5 key skill focusses
Analytics ( 33 % but low for everyone.
Make the time to understand it better whatever your level.
Spurious correlations
Digital Strategy
Stop with the new shiny toys / hacks and start focussing on the overall strategy. Have you taken a skils audit yourself? Do you haev the skills needed for your job in 2020? Does your team? If you arent sure make use of the benchmark Skills test. and benchmark yourself- get teammates to do this as well.
Go for clarity! See your target clearly! Hit it untl you hit it.
General Marketing
See a tendency for marketerts to turn their backs on traditional ways to reach an audeince
Digital and social are exciting- but thats where everyone is shouting. You can stand out by going round the back and building deeper engagment.
Ecommerce client saw 300% increase in new customers from one mention on traditional media. this wasnt a one off it happened 4 times over an 8 week period. each time with different media outlets.
Direct mail and digital can work Can in hand.
doing some cunsulancy work for a UK fashion brand we saw a 3X increase in likeyhood to purchase for customers who got direct mail. Combine that with online video marketing and that rose to almost 4X increase in propensity to purchase.
Customers who just got the digital marketing side of things did a slight increase in their propensity to purchase but it barely justified the digital advertising costs taken to reach them all.
becasue do you know what... contrary to what conventiaonal wisdom tells us, we do actually pay quite a lot of attention to non digital things around us! Big brands understand this Smaller brands still need to experiment and learn what might be possible to reach their all important audiences.
See things more holistically- customers are not nety compartmentalised like analytcs reports would have you think. There arent emai customers and PPC customers. here probably arent actually many mobile only customers. I doubnt there are many exclusievly social customers unless you have mastered a shop front on socia media. customers react to which ever channel is easiest for them to reach in the given moment. In digital its often skewed to channels who have a habbit of appeariing handily beneath the customers fat lasy thumbs as they go bout their frantical digital clickstream filled days.
Everyone in your organisation needs a primer on Analytics - what it measures well, how it works and the problems it has with last click attribution modelling which still haunts most o fthe reports often thrust in front of the anaytics novice.
Make use of Googles analytics training
MAke a weekly appointment to learn more about the reports and ways to analyse data
Attend CIM training and develop your skills even more
Learn how to employ annotations in your Google Analytics reports.Start annotating anything sigifivcant that influences those graphs and charts. Any digital or real world events that help explain the changes. I like to see marketers annotate everytime they send any significant emails, annotate any significant rel word events, trade shows, TV or media mentions, Big promotions, even competitor activity if its having a big enough impact.
Usability
Small conversion improvements can make a huge difference without increasing costs. 0.5% conversion rate to 1% conversion rate in an ecommerce store just doubled annual turnover! Similar multiplications can be achieved if you are B2B and focussed on generating leads.
Plug your leaky funnel
Data can point us to the truth though
We dont know what we dont know
Annotate changes as they occur
Continually test and improve your best performing pages!
walk in the shoes of our customer.
that might mean trying out 3 different bits of footware- Mobile, tablet and Desktop/.
Content Marketing
MAke your best performing content better
find top 3 pieces of content and better them by 10 times!
less is more. but go for higher and higher content.
Show potential customers who you are and how you fix their pain points- show dont tell.
TAlk to your customers. Get insight into what they love and what could be better. for every piece of key content you have explore how it scratches your customers itch. Most customers spend their day asking the same question to everything put in front of them ( both digitally and in the real world) " What's in it for me?" Understant that and you can go bout making the answer clearer and stronger. We talk about the promise behind the click. Look at how you are pushing your messages on social and via PPC. Is the promise closely aligned with whats delivered by tht click? If not - work harder and sort it out. You will be rewarded with happier users and increased reach on both PPC and social platforms ( because guess what- social media and search enignes have been specialising in giving their users more of what they want for years. Become a part of that exchange and start winning.
not just for you but make time for the whole team to do this.
Schedule weekly meetings for one person and work your way through all the free training.
Business strategy- marketing strategy then Digital strategy
Dont forget to include other channels which could hep reach your audience.
dont neglect direct mail. I know this wont be a popular message with many people reading this, but seriously ask yourself which channel is busier for your audience- their email inbox or their front doormat? For man years direc mail it was horribly expensive and horribly wasteful. Junkmail is still junk mail. Much of email bad practice simply leavers on that same mistake from our marketing past. but we now have CRM data and can segment our audience in ways traditional marketers could never have dreamed of when Direct mail was the go to brave new world of marketing. We no longer need to spray and pray! There are all sorts of things you might trial and experiment with in a small way to see how well they work. Like any medium its all about how creatively you can reach your audience and get your message to stick. Keep an eye on what others are doing in this space and innovate if you have the opportunity. At the right stage in your buying cycle, targeted physical campaign content can be quite a remarkable thing to recieve