Unless you have some spare time and just playing around with data, don’t waste your time solving and analyzing problems your team, department, and company is not solving for. If a data practice you’re involved isn’t involved in the problem business is not trying to solve, that is a super low priority thing to work on. When analyzing data and concluding your findings, make sure to go back, and ask if the finding helps solve the core business problem or not.

It doesn’t help to be confused on the problem business is trying to solve either. If you’re trying to analyze data for some problem that is way off from the real problem, then that’ll be a huge waste of time. Make sure the problem is clear and you really understand it.

In a knut shell…

I might have learned the hard way to understand the key behavior points listed here (which is not limited to), but hope you find this list of key acumens required in marketing analytics helpful.

My apologies if this came out to be me puking out things many people already know, but I thought it was important for me to put this out and see if this helps for others. Being in this field of data for over 12 years, there is definitely more to it, but I guess I’ll stop here and write more in near future.

 

 

Planning for Tag Management System TMS Implementation

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Every online marketing related conferences seem to have at least one tag management system (TMS) vendor hosting a booth.  A lot of companies have deployed TMS, and if not, many are probably planning TMS as part of their digital analytics capabilities roadmap.  As of this writing, I have evaluated few vendors through a POC (proof of concept), and thought I’d share some of my experience as well as what I learned from others and blog writings.

 

Three main reasons a company would want or need a TMS are:  Speed, Reliability, Control.  Double check your needs before you start spending your time and company’s money.

 

You should consider a tag management system if you are:

  • Frustrated with the “one tag, one project, one timeline” model of tag deployment
  • Switching vendors and looking to gain leverage over future deployments
  • Managing globally distributed sites but have little centralized control over tags
  • Looking to add Q/A and workflow management to your tag deployments
  • Concerned at all about the quality and data accuracy from your web analytics

 

If you’re looking for TMS vendor make sure they’re providing great TMS product that meets your requirements.  Some TMS vendor may pitch for additional services on top of the main TMS and makes the hole package sexy.  However at the end of the day, if you’re looking for a TMS solution make sure you focus on that, and don’t get distracted and end up getting a so so TMS with many add on services that you are ‘nice’ to have.  Common add on capability I came across is attribution tracking.

 

Service, training, and support.  You want a partner is going to hold your hand really good and tight.  If the chemistry with the vendor is not jiving during POC, make sure you have a vendor has enough experience who is willing to understand your web site and gets it when they work with engineers.  It is also nice to know if your TMS vendor has some kind of training package or session for their clients, and if they do, it is a good sign they’re willing to grow their relationship and not just selling a solution.  TMS is like content management system (CMS), where your important tags and data are going to be managed.  Don’t let your data be managed  by a solution you’re not going to be happy with.

 

Prepare your questions up front, and get technical.  If you’re not technical, but need to choose TMS vendor, then make sure your engineer is with you in the POC.  All TMS vendor is obviously going to be able to support hosting your tags and fire off tags.  The differences are going to come out a lot during the technical evaluations.  Just some high level list of things I’d ask…

  • Control to be able to load tags earlier or later.  For example, many a/b testing tools would want to be able to load the test version before the original page gets loaded so consumers don’t see the original page being swapped with test version.
  • Staging to production workflow control.
  • How the TMS tool works to capture meta data from the data layer, and re-define that value to various analytics tool
  • Make sure your concerns on mobile site and apps tagging are answered.  How mobile site is being architected varies by company so make sure you understand what the TMS vendor can or can not provide regarding mobile/tablet sites.
  • How TMS vendor caches the tags.  Pure cloud, hybrid, or client side.  Make sure your engineer is involved in understanding this so you don’t only have the right too, but a TMS that complies with your data governance and policy.

 

TMS related articles and sources:

http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2012/11/06/tag-youre-it-one-more-analysts-thoughts-on-tag-management/

http://support.optimizely.com/customer/portal/questions/711631-google-tag-manager-optimizely

 

 

 

 

Digital Analytics Roadmap

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Post updated on 2/27/2017

Recently, I’ve checked out my digital analytics roadmap I built at work and thought I’d gave a check to see where we (my former company) we were on that roadmap.

It is also a good idea to reevaluate the roadmap and assess rather it reflects current industry trend.  Usually, a team changes a lot in a company, if not in few years, maybe so within a year.  Companies in Silicon Valley moves really fast.

So it is always a good idea to reassess the plan you had in mind and reflect on what you had built.  That will help you guide to the next steps in your planning in your roadmap.

The roadmap I’m talking about is more of a digital analytics maturity line rather than an advancement of data practice or usage of tools.  So please note that this is not about metrics framework stuff.

In the past, some of the roadmaps I’ve seen from analytics conferences were very useful, it gave me the guidance to really think about my starting point, tools to consider, and skills to consider learning to help my company or the department mature with digital analytics.

However, I have noticed that much digital analytics roadmap I’ve seen are really geared towards the adoption of tools, integration of data platforms.  Something web engineers or people responsible for tracking implementation would be interested in.

The following diagram I created plots level of advancement in data practice along with the maturity of each level.

Each ‘advancement’ level is probably different for each company as the problems every company solving are different.  I’m sure every team or department are structured differently and the objectives and goals are different, too.

You’ll see here my first roadmap created in 2013 and my latest in 2017.  You can still take older diagram and use it to see if your company has adopted any of this.

That said, it is 2017, so I thought I give it a refresh, so the 2nd one below is my latest.  Keep in mind, every company is different in approach and priorities, but fundamentally, given our access to technology and where it is evolving, I thought this would be a good version 2.

The most important thing you need to take into consideration when looking at this roadmap is to ask yourself “what business problem is being asked to solve“.

These are example framework without taking into considerations of your specific business problems you need to solve, but hopefully, you can be inspired by it.

 

digital analytics roadmap by ZoomMetrix

 

Here is my latest version.

Digital Marketing Analytics Roadmap by ZoomMetrix

 

I kept the 2017 version more high-level.  What’s important to note is that my subjective assessment of many companies are that they have barely got out of the first two phases.  Enable tools for analysts and data integrations phase.

Why do I say that?  Because according to eConsulancy’s research, many of their data indicate many businesses challenge trying to get insights and value out of typical analytics challenges observed from the early phases of my roadmap.

Close to or over 40% of the skills gap are coming from:

  • Using Digital Analytics tools
  • Using Business Intelligence tools
  • Conversion rate optimization

Most scary part is that in 2016, 62% of their survey respondents said they do not have a documented data analytics strategy.  WOW!!

In many discussions of maturity or roadmap framework, you’ll see Predictive and Prescriptive analytics are the future, but reality is many businesses are not there yet.  I feel like there are bigger problems on hand that many of us marketers are still trying to get a grip on.  Like, mobile/desktop attribution, multi-touch attribution, getting clean data in a speedy fashion, etc.

Hopefully, this blog post ignites the idea of reevaluating our digital analytics roadmap. There is no one straight answer, so hopefully, my diagram kicks off some new idea for you.

Here are some useful links I referenced to make some judgments on what basic roadmap for digital marketing analytics could look like.

Econsultancy:  Measurement and Analytics Report 2016: Four key challenges in dealing with data

Hubspot: What are your company’s top marketing challenges?

Statista (AMA data):  What do you think will be the most buzzed about marketing topic of 2016?

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