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As Trust Among Consumers Wavers, Authenticity is Critical

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By  Michael Fertik

Facebook might be under fire for questionable data management practices, but that doesn’t mean businesses should shy away from social media as a means of connecting with customers.

In fact, high-profile breaches of consumer trust have lead to a call for authenticity, and businesses who fail to connect on social media and through other digital methods will miss the opportunity to demonstrate authenticity and earn consumer loyalty.

Why is consumer trust at an all-time low? Well, the ongoing deluge of scandals involving misuse of consumers’ personal data has had a devastating effect. For example, Facebook’s rocky year ended with a harsh New York Times expose, revealing that the company sold out even more user data than previously thought to a whole bunch of companies — including Netflix and Spotify, who supposedly can now read your private messages.

Facebook isn’t alone in defending its data security policies — during the first half of 2018,  3.2 billion consumer files were compromised worldwide. Yet even as consumer fears around privacy invasion grow, (last year, for example, Pew Research found roughly half of Americans don’t trust the government or social media sites to protect their data) we continue to rely on social media platforms for information about what products and services to buy.

Oh, the Irony!

So, here we are. Consumers don’t trust the government or social media, but they rely on review sites and social media giants like Facebook for information to guide their purchasing decisions. Case in point: Facebook continues to add more active users, and many think the #deletefacebook movement is self-defeating — the # itself connotes the idea of social media channels aggregating data for our perusal.

It’s up to businesses to figure out how to be seen as trustworthy using an inherently untrustworthy marketing medium. In this contradictory environment, how do businesses fare well? Provide exceptional service. Hold yourself accountable. Be authentic.

What Consumers Really Want

Reputation.com’s 2018 Retail Reputation Report uncovered powerful, actionable insights into what retail customers really want — staff competence and friendliness, short wait times and product value all play significant roles in swaying customer sentiment. All of these things are reflected in online reviews and social commentary, and contribute to a business’s overall Reputation Score — the sum of all your efforts to optimize your online presence.

Our report lists the winners, with Lego at the top, along with Trader Joe’s and (you guessed it) Nordstrom. And we found that a high Reputation Score correlates with a 3.9% boost in sales.

But brands should be careful not to overlook another important factor that goes a long way in earning consumer trust — authenticity. Eighty-six percent of people say authenticity matters when deciding what brands they like and support. To win the hearts and business of your target customers, you have to convince them you are trustworthy and authentic.

Being authentic means being accountable and upholding your brand promise. It requires transparency and a dash of vulnerability. When a brand is authentic, consumers know it, appreciate it and prioritize their spending accordingly.

Think about it. What are people looking for when they have a bad experience at a store, or when a service they access online is temporarily unavailable. Usually an apology combined with a concerted effort to right the wrong — in other words, being authentic —  will quell a consumer’s anger and resentment. And, it can keep bad reviews or negative posts from spiraling out of control.

Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index found that the way an experience makes customers feel has a bigger influence on brand loyalty than any other factor. Elite brands provided an average of 22 emotionally positive experiences for each negative experience.

When it comes down to it, we’re all human. We respond to being treated well. We reject what’s fake or dishonest, and we are drawn to authenticity. It seems so easy, yet for many brands, it’s difficult to accomplish.

Here are some simple ways to build the authenticity your audience is looking for

  • Listen and respond to your customers publicly online. Responding to a critique or complaint online is more critical than ever — 54% of consumers expect a response in less than 60 minutes. And Gartner found that not answering customers on social channels can lead to a 15% increase in the churn rate for existing customers. Make sure you have processes and the right technology in place to monitor all your social media and review sites continuously, and set up alerts to notify you when reviews come in, so you can respond right away.
  • Address complaints and take action to correct issues. The content in reviews and social commentary contains clues to a better customer experience — but you’ll never know they’re there if you don’t leverage technology to collect and analyze the text. That’s what AI-based solutions can do. They pull in content from all over the web, apply machine learning and uncover all kinds of useful information, like where your locations can improve. Having this information on-hand can help you optimize the customer experience (and also boost profits).
  • Share authentic user-generated online content, from reviews, social media and surveys. Lean on your advocates to tell your story. In the customer’s mind, they are way more credible and trustworthy than you are.
  • Own up to mistakes: If there’s one thing we’ve learned from recent reputation management failures — think United Airlines and Starbucks — it’s this: Honesty and humility earn points with consumers. Be authentic in your ability to admit you screwed up, and do better next time.

Feature Image Credit: Getty images

By  Michael Fertik

I’m the Founder and Chairman of Reputation.com. I started my business because digital privacy, Big Data and online reputation are issues that impact everyone from individuals to massive corporations. People should be the center of the Internet machine – not cogs in its wheel. More empowerment online, not less, not what we have now. Follow me @michaelfertik.

Sourced from Forbes

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Four Ways Social Impact Will Affect Businesses In 2019

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By  Patsy Doerr

Major headlines from 2018 – like the rise of the #MeToo Movement, California’s legislation to increase the number of women on boards and the Weinstein Clause – have forced leading companies and their management to evaluate their current practices and their social impact efforts in an effort to avoid drawing negative attention and set themselves up for long-term success. Over the past year, companies have had to take a hard look at their culture and values and determine whether or not those values are reflected in their day-to-day operations. They’ve done this in order to not only get ahead of potential conflict (in an environment where knee-jerk reaction has become the norm), but to put a stake in the ground and become a leader in the areas that they say they care most about. This change in behaviour and the way we do business will continue to take shape into 2019. Below are some of my predictions for what’s in store and how companies can stay ahead of the fray.

Companies Will Be Forced To Embrace Social Impact – Or Fall Behind

For many years, companies viewed investing in social impact as “icing on the cake,” instead of as a must-do for their business – but that’s all changing. While even five years ago, companies were still somewhat slow to integrate social impact into their day-to-day activities and long-term strategies, over the past few years, the rallying cry behind these issues has been growing rapidly. In 2019, it will no longer be a choice for companies to embed social impact into their business and brand strategies – it’ll be imperative. More and more studies are showing that the newest wave of potential talent heavily weigh the values and culture of a company that they may end up working for, and therefore companies will need to make this investment in order to recruit and retain the best talent available. As well, embracing social impact is key to engaging a growing number of customers and investors who care deeply about these issues. In an increasingly competitive business world, customers have countless options for almost any service or product you could imagine – and research shows that many will choose to buy from the companies whose values they most align with.

Social Pressure Will Encourage Companies To Speak Up

In 2018, we saw a number of business leaders and companies take public stands when it came to political and social issues, and in doing utilized a powerful tool for engaging customers and inspiring brand loyalty – a trend we can expect to continue. For example, at the Makers Conference in February, we saw executives from 40 companies including Mattel, Adobe and Microsoft, pledge publicly to make changes to help women progress in their workforces. We also saw marketing campaigns around social issues like Nike’s partnership with Colin Kaepernick, and companies with long-standing POVs on environmental issues, like Patagonia, lean even further into their brand values. Company founders and CEOs are increasingly being turned to as thought leaders and activists with the influence and capital means to incite true social change. Now more than ever, companies and their leaders are expected to take a stance on major political and social issues. Therefore, company voices will get louder and stronger in 2019 due to increased social pressures, an increase in the transparency of company practices demanded by consumers and the growing attention to the current geopolitical environment.

Social Impact Goals And Metrics Will Be More Transparent

The difficulty of measuring social impact and the lack of transparency around it have been two of the key criticisms that have come about in terms of the long-term importance of investing in these initiatives. Many detractors have pointed to the lack of metrics as a reason to doubt the business case of social impact and environment, social and governance. But in reality, the lack of metrics is to be expected with any new initiative that hasn’t yet had the time and opportunity to be proven out. It takes a number of steps in order to get to that point: you must determine the key measurements to track, put in place mechanisms and processes to track them, begin collecting and analysing the data, and then you will have metrics to work from. This has been an ongoing process for many companies to date and those metrics and findings are only now starting to be reported back via annual reports like Thomson Reuters’ Diversity & Inclusion Index, PwC’s Global Inclusion Index, The Dow Jones’ Sustainability Index, and other such reports. I believe that in 2019, there will be increased transparency around social impact metrics and targets both within organizations and outside of them, and sustainable development goals (like those outlined in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals guidelines) will be utilized much more consistently as a framework for developing and measuring social impact initiatives.

Impact Will Increase Exponentially

As a result of the above shifts, I believe that social impact driven by business investment and leadership will increase exponentially beginning in 2019 and continue well into the future – particularly with regard to gender parity, which is one of the first areas that you’re seeing most companies who are making efforts in social impact to be investing in and setting goals for. With the rise of the #MeToo movement and increased discussion of pay equality, the need to rapidly move the needle is this area is certainly understandable, and companies should be lauded for making efforts towards levelling the playing field. As those goals are set, strategies for achieving those goals are put in place (including more formalized training and internal policies), and as results begin to come in, we’ll see companies begin to better focus on the employee lifecycle and instead of putting out fires, create more sustainable career tracks that empower and promote existing talent.

Photo Image Credit: Interest in Social Impact Continues to Grow. Photo Credit: GettyGetty

By  Patsy Doerr

Patsy Doerr is a leading expert and thought leader in the field of corporate social responsibility, diversity and inclusion and sustainability. Her greatest passion is helping large organizations build and develop initiatives that best position them for long-term success in a diverse, global environment. Patsy’s experience includes driving these efforts in social impact, talent, learning, organizational development, diversity and inclusion, and client engagement primarily, but not limited to, financial services.

Sourced from Forbes

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How the Financial Times is building brand loyalty among young readers

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By  Jessica Davies

For subscriptions publishers like the Financial Times, cultivating regular reading habits with younger generations is essential to securing future paid customers. That’s why the publisher has established a long-term program to get school kids and teachers regularly reading FT content.

The program has been designed to help students contextualize their school curriculum with relevant news articles written by FT journalists. The publisher lifts the paywall with participating schools and students and students can create their own online and mobile accounts. Those that do are sent weekly email newsletters, curated by the FT’s global education editor, Andrew Jack. These feature links to stories that are relevant to their specific fields, whether it be economics, the environment or politics.

In doing so, the hope is that 16- to 19-year-old students can more easily contextualize fact-heavy text-book information by reading relevant, real-life, contemporary examples of world and businesses news.

“Historically, the FT has been perceived as [having] an older audience already in working life or advanced education,” said Jack. “But this is important in terms of thinking about our future readers, and with the wider debate around fake news and poor quality information so readily available, we feel providing high-quality information to that next generation is very important.”

The program, which began in the U.K. in 2017, has rolled out to 2,300 schools globally. While around 75 percent of those schools are in the U.K., there are around 100 involved in the U.S. and other schools are participating in countries where English is a second language, like China. This is where the FT’s development of audio text articles has come in handy because students learning English can hear how the article sounds, added Jack.

More than a million FT pages have been accessed by students and teachers in the program over the last year and 34,000 individual accounts created, according to the publisher.

“The FT, like other publishers with older readerships, worries that the next generation will not grow into reading their types of news,” said Nic Newman, senior research associate for Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “So most of these types of initiatives are about establishing the brand and the value early on with the hope that they will continue to identify with the brand as they move into the world of work.”

To ensure students make the most of the program, the FT has cultivated relationships with the teachers. The publisher sends a weekly email newsletter to 20,000 individual teachers who have signed up. Typically, there will be five different subject fields covered in the newsletter, spanning economics, politics, global affairs and culture.

“We have built a network of teacher curators,” added Jack. “They know what is useful and what resonates; they contact me with articles they want shared.” The publisher has started adding two to three question suggestions to accompany articles sent in the newsletter as lesson-planning aids.

To appeal directly to students, the FT runs multiple-choice quizzes and three writing competitions. The quizzes test students on the biggest news stories of the year, published by the FT, across a range of subjects.

The publisher has partnered with credible institutions for the competitions, including the Bank of England, Chatham House and World Bank. The partners don’t pay, but they do offer tickets to major annual events they hold to the winners. Competition challenges have asked students to describe the future of money or to write about what their first priority would be if they were appointed United Nations secretary. The winner gets their article published on FT.com as well as the website of the partner institution.

The FT has a stable subscriptions business with 985,000 print and digital paying subscribers. But to sustain and grow that, the publisher must cultivate loyalty among younger generations, for whom the current paywall is prohibitive. “By engaging with the younger generations, introducing them to the brand from a young age, creating the habit and building up the longer-term relationship The Financial Times will look to coach the individuals through their life cycle and eventually migrate them up to being fully paid subscribers,” said Greg Harwood, director at strategy and marketing consultancy Simon-Kucher & Partners.

The FT also wants to do more to engage younger people with its video coverage in 2019, though it wouldn’t reveal details. So far it has run a short-form video competition, but wants to develop more ways to get young people viewing its video, added Jack.

“It’s vitally important for the FT to engage with new audiences at all points on the age spectrum, but particularly at the younger end,” said Jon Slade, group chief commercial officer at the FT. “We think the FT provides a really important, helpful tool to help young people navigate the world they live in, and help with their studies. And we hope in doing that we are also building the paying reader of the future.”

By  Jessica Davies

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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How to Create Amazing Remarketing Funnels: 5 Tips You Need to Know

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By Christi Olson

In my opinion, every single paid search campaign should be a remarketing campaign.

Gasp, I said it.

Should, not could.

Should, because if you have a remarketing strategy using “Target and Bid” audiences with both positive and negative audience bid modifiers you can shape your remarketing strategy to drive traffic across the decision journey.

Now, let me take a break here, because that was a mouthful – and over the remainder of the article I’m going to unpack what this means and five tips that will help you do this.

The variety of remarketing tactics available within paid search today are growing from the remarketing list in search ads (RLSA), to customer match, custom audiences, similar audiences, like audiences all the way to in-market audiences.

In order to take advantage of most remarketing tactics, you need to have tracking set up.

  • Google Ads: You either need Google Analytics or the Google remarketing tag implemented.
  • Bing Ads: You need to have Universal Event Tracking (UET) set up for your account. UET tracks conversion goals and target audiences with remarketing lists.

Once a customer has engaged with your website in one way, shape, or form, you can use a remarketing campaign to make sure that you’re messaging correctly, because the average consumer engagement is going to involve more than one touch before they actually make the purchase.

Use that space between in a strategic way to guide targeted customer segments in the right direction – all you have to do is capture the data.

The power behind remarketing is the ability to overlay audience data on top of search campaigns and the targeting capabilities that come with it.

Using “bid & target: option for audiences allows you to overlay your audience data on to your search campaigns, and adjust everything from keywords, to ad copy, to landing pages, to your bid strategy based on the user data and intent.

Why You Need to Understand Your Funnels to Create Great Remarketing Campaigns

Before I dig into the tactical steps behind creating a remarketing funnel, here’s an example that characterizes what remarketing is and how it can be used to drive a customer’s purchase cycle.

Let’s say you are an online retailer selling tickets for sporting events. I go to your website looking to purchase tickets to a Seattle Seahawks game.

I go through various pages on your website, looking at different games, availability of seats, and even add a set of tickets to my cart for a game, but before completing the transaction I pull the plug –  no sale.

Based on my time spent on your site, you can pull different bits of information and use that to continue to reach me as I continue my shopping journey across the web.

You already know I had some level of purchase intent, so the next time I’m online searching for Seahawks tickets or tickets to an upcoming event, you could go back and remarket that exact game and seats I added to your cart, using the game day details, ticket prices, seats, etc. to make a very targeted ad, specific to me.

5 Tips to Create Amazing Remarketing Campaigns & Funnels

1. Understand & Optimize the Time Constraints Related to Consumer Purchase Cycles Then Adjust Your Membership Duration Accordingly

When you create a remarketing list, you’re allowed to set a membership duration timeframe (or look back window) for how long a person’s cookie remains in your marketing list.

Many marketers leave this set at the default setting of 30 days; however, marketers who are using search for demand generation will create lists with unique look back windows based on the purchase or lead gen cycle.

Here are a few ideas to consider with setting the remarketing window:

  • For awareness and brand campaigns, I typically recommend setting a longer look back window.
  • For ecommerce and lead gen campaigns, I typically recommend setting the look back window to 10-20 percent beyond the time frame of the average purchase cycle, to include those who may take a little longer to make their purchase.
  • For campaigns related to products and services that are perishable (like travel, entertainment, tickets, etc.), you’ll still want to use purchase window tied to the expiration date.

For instance, let’s go back to the Seahawks game.

I know the date of the game (let’s say it’s on December 30) so I know that any tickets I don’t sell by 1 p.m. PT on December 30 are perishable. If today is December 1, I would set my membership duration to 29 days.

If you don’t know the specifics about your purchase cycle to understand what timeframe to set your membership duration, get insights from your analytics account.

In Google Analytics, go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels, then Select Time Lag. This report shows how many conversions resulted from purchase paths by number of days in length. 

2. Create Multiple Audiences & Remarketing Lists Based on the Purchase Journey & User Behaviors/Actions

Here, it’s important to really understand the steps of your purchase journey and cycle. Based on those steps and stages, create unique audience lists.

I like to create a purchase journey map where I document:

  • What the step of the journey is.
  • How I’m tracking that specific step.
  • The list name.
  • My thought process for the different ways I am thinking about using that specific list.

For the Seahawks ticket example – I can create lists specific to the Seahawks, or their opponent, or CenturyLink Stadium, or potentially to each individual game date so long as that information is passed through the URL string.

Here are a few of the different types of remarketing lists I may create the following types of lists:

  • Visited Website
  • Visited the ticket page for Football
  • Visited the Seahawks Page
  • Visited the Select a Seat Page
  • Added Seats to Cart
  • Started Entering Billing Information
  • Completed Transaction
  • Created a new account
  • Logged into Account

Based on each of these specific on-site actions I could assign them to stages of the consumer decision journey.

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I could also start to figure out how I would change my search marketing strategy from including the keywords I would target, the ad copy messaging, the landing page, or even my bid optimization strategy, based on the action that the consumer took.

3. Adjust Your Consumer Messaging Based on the Audience List & Keywords Targeted

Once you’ve mapped out the purchase journey and what audience will align to each step you’ll need to figure out how to apply it to your search strategy.

Should you shift consumer messaging based on the keywords they’re searching and where they are at within that purchase journey?

This opportunity to shift your messaging could be one of many different things:

  • Ad copy can be customized based on products and services as the consumer goes down the purchase path. Pull in specific data such as pricing, quantity of products available, offers, etc. into your ad copy based on the audience list.
  • Use ad customizers like countdown messaging for promotions or events.
  • For abandoned carts, you could offer a discount or incentive to bring the consumer back to your store.

This is getting to the heart of how you may be planning on using the specific list.

Let’s go back to my Seahawks game day example. Because the Seahawks tickets are perishable, you may choose to use the countdown ad customizer to include how many days are remaining before game day – or counting down to the hours until the game starts.

Also, think about your ad extensions and how you can customize and leverage your ad extensions to be more specific about stage of the funnel and even where you might choose to land the visitor on the site.

4. Understand Your Landing Pages & Think About Conversion Rate Optimization

Think about where you would take someone if they’re in a different stage of the purchase journey.

How would you optimize your landing page and its content to make it more personal, more curated, and more relevant to that searcher?

In my Seahawks example, where would you choose to take a user is they came back after abandoning the cart and searched for “Seahawks tickets”?

You can set up an A/B test to two different landing pages for the same ad copy to see if you can impact conversion rate.

I would most likely run the test of sending them either to the page for the specific Seahawks game as well as the core Seahawks page.

If my site had the capability, I might also use a site link extension to call out the rough ticket price that was previously selected and take them to the “select a seat” phase of the purchase journey; and then use the additional site link extensions for the core Seahawks page or other upcoming games.

With audiences, you can test the ad copy and landing page elements to optimize to conversion rate!

5. Adjust Your Bid Strategy Based on Audience

Adjusting your bid optimization strategy for audience targeted campaigns is an often overlooked tactic.

Because you can assign audience lists at the ad group and campaign level, it means that you can adjust your bid optimization strategy, too.

Based on the past or previous engagements with the user, would you have a different ROAS/ROI or optimization target?

For instance, I’ve managed search campaigns where net new customers had a ROAS target of 125 percent versus existing customers had an optimization target of 250 percent.

Why?

Because while our existing bid models didn’t include lifetime value, we knew from our internal data that 20 percent of the new customers would become regular repeat customers, so we could be more aggressive to acquire net-new users.

Here’s the main takeaway:

If you’re trying to create an amazing remarketing funnel, it goes back to looking at your data and understanding consumer intent and behavior and then mapping that behavior and intent to your search campaigns.

From there you can customize just about everything when you are using the “Target and Bid” setting for audiences.

Without Data, We’re Just Making Guesses at a Customer’s Intentions

There’s a lot of great information available to you within your analytics account to essentially go down and create a ton of in-depth remarketing lists that can be layered on top of your search campaigns.

This gives you the necessary levers to pull for your keywords, ad copy, landing pages, and your bid optimization tools and tactics – and it should be a central part of your business’s sales strategy.

The world is your oyster, go forth and start creating ah-maz-ing remarketing campaigns.

By Christi Olson

Sourced from Search Engine Journal

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Bootstrapping Relevance: Making Web Conversions Meaningful for Long Sales Cycles

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By Derek Gleason    

Most hurricanes that reach the United States start off the coast of West Africa. Those storms join and split with other minor systems as they move across the Atlantic. Some dissipate into a mild breeze; others devastate coastal areas along the Eastern seaboard.

So what does an afternoon rainshower over Cape Verde tell you about the next Category 5 hurricane? Often, little more than a form fill tells you about the potential for a five-figure sale months down the road.

Google Analytics insights frequently end with raw counts of goal completions, leaving a yawning gap between on-site behavior and sales for companies with long sales cycles.

More challenging still, the space between marketers’ realities and solutions is equally vast: Seamless integration of marketing and sales data or a Google Analytics 360 subscription is aspirational.

This post details four steps that any organization can follow to estimate the value of on-site conversions more accurately:

  1. Identify every potential touchpoint.
  2. Organize existing data into an idealized customer journey.
  3. Integrate data into goal completions.
  4. Analyze and act on that data.

No solution is perfect, but incremental progress is possible—and worthwhile.

Why bother? Analytics incentivize behavior

The data-related challenges of long sales cycles are well known: Between a form fill and a sale, there may be dozens of touchpoints spanning weeks or months. Those interactions occur across teams (marketing, sales, customer support) and platforms (analytics, CRM, email).

The challenge of joining those datasets resigns many marketers to limited measurement: We know our data is incomplete, so we might as well just count form fills.

Yet analytics incentivize behavior, and if marketing teams can’t see past total goal completions (euphemistically, “leads”), they’ll devote resources to those efforts—even if a painfully low percentage ever become sales-qualified leads.

The limits of attribution

A common focus for companies with long sales cycles is attribution. But even data-driven attribution, robust as it may be, usually improves attribution of form fills or PDF downloads—marketing metrics that may be weak indicators of sales.

Goal completions can become stronger predictors of sales by pushing data about the relative value of each goal completion back into analytics.

Attribution’s relevance depends on the known value of the conversion.Regardless of how much data you have, you will make decisions on how to allocate marketing resources. Partial data—or even anecdotal data—can, at the bare minimum, form the basis for experimentation and a means to test your assumptions.

It starts with a survey of all known customer data.

Step 1: Identify every potential touchpoint.

“Long lead time before the sale is an opportunity to do more data collection,” offered Snowplow Analytics’ Anthony Mandelli, “which will ultimately help you in the long run.”

Compare the number of touchpoints in a year-long sales process to the purchase of novelty socks (Mandelli’s example). The latter is a single image, the former a feature-film—a complete narrative with deep insight into what influences consumer behavior.

“It’s a long sales cycle for a reason,” Mandelli continued. “Leads are conducting online and offline research.” The starting point, then, is to “get all your data together somewhere—start with the first interaction, then all the way to purchase.”

That data may include:

  • Form fills
  • PDF downloads
  • Phone calls
  • Email opens/clicks
  • Webinar signups/views
  • Demo requests
  • Free trial signups, etc.

It may also include reports from your sales team, estimates by executives, or other offline sources. At the outset, you simply want to know all the potential sources of data (regardless of whether you’re able to gather them into a Customer Data Platform that curates “a single source of truth“).

You may be missing key data or may not be able to integrate it in future steps, but knowing what exists—and what is or isn’t accessible—helps establish the immediate path forward and guides future improvements.

Step 2: Organize existing data into an idealized customer journey.

Sketching an idealized user journey—or reviewing one already created—is not about forcing users into a linear funnel but about creating a structure to help organize your data.

A customer journey map, Hull’s Ed Fry explains, “highlights the macro-conversions that many teams in the company optimize for (like a new user signing up) vs. micro-conversions that concern few other people.” Each stage in the journey, in turn, is delineated by a conversion:

In a customer journey, the step-by-step progress of a user usually includes a measurable conversion in a digital channel. (Image source)In an example Mandelli shared, a flooring company had no visibility into what happened between a potential buyer’s $10 sample purchase and a $10,000 sale. Building an idealized user journey—based on data from a real customer—helped the company organize the data they had by the steps the customer took:

  1. Web ad (Google AdWords or Bing)
  2. Visit the website
  3. Order a sample from the website
  4. Review samples
  5. Receive drip email marketing campaign
  6. Purchase flooring (through the web or on the phone

With existing data points plotted along the idealized user journey, ask yourself: “Where are the biggest gaps between touches?” (In the above example, it’s Step 4.) “The goal is not to sink under analysis paralysis,” writes Fry. “It is to simply understand the backbone of your customer journeys.”

A data gap does not invalidate conversion values for long sales cycles. Charles Farina of Analytics Pros explained:

If you are able to qualify a lead quickly, work to connect your metrics to center on qualified leads. From there, try and work further down the funnel.

In other words, if a form fill can be qualified with a second interaction (say, responding to a phone call), that data—the percentage of form fills who become qualified leads—can guide conversion valuation, even if months pass before those qualified leads become sales.

Even with complete data, Farina suggested, you’ll rarely optimize based on close-of-sale metrics: It simply takes too long. If you make changes to service pages today, would you put everything on hold for months while you waited to see how many leads from the updated pages became customers?

What you really need, Farina suggested, is a two-stage optimization process:

Focus on bringing more quality into your funnel, then use the fully connected journey to make additional optimizations on top.

For many, the perspective is liberating: Data points from one or two steps post–form fill can make conversion data vastly more relevant, no matter how long the sales cycle stretches past the initial conversion.

Step 3: Integrate data into goal completions.

There are elegant solutions for integrating Analytics data with CRM data and similar sources:

The potential value of an integration—like pulling Salesforce data into Google Analytics—is clear, but securing the budget is, for most, unrealistic. (Image source)In the prior example of the flooring company, Snowplow joined the data from web analytics and marketing automation tools to provide ongoing visibility about how users progressed through the journey. But that ongoing portrait—while closer to the ideal—isn’t mandatory.

If you don’t have a sizeable analytics budget or an in-house team of developers to manage multiple connections, use a snapshot of your post-conversion data to adjust Goal Values in Google Analytics.

1. Make periodic calculations for Google Analytics Goal Values

Goal Values assign dollar values to conversions—replacing the faulty “a conversion is a conversion” logic with estimated revenue from on-site actions.

To set Goal Values, you need to calculate the value of a lead on a goal-by-goal basis. In its simplest form, the process divides the total number of goal completions by the revenue from those conversions.

  • 100 form fills
  • 5 form fills convert to sales
  • Each sale generates $10,000 in revenue

Thus, a form fill is worth $500. The calculation requires two data points outside Google Analytics: The number of web leads who became customers, and the value of each sale. (If you don’t have access to both, skip to the second option.)

In a perfect world, the calculations are exact enough to establish ROI for marketing efforts. However, for long sales cycles, obtaining that degree of accuracy is almost impossible—but that shouldn’t keep you from using Goal Values.

Goal Values Are fixed numbers…with relative value

When it comes to long sales cycles, setting the Goal Value of a form fill is less about ROI and more about weighting the impact of on-site behavior. Relative differences in dollar values, as detailed in the fourth step, allow for better comparisons of how each page or channel performs.

For example, if a lead who initiates an engagement with a phone call—tracked via CallRail or Marchex—closes at twice the rate of a form fill, that difference will be reflected in the Goal Value. Likewise, a newsletter signup from a blog post will probably be weighted less (by using sales data from newsletter subscribers).

To think of it another way, not assigning Goal Values gives every goal the same value: $0. If your Goal Values aren’t accurate enough to determine ROI—whether left as $0 or calculated based on sales data—you might as go with the calculated estimate that at least has a chance of being directional.

Note: If seeing “inaccurate” Goal Value figures will ruffle feathers in other departments, create a new View with the same Goals and add estimated Goal Values.

Use Lookup Tables to generate dynamic Goal Values

Not all form fillers—even of the same form—are equal. A Lookup Table in Google Tag Manager (GTM), as Bounteous details, can set dynamic Goal Values based on form inputs.

So, for example, if a form question includes the size of the company, you can adjust the Goal Value based on the likelihood of conversion, average order value, or lifetime value of that demographic.

Set a different Output (Goal Value) for each based on Input (the form-field options):

The Default Value is used if none of the other criteria is met.Create a Data Layer variable to capture the business category data (the Input field) upon submission. Then, create an Event that pulls in the business category information and the associated lead value from the Lookup Table.

Finally, use the Event value as the Goal Value for the that conversion:

Even if you don’t know the value of a given type of lead—or any lead at all—you still have another option.

2. Estimate the relative value of online touchpoints

If quantitative data on lead conversion rates and order value isn’t available, you can add relative values. Branko Kral of Orbit Media detailed the process for a stem-cell clinic with a long sales cycle and limited data.

They identified the primary touchpoints, then assigned relative values from $100 to $10—the actual dollar values were irrelevant—to gauge the impact of campaigns that spurred a range of micro- and macro-conversions:

  • First-time calls – lead to most new business
  • Repeating calls – also highly valuable
  • Call-back requests – capture contact info and explicitly ask to be contacted
  • Blog subscriptions – capture contact info and indicate trust
  • Video views > 50% of the video length – patients who book often mention they’ve watched the patient testimonial videos
  • Email link clicks – typical for inquiries higher up the funnel
  • Social share clicks – spread the word
  • Views of a Contact Us page – a subtle but valuable indicator of interest

It’s easy to poke holes in the process: How do you know that a social share click is worth say, half that of a video view? You don’t. However, that initial, heuristic estimate is a baseline for hypothesis development and testing.

After all, if you don’t assign Goal Values, you’re still allocating resources based on which actions you perceive to be most valuable. Adding relative Goal Values to on-site conversions makes it easy to visualize the implications of your assumptions throughout your site.

Step 4: Analyze and act on that data.

Adding calculated or relative Goal Values to conversions populates one metric (Page Value) and makes others—even basic channel grouping reports—more instructive.

Page Value

The Page Value metric provides URL-by-URL valuations of every page. (Image source)In Google Analytics, Page Value “is the average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the goal page or completing an Ecommerce transaction (or both).” As Effin Amazing notes:

Goals are a Session dimension metric, which means that you cannot use them in a Hit dimension report like Pages report, Event reports, or any type of Custom report built around a Hit dimension.

Page Value bridges the gap between these Session dimensions and Hit dimensions by tying a specific page URL to a monetary value when users complete a goal or transaction.

It’s one way to see the value of content at a URL level. With a Goal Value calculated from actual sales data, the Page Value metric may (roughly) estimate revenue; without it, it still offers a weighted estimate of importance for pages in the conversion process.

That URL-by-URL view can break down further into:

  • Mediums (e.g. organic vs. direct visits to the same page or group of pages)
  • Website sections (e.g. /case-studies/ vs. /whitepapers/)
  • Anything else you can think to add as a secondary dimension.

A caveat on taking action

A one-time estimate of close rates or average order value is good for only so long. The more often (monthly, quarterly) those calculations can be reworked—and Goal Values adjusted—the more reliable that data will be. (Goal Values are not assigned retroactively.)

Further, if an initial estimate suggests that email visitors are more lucrative than those from other channels, that may justify a push to acquire more email addresses—only to capture the addresses of less-relevant, less ready-to-buy visitors.

Every update of your Goal Values, then, is an opportunity to spot diminishing returns and shift marketing resources to another channel or site section. Disappointing as it may be to realize that you’ve exhausted a strategy, you’ll never notice unless you rerun the numbers—all you’ll see is conversions trending up, a vanity metric reaching ever-higher to nowhere.

Conclusion

When it comes to long sales cycles and web conversions, “perfect” is often the enemy of anything. But just because you don’t have uninterrupted lead-to-sale data doesn’t mean you can’t make your web analytics more meaningful.

Indeed, the second and third interactions after an on-site conversion—those you’re most likely to have on hand—may be the most influential metrics no matter how much data you accumulate.

Importing calculated Goal Values based on those metrics back into Google Analytics offers a more accurate valuation of the actions that take place on your website.

Even if those values are relative, you gain visibility into the assumptions you have about your site. Whether or not they hold true, the outcome will improve your marketing.

By Derek Gleason    

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Predictive Analytics and AI Drive Up Customer Lifetime Value

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By Matthew Kelleher

We focused our efforts on seeing whether using Predictive Analytics combined with AI driven marketing automation can help improve the customer experience around the key stages of the customer lifecycle – prospect’s first purchase, second purchase, multi-purchase, VIP and churn. Our strategy was to improve marketing performance at each of these stages by using Predictive Analytics to understand where each customer is on their own journey.  When the brand understands the customer’s next likely action, they can specifically target those individuals with more effective comms, ultimately, driving up total customer lifetime value.

Results at each stage of the lifecycle have been excellent. For instance, one brand saw an increase of 83.5% in second purchase rate. This, and other case studies, can be found here. Anyone who attended my presentation at either Technology for Marketing or Festival of Marketing recently, would have seen me present the outcome of the longer analysis to see if they could improve Customer Lifetime Value. For those of you who could not attend, you will have to wait for the release of the new case studies to the website in the next couple of weeks.

The obligatory Q&A session followed my presentations at both these events. But to be honest, I always find these questions instructive and rather good fun. Too often, and I’m not alone in this, I get carried away with what I want to say, and questions illustrate key elements that I’ve missed! So, these were the six questions that were asked (although I must admit I thought there were more) with a few more thoughts than I had time to give on the day.

  1. How has GDPR affected your data gathering? How did you fight an increase (if any) in unsubscribed customers?

    Whilst it has felt like forever, the period since May 25th is still, in the grand scheme of things, relatively short! Our impression is that, in general (can you see me caveating this response very heavily!) the long-term impact on sign ups and consent is relatively little. However, for some organisations their ‘re-permissioning’ experiences have been fairly disastrous. For instance, a database of active contacts of 500,000 reduced to 6,500 (if you are in this group then you are not alone). It’s not the objective of this blog to cast aspersions on the quality of advice given to some organisations, all I can really say is that without the correct permissions, processing data for comms or even for Predictive Analytics is not possible. There are minimum amounts of data required to make Predictive Analytics work, so for many organisations with smaller databases Predictive Analytics may not work and the issues surrounding GDPR only serve to increase that group.

  2. Do you have an example of using Predictive Analytics for recruitment initiatives – getting new customers rather than increasing the value of current customers?

    RedEye has not worked with any organisations to develop models around acquisition. However, our whole strategy is built around recent prospect/customer behaviour as the key driver for predicting their next likely action. Marketers can better understand how an individual prospect or customer is behaving in relation to their brand. By tracking as many interactions, across as wide a number of channels as possible, this can then be compared with the typical behaviour of customers who have completed certain journeys. And this is applicable to many different market sectors.

  3. What were the actions that came out of the predictive model to reduce churn. How were they implemented?

    25 minutes is a very short amount of time to pack in a lot of things. One that I often leave off the list is a detailed description of the treatments employed at each of the stages. But there is a very specific reason for this… the platform RedEye has developed provides the data to the marketer, and it is up to the marketer to then leverage this information. They know their brand and customers better than anyone else. A review of the treatments used by Travis Perkins would be a completely different presentation. Every brand will develop specific treatments and the insight of what Travis Perkins did is therefore of less relevance when we’re looking at how the system was plugged together to provide the outcome. I often say ‘if you knew a specific customer was likely to never buy from you again – what would you want to say to them?’. Every marketer would have a specific answer to this, I am sure!

  4. How did you link website behaviours to an individual? Was it logged in users only?

    At FoM I briefly shot off an answer, which was that we utilise a tag management solution, which was a bit blasé. The RedEye solution has always been built around a personalisation capability centred on the value of an individual’s browsing behaviour, which is also at the core of our approach to Predictive Analytics as described above. We then link this to channel engagement information, transactional data and any other type of data a client has that has a personal identifier of any kind. It is this data that is at the core of the CDP function and therefore the bedrock of Predictive Analytics. With regards to the issue of ‘logged in’, no, the customer or prospect does not need to be logged in, they just have to have given their consent.

  5. Did any of your clients face major hurdles in pulling together all the data from siloed and legacy data pots? If so, how was this overcome?

    I would say that the vast majority of organisations that RedEye work with have internal hurdles with regards to data silos. Some clients who want to input more data find they are restricted by internal systems, and there is very little that RedEye can do to overcome these bottlenecks. But assuming that the data is available somewhere in an organisation, the CDP is there to help marketers resolve these issues. We try to make this work more effectively in two ways. Firstly, we create easier ways to format data into the system, using simple connectors to input (and export) data. And secondly, we offer support staff to help this happen for clients who are resource strapped.

  6. Which is the best CDP you would recommend for publishers?

    If I remember this question from the day it was asked by Nish! Well Nish, as an executive of RedEye I would say get in touch with us! But being a bit more professional, and having asked my colleagues on the Customer Data Platform Institute I would recommend BlueConic and Lytics who I’m informed have good experience working with publishers.

If anyone else has any other questions I would be delighted to do my best to answer them, get in contact with me here.

By Matthew Kelleher

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

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What 199 Days in a Row of Blogging Taught Me About Bad Ideas

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By Christopher Mance II

Today represents 199 days in a row of writing a daily blog. One of the most important things I’m learning on this journey is the art of loving bad ideas.

Most days I wake up and I have no idea what to write about. Some days I don’t come up with something until very late and don’t publish anything until 11:59pm.

Struggling to come up with a topic to write about is mentally frustrating. However, this gets even more frustrating on days after I actually write something that people really like and connect with. I tend to have the worst ideas on those days.

This is why I am starting to love those bad ideas. I now know that without bad ideas you can’t have good ideas. Furthermore, fighting through the days to write even when my ideas suck and I’m afraid I can’t follow-up on a previous success is teaching me two valuable lessons:

  1. You can’t have writers block when you have a deadline you refuse to miss
  2. Being successful at something does not reduce the fear of failure, it increases it. However, it also increases your courage to face it.

By Christopher Mance II

Sourced from Chris Mance II & Company

 

 

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Does Your Business Have the Right People with the Right Skills for the Future?

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By Mark Rinaldi,

According to PwC’s 21st Annual Global CEO Survey, 80 percent of CEOs worry about the availability of key skills in the future. This figure is up from 77% in 2017, and 63% five years ago. The rise of artificial intelligence, automation, and demographic shifts are all driving to increase the importance of a solid people strategy.  Finding and hiring employees with the key skills they need to achieve corporate goals is increasingly a top executive priority and board-level concern.

Leading organizations are taking a hard look at planning the human resource needs of their businesses—identifying what skills they will need in the future and managing the supply and demand of those skills.

Collaboration Between HR and Finance

While most companies set up long-range plans tied to financial goals 5 to 10 years out, HR teams often are not part of that planning. In fact, only 57 percent of HR leaders think their company has a clear understanding of the skills employees will need for a digital future, and fewer still—just 16 percent—think their company is well prepared to deal with the change in necessary skills.

Yet getting the right workforce in place is not just the responsibility of HR. It’s a C-suite and board issue, too. Companies can’t reach their strategic goals without the right talent, so the executive team, finance, HR, and line managers all need to be part of the talent-planning process.

The skills gaps that executives worry about most include data science, analytics, and general technology skills across all industries. To remain employable, 74 percent of employees say they are ready to learn new skills or retrain, but employers need to know what those workforce needs are going to be before they can develop a future-focused strategy.

Getting the right people with the right skills at the right costs requires buy-in from multiple departments and collaboration between HR and finance. Traditional HR solutions cover learning, employee sourcing, talent and performance management, but they haven’t typically helped organizations plan for the future. On the finance side, traditional workforce planning addresses salary and compensation planning. Strategic workforce planning (SWP) brings the two sides together and helps translate the long-term corporate strategy into execution by ensuring that the workforce is in place to deliver on the plan.

It helps answer questions like: Do you need to retrain the existing workforce? Do you need to hire external help? What is natural attrition going to do to existing resources? How do you prevent that attrition and increase employee retention? What about the graying of your workforce? What will happen if 5 percent of your employees in critical roles retire next year? Do you have employees in the pipeline who can support market expansion?

With strategic workforce planning, you can acquire a more skilled and innovative workforce, implement on your long-term business strategy, increase productivity, and increase staff engagement and retention.

Collaborative Strategies Need Collaborative Tools

Oracle Strategic Workforce Planning can help you proactively plan and optimize your workforce, assess talent and skills gaps, visualize predicted impact on headcount and cost, and structure the organization to support the ever-accelerating pace of change in the business.  And because it is built on the unified Oracle Cloud platform and fully integrated, it allows your organization to link all strategic business objectives to one another, and helps ensure that your most vital assets—your human resources—are fully understood and managed:

  • Best Practice Headcount Planning: Industry-leading planning framework for enterprise-wide headcount planning.
  • Driver-based:  Utilize strategic operational assumptions to match the ‘supply and demands’ on the workforce.
  • Scenario Analysis:  Perform robust ‘what-if’ analysis across numerous economic and operational scenarios.
  • Predictive Analytics:  Leverage predictive algorithms to improve accuracy.
  • Stay Connected:  HR-owned, but still aligned with the corporate financial planning process.

By Mark Rinaldi,

Director of Product Management, Oracle

Sourced from Oracle

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Three DIY SEO Tools for Your Content Marketing Strategy

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By Anna Fox

Is DIY SEO possible?

Yes, and it can improve your blog traffic quite a bit!

And more traffic means more monetization opportunities as well as more potential clients to work with.

So to state the blindingly obvious, increasing the amount of traffic to your blog is a top priority.

By utilizing proper SEO techniques and tools, you can dramatically increase your organic search visibility.

The good news is, SEO is not rocket science. You don’t have to hire an SEO consultant or pay for expensive tools. You can totally master DIY SEO at home and achieve long-term search visibility on a very tight budget.

Disclaimer: I am not an SEO expert, but I have been using the following tools on a regular basis when producing content for clients and myself. So I know what they help with and how to succeed, from my own experience.

What should you be looking for in SEO tools?

Unless you are a professional SEO consultant, the best criteria for choosing SEO software you can focus on are

  • Ease of use (You can understand how a tool works without additional training),
  • Inexpensive and/or free software
  • Reliability! Stay away from false promises and outdated SEO advice such as keyword density metric that can harm your content quality.

1. Google Tools: Monitor Your SEO Health (FREE!)

For the best in free, Google has its own set of optimizing tools for small businesses and content marketers in the form of Google Analytics and Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools).

Google Analytics

Google Analytics focuses solely on traffic driven to sites and offers statistics on what methods work for this, sales, and more. Everything is set up in a smooth dashboard that’s minimalistic and easy to read.

Google Analytics can get quite intimidating when it comes to goal tracking and setting URL parameters, but if you are just starting out, use the rule I went by:

  • If I don’t know what it means, move on.
  • Focus on what matters and learn everything else later

This helped me get started with Google Analytics. Install the script (using one of these plugins). Give it a few days to accumulate the data and focus on this section:

Behavior -> Site Content -> All pages

This will help you identify your articles that are driving more traffic. You can use a filter to drill down to article topics and sections to get a better understanding of your blog most successful pages:

Google AnalyticsSave

Google Search Console

Google Search Console scans your website and alerts you to any errors that you may have made in SEO specific to your website. Linking these two accounts together can also add data specific to your website through Analytics.

My favorite section here is “Performance”. (This can only be found insider new Search Console design. I believe it used to be “Search traffic”)

Here, if you enable the “Average position” tab, you’ll see your best-performing keywords in Google:

Search ConsoleSave

While they may not be the top of the line in SEO Marketing tools, the ease of use is a definite positive. Search Console and Analytics are both compatible with mobile devices as well, allowing you to work on the move.

2. Text Optimizer: Implement Keyword Topic Research and Content Optimization ($60/m)

You’ve probably heard that you need to research and optimize for keywords in order to rank, right?

It’s not simple. You also need to know the topic well.

Fortunately, Google has moved away from matching keywords to content to understand its relevance. And it’s good news for content marketers who want to focus on in-depth, high-quality content.

These days Google understands semantic relationships between words, related concepts and neighboring topics. In other words, Google knows what should be included in a page copy for it to satisfy the user’s query better. Keyword research now includes intent research, synonymous concepts, related terms and neighboring terms.

With that said, put aside your traditional keyword research tools you are using now and give this tool a try.

Topic Research

Text Optimizer is a topic research tool which uses Google search results to give you cues on what needs to be included in a copy for it to rank better.

The tool uses semantic analysis to create topic clusters and help you create better-researched content that Google will like. It can be used to optimize your existing content as well as to create content from scratch.

Let’s see how it works and how it can help:

  • Say you have a general content idea
  • Single out a phrase that best describes the idea
  • Put the phrase in Text Optimizer

Now, select the “Start from scratch” option. The tool will search this phrase in Google and come back with the list of terms and concepts that need to be included in your content:

From scratchSave

Select around 20 of those terms that look like they will fit your future article well, then start working on your article. Here’s what I got for “healthy living”, for example:

textoptimizer topicsSave

The tool also provides “Editorial Suggestions” that you are likely to find quite helpful. Those are popular questions on the topic you are writing about:

QuestionsSave

Once you are done with your content, run the tool again (now choosing the “My text” option). This will show you whether your article is optimized well. Continue tweaking your copy until you have a minimum score of 80. Pay attention to the “Content quality” section for better results:

Well writtenSave

This way, this helpful tool will direct your writing process allowing you to come up with both better-optimized and higher-quality copy.

One word of advice re. this and most other tools that analyze content – including Grammarly:

Sometimes, machines don’t understand nuance. Always make sure that the suggested changes actually look right to the eye.

3. Yoast SEO: Get Your Structured Data and Important SEO Elements in Order (Freemium)

I am a huge fan of Yoast, and you have almost certainly at least heard of them in the past. This plugin for WordPress guides you along the way to SEO excellence. You put in a focus keyword, write a meta description, put the focus keyword in the bulk text and let the plugin analyze how you are doing regarding basic SEO.

It will give you recommendations to further strengthen your SEO in the post, turning green when you have reached the minimum for Google benefits. It will help you improve readability and structure of your text by encouraging you to use shorter sentences and paragraphs, fewer words between subheadings, active voice, etc.

Yoast SEOSave

Yoast also contains a lot of up-to-date sections that help you capture more Google ranking opportunities and optimize for the most recent SEO trends including:

Content blocksSave

Additionally, the plugin comes with an enormous amount of SEO tutorials that guide you through complicated processes, explain SEO terminology and help you optimize your content better.

Bonus DIY SEO Tools

  • Cyfe: This tool is not an SEO tool, but it can be used for monitoring your SEO success easily. Import your most essential stats from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, your rank tracking tool, etc. Cyfe can save you lots of time and turn complicated data into easy-to-understand graphs. It’s a great multi-feature tool, especially if you are not doing SEO 24/7 and want to just keep an eye on your progress without spending hours going from a report to a report
  • Answer the Public: This site is a free tool that provides data for searches on popular search engines like Google and Bing. This can help you streamline the keywords you decide to use in your site. This one is also set up similarly to a search engine itself, and the data is clearly displayed for you on a dashboard. It may be a really simple tool, but it can give you valuable information that sends your ranking up leaps and bounds from where you started. It’s also a great content inspiration tool for FAQ pages, lead magnets and even eBooks.
  • Detailed.com: Do you want to get better at SEO? Detailed sends you two emails a month listing best SEO tricks and techniques. This won’t help you directly in your smaller market. But it will give you insights on what makes these larger companies tick and the strategies that they utilize to stay on top. This can give you an active look at these strategies being utilized without having to fork out the money to see your competitors.

Don’t underestimate the power of basic actionable SEO. By utilizing the DIY SEO tools when optimizing your content, you step out on the right foot and increase your chances of getting found online!

By Anna Fox

Anna Fox is the blogger behind Hire Bloggers, a website helping bloggers to find jobs and monetize their sites.

Sourced from Curatti

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