How Google Analytics Ruined Marketing
Marketers in the high-tech world who use phrases such as “social media marketing, ” “Facebook marketing” and “content marketing” do not understand..
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Strategy => Content => Channel. This article reinforces the need for all marketers to understand the difference between a marketing strategy (what message are you trying to convey) and a marketing channel (what’s the best method for conveying that message).
It also reinforces one of Sales Renewal’s key beliefs that “there is no ‘digital marketing’ and ‘traditional marketing.'” Sure, there are digital channels and traditional channels, but they all should be used to support the marketing strategy.
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When Should Engineering Marketers Pass a Lead to Sales?
Find out how engineers answered the question: at what stage of your investigations into a new product or service do you prefer to engage with a vendor representative as opposed to conducting independent research?
Sales Renewal’s insight:
1, 000 engineers were asked: “At what stage of your investigations into a new product or service do you prefer to engage with a vendor representative as opposed to conducting independent research?”
The answers could be:
- At the beginning of the process to discover the potential solutions
- Later in the process when I need to dig deeper into a few possible solutions
- Near the end of the process, when I need pricing or delivery information
The question was asked to determine the right marketing approach, from sending engineers directly to sales to nurturing them through several touch points prior to passing on the lead.
Read on for the results.
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7 Strategies For Selling Marketing To Your CEO
What can a CMO do to get better strategic support and key resources from a CEO?
Sales Renewal’s insight:
No one said it would be easy to get buy in for your marketing programs. In fact, according to a Forbes Insights survey, 69% of CEOs said they thought their companies waste money on marketing initiatives.
But we also know that without any marketing efforts, your business runs the risk of being dead in the water.
One of the keys to management buy in is to support your requests or plans with data that speaks to the bottom line. For example, strategy #4 in this article emphasizes using strong insights to show why your approach is working-or how it may need to be adjusted-as a way to strengthen your position and get leadership on your side. Equally compelling is using analytics for predictive modeling.
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Writing a Blog to Grow Your Business
“What do I write about?”
It’s inevitably the first question any business starting up a company blog will ask. And it’s inevitably the question that will continue to be asked as long as the company blog exists.
If you’ve done any research into business blogging, you have probably encountered endless articles about why you should have a business blog. These articles are often supported by survey results and data analysis. They typically explain that it can be a successful, cost-effective way to bring traffic to your website. An active blog means the search engines see your fresh content, which, if set up properly, can help improve your SEO performance. An active blog means you have plenty of fodder for sharing on your social media networks. You can also email articles to prospects and clients, and encourage people to contact you in the post itself (calls to action). All this, in turn, can grow your leads, increase sales, build your authority, and expand your market reach.
Write to Delight
Dive in a little deeper, and you are guaranteed to find even more articles about how to put together a blogging program. And they all make it sound so quick and easy.
Chances are you’ve come across some version of this advice: “To bring readers to your blog, all you have to do is write to delight and inform.” This is usually accompanied with plenty of tactical (?) advice:
- Plan your content in advance
- Use an editorial calendar
- Headlines/images/bullet points sell
- Understand your personas
- Blog daily/weekly/monthly/regularly
- Write to delight (there it is again!)
Sounds nice at a first read, but if you stop to think about it, what does it really mean? Can a business owner really turn this advice into an effective company blog? We don’t think so. At least not without investing way more time into understanding what it all means than anyone actually has. Because first and foremost, you still need to answer the question, “what do I write about?”
A Thoughtful Way to Structure Your Blog Content
There’s some old-school advice about writing that can be more constructive: “Write what you know.” You know your business. You know your customers. So in theory, you know what your customers need to know about your business.
We’re getting closer, but we need to take it to the next level by adding some manageable way to plan your content that takes into account all the benefits we discussed above: SEO, social media sharing, individual distribution.
So let’s start with what you know: your products and services. Ideally, your website is structured so each category of products or services has a dedicated page (on the SEO side, think broad key concept, or a category of keywords). These Category Pages link to individual Product or Service Pages (for SEO, this equates to “longer-tail keywords”). There may be one or two additional, highly-targeted pages for each of those services, focusing more in-depth on various aspects of that service or product.
Enter your blog. Each of your product or service pages offers near endless fodder for blog posts. Product updates, news, customer reviews, customer examples, how-to articles, all make good blog content.
Put the pages and blog posts together, and you have a content hierarchy that can be used to strategically answer the question, “what do I write about?” Not only will you have something to write about, but you will have content that will help your SEO efforts, move your prospects along the sales funnel, and allow you to reach out via social media networks.
An Example: Sit, Stay, Home – an Electric Fence Company
Let’s use Sales Renewal’s fictitious company, Sit, Stay, Home, to demonstrate the power of this model.
- Our top-level Category Page “Electric Fence Models” gives a summary of all our electric fence products.
- Each summary is linked to a Product Page, for example, “Model 1 – Electric Fence with GPS Collar”.
- This, in turn, links to a Special Features page, explaining “How the GPS Collar Works.”
- We can then generate Blog Post content for these Product or Special Feature Pages to enhance the reader’s understanding of your product: how the idea was developed (company insights); true-life example of how a dog was saved by wearing the collar (testimonial); why it works even in snow (geographic reference); what types of dogs it is best for (customer example); how to prolong the battery life (tips).
You’ll want to go through this process for each category of product or service you offer. At the end, you will find you have plenty to write about. And you will be able to systematically plan and schedule your content so you develop a well-rounded website, with pages and posts that support and explain your business.
With this birds-eye view of your content, you can balance they types of posts you write, as well. For example, one week you might write about why the GPS model works in the snow, the next week a customer testimonial about how Model 2 worked better than anything she had tried. Week 3 announces a software update for Model 4, and week 4’s post offers tips and tricks for better training.
Of course, once you know what to write about, you can rely on readily available advice for how to write it, being sure to take into account readability, WIFM (what’s in it for the customer), delight (!), SEO, and social sharability.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
“What do I write about?”
It’s inevitably the first question any business starting up a company blog will ask. And it’s inevitably the question that will continue to be asked as long as the company blog exists. By looking at the content of your web pages and blog posts together, you have a content hierarchy that can be used to strategically answer that question.
How Much are Your Sales Leads Really Worth?
Every day, marketing and sales professionals in thousands of companies make significant investments to acquire and develop sales leads. The ultimate objective is to grow revenues and profits by winning new customers.
Unfortunately, these investment decisions are often made without a clear and accurate understanding of how valuable leads actually are. When marketing and sales leaders don’t know the true value of their sales leads, they can invest too little and miss out on profitable new revenues, or they can invest too much and acquire customers that are unprofitable.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The author believes determining the value of sales leads is a four-step process, which he explains and details.
In the post referenced here, he discusses the first two steps. In a subsequent post, he concludes with his last two steps.
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Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from November
Since we update our Growth Spurts blog several times a week, our readers know they can find a lot of actionable marketing & technology advice in it. And in case you’ve missed them, we offer a monthly, summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts of the month where we extract the most useful information into tips you can use, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.
Here, then, are our 6 favorite posts for the month:
Marketing Strategy
- Don’t Let Silos Destroy the Customer Experience – Integrated marketing is critical for a good customer experience. It means breaking down silos not only between individual marketing tactics, but across product lines, between marketing and sales, and with upper management, too.
- A Better Way to Calculate the ROI of Your Marketing Investment – Today, marketers have access to data that allows them to track an individual’s various interactions with a brand before their purchase and better understand what role each interaction played in the eventual sale. This approach is called “attribution modeling, ” and allows companies to attribute appropriate credit to each online and offline contact and touch point in a customer’s purchase cycle so that they can improve their marketing ROI. Read more about this approach here.
SEO
- Google’s Natural Language Search Gets Smarter – If natural search traffic is important to you and you have not yet reevaluated your SEO strategy, this story makes it abundantly clear that now is the time to do so! Why? Because you are shooting yourself in the foot if you’re still focusing on traditional keywords instead of semantics.
- 9 Ways Small Businesses Can Be Big on Google – With smart planning, small businesses can have a strong presence even with a limited budget. Taking advantage of online opportunities is key. Here are 9 ways to make sure your SEO efforts pay off, including adding customer reviews and ratings to each product you sell; using a variety of images and/or videos for each product; and building links to specific product pages instead of just your homepage or other high-level pages (a.k.a. deep-linking)
Content Marketing
- How to Market to Goldfish – Did you know that the average attention span has gone from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds in 2015? And that is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish, at 9 seconds. But all is not lost, as we are humans, not goldfish. Find out some of the keys for holding people’s attention in this article from Hubspot.
Social Media Marketing
- How Airlines are Using Social Media for Seat Selection – They call it “social seating.” By using your social media profiles, airlines will select who you sit next to on your next flight. The claim is that it will provide you with a better in-flight experience. What do you think?
Stay up-to-date with marketing news and advice for your business – Subscribe to our Best of Monthly Digest here.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Since we update our Growth Spurts blog several times a week, our readers know they can find a lot of actionable marketing & technology advice in it. And in case you’ve missed them, we offer a monthly, summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts of the month where we extract the most useful information into tips you can use, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.
Here, then, are our 6 favorite posts for the month covering Content Marketing, SEO, Strategic Planning and Social Media.
A Better Way to Set Your Marketing Budget
The best way to develop a marketing budget is to treat that budget as if it’s an investment — something that delivers an expected, quantified return over time. In order to build a strong business case around this concept, a marketer must understand the dynamics of their funnel. Take a deep dive into how new potential customers enter in the top of the funnel, how much you need to invest to find those prospects and help them move through the revenue cycle …
With this model in place, marketers can run scenarios that show how the budget translates into more leads, opportunities, and wins down the funnel. (They can also quantify the impact budget cuts will have.) At most companies, any significant investment must be supported by a business case that shows it will deliver a “hurdle rate”, or minimum rate of return. If you can make that case, the CFO generally approves it. Of course, some types of activities — demand generation comes to mind — are easier to tie to ROI than others, such as brand-building or PR. But no matter what the activity, make “worst case”, “expected case”, and “best case” assumptions to show the range of possible outcomes.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The author does a nice job explaining some of the ways to do a marketing investment analysis, and even makes a plea to treat marketing just like other business investments, even capital spending (are you listening FASB?)
We ourselves have tried to contribute to this change in mindset, for example, we’ve presented real-life data that shows the more you invest in marketing, the more your leads increase and costs per sale or lead decrease to larger growth (here).
We even offer a quick, low-cost service, a Marketing Investment Analysis, that will help you figure out what a rationale marketing investment in your business should be.
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A Better Way to Calculate the ROI of Your Marketing Investment
“Marketers have access to data [today] that allows them to track individuals’ various interactions with a brand before their purchase, and better understand what role each interaction … played in the eventual sale.
This approach, called “attribution modeling, ” allows companies to attribute appropriate credit to each online and offline contact and touch point in a customer’s purchase cycle, and understand its role in the revenues that ultimately result.
Developing an attribution model is a gradual process. You can’t get there all at once. There are four key stages in the journey:”
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The authors lay out an excellent road map, but like most things in life, the devil is in the details. Sales Renewal, as Growth Spurt readers know, focuses on small businesses and the details are particularly devilish for them since they don’t have the technical & financial resources of the big boys.
Almost all small businesses rely on Google Analytics (GA) for the authors’ Step 1 because it’s free and will tell them what marketing activity to credit for bringing the visitor to the site (ad click, natural search, etc), which pages they clicked through, and whether in the end they converted into a lead or sale. The challenge small businesses face therefore isn’t “data in different databases” but the limits of GA.
For example, imagine a visitor who comes to a site by clicking an online ad, clicks thru pages 1, 2 & 3 and then purchases something. So using a simple attribution model, you might think GA will credit the ad campaign for the sale. It turns out, however, that it does not: if takes more than 30 minutes for them to click from page 2 to page 3, GA loses track and considers the page 3 click to be an entirely new session. GA will report 2 different visitors (the first who came from the ad, the second who magically started out on page 3) and so does not attribute the sale to the ad click.
Sales Renewal’s business model (sharing the risk & reward) makes us very big believers in ROI-focused marketing but it’s a very challenging thing to do, especially for small businesses. That’s one of the reasons, for instance, that we’ve been developing our SR Analytics system for 6 years.
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15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Generation Z
While many marketers still struggle to figure out the Millennials, a new generation-Generation Z-is growing up behind the scenes.
Members of Gen Z, born after 1995, are quite different than their Millennial counterparts, with their own set of expectations when interacting with companies.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
You might not realize it but more than 25% of Americans belong to Gen Z, and with 361, 00 babies born in the U.S. every day the segment is growing fast.
All of their 15 stats are interesting but we found these 2 to be the most intriguing … and scary:
- Millennials use 3 screens on average, Gen Zers use 5 (smartphone, TV, laptop, desktop, iPod/iPad)
- The average Gen Zer has the attention span of about 8 seconds.
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The Increasing Importance of Content Marketing in 2015
A new infographic from ExpressWriters nicely illustrates Content Marketing’s increasing importance to growing your sales and brand.
Some factoids we found particularly interesting:
Sales Renewal’s insight:
A new infographic from ExpressWriters nicely illustrates Content Marketing’s increasing importance to growing your sales and brand. Some factoids we found particularly interesing:
- Coca-Cola now spends more money creating content than on television advertising
- Marketers invest over 25% of their marketing budget on content
- 77% of marketers plan on increasing content production in 2015
- 61% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that shares custom content
- 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing