This brings up the issue I wanted to write briefly about, with more to follow later; specifically: What do I do with “Medium Data?” One of the other analysts I work with was having issues with analyzing a data set for a lead management and marketing attribution project and was using spreadsheets with some pretty intense v-lookups. The problem with tackling a “medium data” problem with simple tools like Excel is that you have very little visibility into what you’re doing as you’re doing it and that IT CAN TAKE FOREVER. In his case, his computer was routinely freezing for minutes at a time, leaving him with nothing to look at except the countless rows of data without anything available at a trend level or to provide encouragement that, at a meta level, he was on the right path.

I’ve been using Google Refine and Tableau recently for a lot of the “medium data” analysis I’ve been tasked with completing. Tableau, especially, is a fantastic tool for looking at large data sets because, while it isn’t an exceptional statistical or precision tool, you ALWAYS can see the top-level view of your data. An analyst can save countless hours of unnecessary work, chasing trends that may not exist, by performing a few drag/ drop commands within Tableau and seeing, at a very high level, whether your question is worth asking. That is why, as an exploratory data analysis tool, I’ve been pushing hard for a more widespread Tableau adoption within my organization. Additionally, Google Refine is huge for cleaning up data, filtering on certain elements, and appending data sets. It’s a more precise way to dig into data once you’ve already viewed it at a distance with Tableau.

I’ll certainly be writing more on this over the next few days.

Google Analytics

The first thing a business should make sure to know is how to gauge its effectiveness.  Without a benchmark, you’ll never know the effectiveness of any subsequent marketing efforts or have any way to compare campaigns.  Google Analytics involves a very simple setup process and requires only the most basic knowledge of code (or is built into some themes or WordPress plugins).  With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see demographic and behavioral trending statistics of visitors to your website.  Additionally, Google Analytics can be highly customized and has released new features recently that allow it to compete very well with high-price, enterprise analytics packages like Webtrends or Omniture.

Sprout Social

Social Media has become the people’s marketing platform because of its ease of use and low (actually free) cost.  Sprout Social calls itself a “Social CRM”, which I’ve written a few articles about, but in reality it allows a marketer to perform a number of social media functions with ease.  Using Sprout Social, a social marketer can post to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which are really the only 3 social networks worth a small businesses’ time today.  Also, Sprout Social has great features to monitor anyone mentioning your website on social networks, has click tracking features through an internal URL shortening tool, and allows you to easily find and build lists and contacts with annotated notes.  The contact and list building features, as well as great reporting features, are really what separates Sprout Social from other popular tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.  Sprout Social offers a free version and a very cost-effective package for heavier users.

Genius.com

Genius is the tool on this list that I’ve used the least but probably has the most potential to have the highest impact on your business.  Other very good tools exist in this space, including Mailchimp and Zoho (fulfilling very different functions) but Genius.com is the most like an enterprise version of marketing automation software, having many features but lacking some of the unnecessarily  sophisticated functions of marketing automation systems like Eloqua and Marketo.  With Genius, a marketer can create landing pages, gain new contacts through form submissions, set up automated email marketing campaigns, and manage contacts through a simple CRM.  The effective use of Genius can save your organization countless time sending emails and nurturing contacts but, be forewarned, it is a more complicated marketing approach than what you’d do with many of the other tools on this list.

Google Apps

Google Apps and (if you want to pay a little more), Google Apps for Business is a great way to get enterprise-level collaboration and organization tools for a much discounted cost.  I suppose Google Apps technically is not a marketing tool; however, the ability to have collaboration within your organization through the best free email on the market, real-time Google Docs and Presentations, and internal sites and wikis is absolutely golden for lean-running small businesses.  Google Apps requires a little more setup than some of these other tools but, once you get it set up, you’ll spend more time in it than with any of the others.

Facebook Developers

As Facebook surpasses 800 million users, it is becoming increasingly important for business to be “on” Facebook. Just being “on” Facebook, however, is not an effective use of the tools. Incorporating the tools provided for free by the Facebook platform, a website builder can make their site much more engaging for users and effective for marketers.  Developing for Facebook has become easier as of late, both for applications and for websites; however, you’re still probably going to want some coding experience before diving into this tool.  Anytime you see Facebook signups, logins, images of your friends, or easy sharing features on a website, it’s through Facebook developers.

To be clear, I like the daily deals concept and have been rooting for companies like Groupon since the beginning.  The problem is that it’s being spread WAY too thin and there’s no way for a company to establish a competitive advantage in a market that has almost no barriers to entry.  Business Insider did an interesting piece a few weeks ago when Glenn Beck’s start-up, Markdown.com, was able to sell more NRA memberships in a day than Living Social was able to sell New York Times memberships.

I guess in the end, getting cheap things in my inbox every morning is not something to complain about but, if a company was able to establish a competitive advantage and edge out the competition they could do a few things that no one can seem to implement right now, including:

• Deals tailored to individual interests (i.e. Groupon for Outdoor Enthusiasts or Living Social for Food Lovers)
• Send one email with a strong lineup of deals or keep it to one great deal per list per day.  Currently, daily deals are like MLB in the late early 2000′s (and still today, arguably), where there isn’t enough talent to spread across all the possible teams.  If MLB, with a governing body looking out for this kind of thing, was unable to downsize, then what hope is there for Daily Deals?  The easy answer is capitalism and free market economics but, again, we’re back to that ‘no barrier to entry’ thing.
• Seriously, I can only get so many 50% off massages.

-DM

To clarify, its not that I believe marketers are doing a bad job reaching and engaging their audiences; to the contrary, I actually believe that many are doing very well.  It is my conviction that, ancillary to the performance of an individual or campaign, the actual techniques and practices of marketing are not being approached from a quantitative perspective in which we can continue to improve with each success and learn with each failure, making better marketers and a more effective and accountable space within the scope of business.

For this reason, I’m kicking off Math + Marketing along with my career transition to “Marketing Analytics Specialist” at Red Hat.  While I count my agency experience and hit-the-ground-running quest for marketing knowledge as the sole reason I’m qualified for this position, I truly believe that I’ve found something that most closely aligns my skill set and work passion.  As a bonus, as I mentioned above, marketing analytics in the new world of media is lightly charted territory which, to this point, has been navigated either with trepidation or with false confidence.

I want to throw deceiving metrics like “engagement”, “klout”, SERP rank, pageviews, email signups, cost/ click, etc. out the window and do my part to develop a new collection of meaningful metrics to which marketers can be held accountable.  For decades, this type of quantitative discipline has been applied in financial services, banking, operations, accounting, and actuarial functions, and it is time that marketing get on board.  I hope that you’ll check in to read my blog from time to time, as I’m going to make a concerted effort to track my progress and use this medium as a way to convey my learnings.

Thanks for reading.  More later.

-Daniel

In fully online, eCommerce sales, this process works more seamlessly than with the inclusion of an offline, outbound sales force; however, when used correctly the synergy of sales and marketing can be effective no matter where the final value-add occurs.

Although I don’t have a lot of experience working in purely eCommerce models thus far, the space is extremely attractive from a customer acquisition standpoint because it truly is a combination of sales and marketing. In most B2B or high-margin B2C engagements, ‘leads’ are delivered to the client and depending on the effectiveness or capacity of their outbound sales teams, it’s harder to create direct value and quantify our impact. With eCommerce, though, there is no outbound sales process and its much easier to claim direct value-adds to marketers and be much more proactive in adjusting our strategies dynamically to map activities to the creation of direct, monetary value rather than mid-pipeline leads or unquantifiable social collateral and branding.

Paid media, on the other hand, can work effectively within the eCommerce space or with other B2B or B2C engagements. Display and search marketing are especially attractive from a sales standpoint because the message is very much closer to the end of a sales funnel and leads generated are often highly intent-driven. While it’s true that most organizations haven’t distilled their marketing spend to a cost-per-lead or cost-per-sale model, they are likely to have had experience accounting for marketing spend on a revenue-generated-per-marketing-dollar-spend model. Paid marketing is, intuitively, more heavily skewed toward last-touch attribution than organic and social media and thus fits more readily and comfortably into traditional models. Content marketing is much more high-level and intangible to organizations because it creates value through building a reputation in the vertical, creating and nurturing social connections, and gaining mid-long term wins in the SEO field. With paid media, it’s easier to understand the targeting, both intent-driven or demographic, and the dollars spend versus paid leads metric, while not perfect, is a very relevant KPI. Finally, from a sales and business development perspective, many organizations already have budgets for paid media that may be performing at suboptimal or even unacceptable levels. Improvement in existing spend, rather than creating value from scratch, is easy to quantify because of the inherent and concrete benchmark.

On a side note, as I mentioned above, paid media and eCommerce are highly quantifiable but not perfect. It’s important to understand that only certain purchases, usually not long-term or high-margin b2b or b2c, can be sold with very short sales cycles or with one-off paid media. For other products and purchases, paid media or eCommerce will often serve as the last-touch in an attribution model, with branding, content creation, and lead nurturing fulfilling necessary intermediary points. While nothing in marketing is mathematically perfect, cutting-edge marketing engagements that are contingent upon the bridging of sales and marketing into a quantifiable customer acquisition model creates a new and more business-centric way of looking marketing dollars spent. I’ll be writing a post soon on some more specific ways to create this type of tracking model so check back soon.

Increasing Year-Over-Year Traffic is Making LinkedIn Increasingly Useful

As seen in the graph below of traffic data provided by Quantcast, LinkedIn has seen an immense boost in their daily traffic and, more importantly, has seen an uptick in regular visitors to the site.  As a job search and business networking platform, LinkedIn was a great tool for some people; however, by adding features that encourage return visits like news and real-time updates, the site has been able to maximize its user base and increase the time consumers spend on the site.

Marketers looking to get inbound traffic from LinkedIn should begin working to send messaging not only to Twitter and Facebook, but also to LinkedIn.  In many social management platforms, that simply involves checking an additional box- which I believe is probably worth your time.  Is LinkedIn Useful for Marketers?  It’s looking that way.

The Best Social B2B Demographic for Marketers

One of the largest constraints of social networks is what I call the “low-hanging fruit problem.”  This refers to the fact that social platforms tend to share essentially the same demographic and, frankly, most of the same specific people.  I would say its a safe bet to say that nearly everyone who’s actively using Foursquare is on Twitter, and that nearly all Tweeters have a Facebook page.  Facebook, with its colossal audience base, is escaping this problem- but more on that in another article.  Based on demographics, the question of “Is LinkedIn Useful for Marketers?” is assuredly “yes.”

LinkedIn has a fundamentally different target market than other social networks.  In emphasizing professional development and utility over novely, LinkedIn has built a network of B2B decision-makers that is difficult to find online.  Marketers looking to reach high-ranking people in major organizations (that aren’t marketers or salespeople) needn’t waste their time on Twitter and Facebook but, instead, should actively participate in LinkedIn Groups or on other Linkedin-specific networking options.

Ad Network Targeting to Job, Industry, or Function-specific Targets Answers the Question,”Is LinkedIn Useful for Marketers?”

For any readers who are active in paid media advertising, this header requires almost no explanation.  LinkedIn provides marketers with the ability to target specifically to industries, discrete companies, job functions, and even hierarchical position.  With traditional paid advertising, the question of “Are my leads qualified?” is difficult to answer; however, with this level of granular functionality, you can be assured that upwards of 90% of your leads will fit the bill (there’s always some people that lie on their profiles).

Additionally, I answer the question “Is LinkedIn Useful for Marketers?” by bringing up a unique competitive advantage in LinkedIn’s ad platform that makes it especially useful- the lack of complexity.  Unlike AdWords, Facebook (to some extent), or many display networks, LinkedIn doesn’t seem to evaluate your ads intensely based on CTR or even have an implicit quality score.  Ad Fatigue, also, is less of a problem unless your ads are getting a pitiful CTR for a number of days, in which case they’ll stop serving.  In not having to cater to a multitude of internal rules designed to maximize earnings for the site (i.e. Google Adwords), LinkedIn gives you the freedom to experiment with Ad Copy, extremely small segments, or different landing pages without worrying about being penalized or paying outrageous prices for your clicks.

I hope I’ve made my point that the question “Is LinkedIn Useful for Marketers?” should be answered with a resounding “Maybe!.”  B2C Marketers can expand their demographic reach and market to an increasingly high volume of users but it certainly doesn’t have the power that LinkedIn provides for B2B initiatives.

Read some more articles, comment if you have any questions, and go try marketing on LinkedIn for yourself!

Is LinkedIn Useful for Marketers?

Google AdWords truly is a fascinating platform to learn and a great way to generate leads and convert customers on your website.  Google AdWords, unlike many online advertising platforms is easy to begin with but has a definite depth of knowledge required to become a quality user.  This differentiates AdWords from Facebook or LinkedIn, which make creating a few ads extremely easy but discourage scale by having systems that provide very little room for improvement and are arduous to use with high volumes of spend.  Although I don’t consider myself an AdWords genius by any stretch, I’m going through the official certification courses now and have had the privilege of learning from those with decades of experience and managing sizable budgets on my own accord.

Here is the first of many introductions to some more advanced strategies to drive success in Google AdWords:

Use {UTM} Codes in the URL to Track AdWords Performance

You don’t have to be a professional web designer to use some basic coding that will make your campaign tracking immensely easier.  If you click through on any professionally created Ad on Google AdWords and look at the URL, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.  To show an example, I just clicked on an ad for Progressive Auto Insurance:

[box] http://www.progressive.com/insurance/search/quote-compare-save.aspx?code=8004367760&se=Google&cmp=NC&adgr=(NC-GEN)+-+HT+-+Generic+Insurance&kwd=insurance&srcfrc=true&&mt=e&[/box]

While this may look like a lot of arbitrary letters, &’s, and =’s, I assure you there’s a method to the perceived madness.  Each section, separated by an “&” gives some information about who just clicked through to their ad.  The first few listings are static and thus can say whatever Progressive wants to use to track visitors.  If you’re new to manipulating URL’s in general, remember that anything you put after a “?” doesn’t affect the page destination.  Later in the code, you see Google’s proprietary dynamic UTM codes that will dynamically insert information about the visitor and query.

These include:

Static URL codes for AdWords

*These can be whatever you want*
Medium=*Google
Account=*[YOUR ACCOUNT]
AdGroup=*[YOUR AD GROUP]

Dynamic URL codes for AdWords

Keyword={Keyword}
MatchType={MatchType}
Distribution={IfSearch:Search}{ifContent:Content}
AdID={Creative}
Placement={Placement}

So the finished product, using dynamic and static codes, should look like:

[YOURWEBSITE.COM/YOUR LANDINGPAGE]?Medium=Google&Account=XYZ_Incorporated&AdGroup=NewProducts
&Keyword={Keyword}&MatchType={MatchType}&Distribution={IfSearch:Search}{IfContent:Content}&AdID={Creative}&Placement={Placement}

Make sure you have Google Analytics on the site you’re monitoring, too, as it will be one of the best places to view all your newfound Paid Ad tracking data.  If you have more questions, this is a great article from my friends at Performable that explains, in more detail, UTM codes and tracking.  If you follow all the steps above, get ready to see tremendous changes in your ability to track your AdWords Campaign and Ad Performance.

Most of the time organic and paid media, from a marketing standpoint, are considered to be primordially and principally different, especially among marketers at the far ends of the spectrum- the staunchly social and the stubbornly traditional.  While its true that the past decade has brought unprecedented change to the social aspect of a marketer’s repertoire, I believe that agencies and marketers have turned their backs too quickly on the former crux of their livelihood.  AdWeek today produced a tremendous article on the relationship between advertising and the automotive industry on the fall and rebirth of Detroit.  The advertising colossus built by legendary firms like  WPP and BBDO relied on paid media in the absence of social channels; however, I question whether or not that strategy holds today.

Paid Media Makes Sense Because Organic Media Isn’t Free

Throughout my career at different agencies, I’ve seen enormous successes and failures with regards to buying and converting users through online media buys. While paid ads are mostly considered a nuisance and come from a heritage of sub-professionalism, its impossible to discount their current effect on the online advertising landscape. As content increasingly moves online, expect a fundamental shift in the way that online ads are created and viewed by consumers. Television ads are, if anything, significantly more invasive than sidebar or popup ads but are tolerated and even celebrated for the capacity to entertain viewers. As your television and computer begin to resemble the same device, the advertising dollars that have spurred a creative arms race on your television will have to be reallocated online, with even more potential because of the interactivity of the new medium.

My second headlining point about organic media provides another, probably more unique, point of view than simply the shifting of advertising dollars, creative initiative, and consumer attention online. As anyone who’s ever worked at a digital media agency knows, organic media is not free. The time required to build a social community, interact with its members, curate enough content to gain notoriety, and constantly tweak search engine optimization is far from free. Additionally, even after you get everything right, you’ve created an engaged community for conversation but not always a viable conversion pipeline. Companies with robust social and interactive communities can still struggle to drive dollar value because of a disconnect between the value and message or simply a suboptimal online business model.

Organic Media Makes Sense Because It’s Scalable

Although I’m usually one to argue for what I consider to be the modern-day underdog in this argument (paid media), organic content and conversion solutions provide much greater upside than does paid media. Organic media has been an effective way to spread a message or build brand equity; however, not since the printing press have so many tools been developed in such a short time. Organic channels are still unfledged and significantly more difficult to track, especially for brands that can’t afford $50k+ annual web analytics platforms; however, because the tracking is fallible does not mean the medium is not effective. While some campaigns have gone “viral” over the past few years and gained extreme notoriety, there are countless unheralded examples that have built solid, perpetuating online revenue models without purchasing ad space or paying television production crews.

The power of organic media has significant overlap with its most readily observable downfall- the inability to control its spread. Last week, I heard a marketer in a meeting with the business development team at Three Ships discussing social media and his fear of the platform. Many social gurus would discredit his fear of “wildfires” but those same social gurus are often tweeting from their parent’s basement while this individual is managing the marketing spend for an enormous corporation. Social media and organic content creation is scary. Not scary like paid media in that you can lose a lot of money, but scary in that you can work incessantly for days, weeks, or months and either end up with a hostile and volatile community or one in which consumers simply refuse to interact.

Organic content may have prominent fallacies but its upside is equally viable.  A marketer or agency lucky or talented (probably both) enough to create and nurture a readily available community of brand loyalists, or one that strikes the right chord with search engines and readers alike, will reap tremendous rewards from a brand equity and financial standpoint. While it may be hard to quantify exactly how much time or which interactions led to a social media payday, as long as the money is coming in and you’re building a rock-solid and self-perpetuating online presence, granular tracking is probably the least of your concerns.

Organic vs Paid Media: Can’t They Get Along!?

The simple (and actually only) answer to this question is a resounding: YES!

The biggest mistake a marketer can make is taking a philosophical stance against something, which two many on both sides of the old-school to new-school spectrum are doing against social media and paid media, respectively. To effectively execute a holistic and effective online marketing campaign, one must move their audience from unaware to sold, which is catalyzed by the synergy between organic and paid media.

Anyone who’s worked extensively with social content knows that social engagement is tough to convert and that website visitors don’t always produce website value. Likewise, any adman worth his salt knows that you can’t pick the low-hanging fruit forever and that, no matter how much ad spend or creative firepower you control, converting cold leads is always going to be expensive and arduous.

[box]

Detroit City Limits A new generation of agencies is striving to redefine the auto industry By James Cooper, Noreen O’Leary

In the first six weeks after Chrysler launched its “Imported From Detroit” commercial on the Super Bowl, the Wieden + Kennedy spot generated nearly 10 million views on YouTube alone. Never mind that it was made by a Portland, Ore., agency for a company run by Italian Fiat executives who have been moving Chrysler’s manufacturing base to Mexico. The original two-minute commercial struck a patriotic chord, offering a defiant response to the city’s—and its eponymous industry’s—demonized image in popular media.[/box]

Social Media Creates Brand Advocates

from: www.marketingcharts.com

Retailers can use social media to turn consumers who have had a negative experience with their brand into brand advocates, according to [pdf] a new report from RightNow and Harris Interactive. Data from “The Retail Consumer Report” indicates 68% of US consumers who posted a complaint or negative review of a holiday shopping experience during the 2010 holiday season were contacted by the retailer. Read more.

What is the Best Geolocation App?

Countless Applications exist to allow users to plot their location, objective to locational data and relative to friends; however, I STILL have yet to see one that presents a value proposition to consumers. “Checkin-in” at a place requires time (albeit minimal) and, unless you’re the mayor or happen to have a particularly robust geolocation community that can alert you of nearby friends you many be unaware of, there is little more than an initial novelty to the current platforms that I’ve seen.

Anyone who has read my blog knows that I’m a huge opponent of the “bright shiny things” play for marketers. While this may work for a certain amount of time, there has to be value in an idea that incites a customer- whether it is through something tangible, a feeling, entertainment, or utility. Geolocation can provide nominal entertainment but, if you’re like me, you’re ready to find more use and are struggling to do so.

Geolocation undoubtedly provides value to marketers, as I’ve talked about in a previous article and is explained well in this video.:
[youtube hECW4A4_KOw 600 alt="best Geolocation App"]

So, everyone, which Geolocation App is best and offers a value proposition to users?