[Marketing Analytics] Introduction to Marketing Analytics

Marketing Analytics: Introduction to Marketing Analytics

Digital marketing strategies can often seem like a maze of tracking tools and algorithms, overwhelming at first for those not specialized in their use. Where do we start? How can we capture all of this digital data and use it as an overall marketing lever to target a larger group of potential readers? How can we track all of the data on our website, social media and marketing campaigns to see where we are going right and wrong? Who can help us with all of this?

First of all, you will need to separate your data collection into three different sections: owned media, paid media, and earned media. Your owned media is your website, your paid media is the ads and campaigns that you spend money on, and your earned media is any interaction or mentions you garner through social media. Instead of relying only on the tracking tools supplied by your provider, you should consider using several tools combined together, including Google Analytics which is the one tool we highly recommend. This way you can combine and compare data to see what campaigns are working and where you need to focus your marketing targets on in the future. Your tracking tools will help you determine your goals and objectives, a main part of your overall marketing strategy.

Before you can even start to understand how to interpret all of the data that you collate, it is important to understand how tracking works. Through the aid of cookies and tracking pixels, every single action made on every single web page is recorded and stored. This means that every page you access, how much time you spend on a page, which link you clicked through to access that page, where you come from, what your demographic is, if you clicked through to a purchase, or if you dropped off at the first ad, etc. is all stored, collated, and used for different purposes. This is what allows websites such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook to personalize the ads that appear on your page. You thought it was a little strange that a fruit juice ad appeared on Facebook a few hours after you typed a status about juice? Nothing strange about it at all! It was all digital marketing analytics doing its job!

Your main concern is to understand on a high level how these tracking tools work and then make them work for you.

Let’s take a step back and look at what you want marketing analytics to do for you. You can measure performance, reports, optimization, and goal conversion just to name a few items. Your goals are to sell more of your work and to grow your fan base, right? Well, you can use all of you tracking media to help you reach these goals. Google Analytics actually allows you to enable different types of goals within your set-up, which will then allow you to quantify goal conversion rates. You can actually configure your set-up to not only track goals, but to also analyze the journey to each conversion. This will help you see what marketing tactics are helping you and which ones aren’t. For example, you may find that you have sold quite a few copies of your book via an article that keeps getting retweeted on Twitter, but that your advertising campaign on Facebook is falling flat.

You can also use data to create easy-to-read business and customer insight, which will definitely help you narrow down your marketing strategies. Google Analytics will allow you to create what we call conversion funnels. Basically, you are looking to funnel users or visitors down towards a certain outcome, which, depending on your goal, could be a sale, a new sign-up on your mailing list, or a new share of your website info. So, your funnels may be of different shapes and sizes, but they should be optimized correctly to ensure minimum drop off along the way and maximum conversion. Funnels allow you to track visitor steps to see where there are issues that need to be fixed. For example, if people are dropping off right before the payment area, leaving a full shopping cart behind, your funnel will show you exactly where the issue is so that you can optimize it rather than changing the entire customer journey.

Analytics are a veritable goldmine of information that can really help you optimize and manage your business processes to suit your objectives. We have just scratched the surface of what they can do for you in this article.

In the next series of 3 posts, we will delve deeper into marketing analytics and cover sources, segmentation, and testing.

-Marquina

Growth Hacking Tip #3: Provide a secondary ‘Call to Action’ (CTA) on your Thank You Page

Strike while the iron is hot and prompt your newly converted leads with a secondary CTA on the Thank You Page of your lead generation campaigns. For example, if readers have just downloaded your first book, add a link on the Thank You Page that sends them to your Author Page on Amazon including your other titles.

Separately, I’d like to share a blog post that has helped shape the marketing for my upcoming book. It’s called Exactly how I self-published my book, sold 180,000 copies, and nearly doubled my revenue. The section that I found most helpful is copy/pasted below:

Find “cousin” books and reverse engineer bloggers

“The typical approach of most publishing houses to sending out advance reader copies of the book is that the marketing or PR department sends out a standard email to a vast list of bloggers and podcasters and influencers, offering to send them a copy. I know, because I get these daily. These appeals are somehow breathless and bland at once. If you say “yes” to the book, they kindly send you a copy and then hope somewhere down the line you read it and mention it somehow.

This strikes me as a huge waste of time and effort. The outreach is not thoughtful or targeted. Most of the time, there’s no follow-up to those who’ve received a copy of the book.

We decided to be more thoughtful with our time and money. We decided to find the people who might actually want to write about our book.

Step one was to identify a book that was similar but different from mine, a “cousin” book, and one which had been a big success. I started with Dan Pink’s Drive. Super smart, and it seemed to get a ton of good press. Similar to mine, but not quite a one-for-one comparison.

I then jumped onto Guru.com and hired a researcher. Her task? To find the top-ranked 50 articles or reviews aboutDrive, the name of the reviewer, and their contact details (email and/or Twitter).

When we had that information, we then wrote to each one, referencing the article they’d written, saying that The Coaching Habit might be of interest to them, telling them that Dan Pink had written a nice blurb and offering to send the book to them.

We then followed up. And followed up. And followed up. (You can see how we tried to strike a pleasant-yet-persistent tone in the templates here.) Nicely, of course. There was no obligation for the person to read the book or write about it. But I wanted to give us every chance of having the book considered — and them, every chance to consider it. About 30 percent of those who got a copy of the book generated some sort of press component (podcast, article, social media mention, review).

This was a hit. And when something works, do more of it. Using a combination of scanning the Amazon business bestseller list and the fact that I read a lot to find good guests for the podcast, we identified possibilities. We followed up with Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, Charles Duhigg’s Power of Habit and Susan Cain’s Quiet. Then Marshall Goldsmith’s Triggers, Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup and, finally, Adam Grant’s Give and Take. As a strategy, this worked better when the book was recent and closely aligned (Duhigg’s Habit worked particularly well, as it ticked both those boxes).

Through this strategy, we sent out more than 450 copies to people who had actually asked for the book and knew why we were sending it to them. And because we had the book ready to send five months before its launch, it meant we were able to get some wonderful press, for example with Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, Huffington Post, the Globe and Mail and Fast Company.

Here are some of the hard numbers:

• 1,000+ emails sent (none sent in bulk).
• 40 percent of people emailed asked for a copy of the book.
• 450-plus copies of the book sent.
• 30 percent of those who got a copy of the book generated some sort of press component (podcast, article, social media mention, review).

Requirements: A simple system to track and chase. Someone on the team who’s willing to follow up and follow up and follow up and not get discouraged.

Cost: $5–$10 per book sent out (book + postage); research @ $2 per name. Team member following up at $15–$20 per hour.”

You can click here to read the full article.

Wishing you the best this week as you set up your google analytics goals, add the CTA growth hacking tip, and reverse engineer bloggers to review your next book.

Best,

Marquina

Photo of The Week: In Boston, MA at a park near my sister-in-law’s home.

Meal of The Week: Easter desserts made by my mother-in-law. Homemade cream puffs and strawberry puffs, dove chocolate ‘birds’ nests’ with jelly belly jellybeans, and orange zest brownies. Mmm!

Originally published at Authorpreneur Launch.