Content Marketing: Another Piece to the Digital Marketing Puzzle

Bloggers can blog all day long if they want to and make thousands upon thousands of posts, but if the content isn’t right, it’s basically all for nothing. In order for your blog and your posts to get more and more views, you need to be sure that your content is aimed for the right audience (or audience you hope to have in the future), is engaging for the reader, and is promoted in an effective way in order to help awareness. This idea doesn’t solely apply to writing blogs, and can be applied to business efforts with a new product, even to the way you present yourself to others. Making sure you have not just good, but great content, can be broken down into 5 steps:

1. Understand Your Audience: It’s extremely important that before you even begin writing your content, you have a clear understanding of who your audience currently is (if you even have one), and who you want your future audience to be. It’s also important to consider people who might find your content to be useful to them or insightful. To do this, you can create a “buyer persona.” Or in other words, an imaginary audience you wish to have, and determine the desired demographics/psychographics they will have. Another way to develop your buyer persona is through interviewing prospective viewers/buyers and/or the sales team, evaluating your web analytics reports (Google Analytics is a great tool to implement to your company or blog etc.), use keywords to research what your possibly viewer is searching for, and keep an eye on social media activities.
2. Map the Content to the Sales Cycle: In the short version of the business sales cycle, there must be awareness, an evaluation, and finally a purchase. At the awareness stage, your main goal is to drive traffic towards your content and help create awareness of your product that wasn’t there before. Promotion of your brand is key in this stage. Next, is the evaluation. Customers are already aware that your brand exists. They may not be ready to purchase just yet, but they need to know that your brand is exactly what they are searching for. Lastly, is the purchase. With any business and content marketing strategies, the purchase and sale is ultimately the main goal. The customer has already become aware, gone through their evaluation process, and now the content needs to help them make the decision that your brand is better than your competitors.
3. Create the Content: The most valued types of content consist of research reports & studies, technical & data sheets, analyst intelligence & insight, white papers, and articles on trade publishing sites (in that order). The length of your content is just as important. In this case, the longer the better – 2,000 or more words to be exact. Short posts don’t drive enough traffic and don’t add enough value to your company, or prove that your time is being well spent. There have even been studies done that show the more you write, the more your posts will be shared over other media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. This can even be connected to inbound marketing efforts, because the more your content is shared and promoted the less outbound marketing efforts need to take place.
4. Promote your Content: Promotion is where the marketing comes into play with this method. It doesn’t matter how amazing, insightful, and down right spectacular your content is. If you’re not promoting it, no one is ever going to see it, and you just wasted a few hours of your valuable time! It’s important that you link your content to your social media sites (like I’ve done with my twitter account and this blog). Everyone and their mother is on social media these days, and this is probably the best place to promote your content. Beyond social media, you can promote your content through a Google AdWords campaign or through email marketing campaigns.
5. Measure and Analyze: I’m personally guilty of not following through with this step. It’s so, so, so important to measure how well your content is doing and check out the progress you’ve made over time. I’m stuck in the habit of clicking publish, and never checking back to see my page views etc. Luckily, thanks to my new certification in Google Analytics, I know exactly how to track some of the most important measures. Components you might consider measuring are number of page views, what posts are being shared the most as well as which types of content are being shared, what keywords are triggering views, and how many leads your content generates. When you are able to understand these measures and analyze them, you’re able to create MUCH better content, because you know exactly what your viewer/customer is doing while on your blog.

On a business level, blogging is an extremely useful tactic to help customers learn and become aware of new products that might be launching, things your business is doing around the community, and overall learn more about what it is your company does and hopes to do in the future. Blogging is a key component to any business in todays society. Everyone is using the internet and many people have their own blogs for personal use. Companies must stick with the times and adapt to the media habits of their current and potential customers. The main focus of a blog for a business is to attract visits, create a lead, and hopefully convert them into an actual customer. The more posts and indexed pages your business has, the more likely it is that your blog will be found in an online search! With engaging content, this will hopefully open up opportunities for viewers to want to learn more, read other blog posts, and even decide to go to your company website or store and make a purchase.

HubSpot Academy emphasizes that one of the fundamentals of blogging is to generate inbound links. They describe it as votes. This metaphor works because if a company doesn’t create blog content, they can’t gain awareness. Just as if a president doesn’t run their campaign, no one knows what they stand for, therefore can’t receive any votes. That’s my interpretation of the metaphor anyways! Another important factor of blogging is that if you help a client, customer, or viewer solve the problem they were searching about in the first place, they are so much more likely to come back to you in the future! Closing a deal is a great accomplishment in the first place, but creating a lifetime customer? Priceless. The positive impacts of blogging for a business are endless. One of these impacts is that 82% of marketers that blogged for their companies daily reported positive ROI for their inbound marketing efforts.

Some other really important tips for content marketing and writing a blog are:

• Stay relevant!! You don’t want to be publishing information that’s out-of-date. This just makes yourself and your company seem inadequate and you’re guaranteed to lose the trust of potential customers.
• Another way to promote your blog is to add it to your business card, resume, and LinkedIn profile
• In order to be searchable, make sure you optimize your keywords throughout your blog
• Add relevant links, sources, and outside opinions to your blog to add credibility and support what you’re saying
• Inbound marketing efforts would be nothing without your great content marketing!
• HubSpot suggests the 80/20 Rule: create mainly awareness and consideration stage content

Here are some Cold, Hard Content Marketing Facts, outlining some statistics that show the development of content and inbound marketing, and where it’s headed in the years to come. To follow, here are 30 Genius Content Marketing Examples of 2014 (something to give you some inspiration for your own content marketing!)

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, you’ll notice some of my previous posts were about inbound marketing, and the power that web analytics has for your company. Also, you’ll notice I mentioned both of these marketing components in this very blog post. They all go hand in hand with one another. Without the amazing content, you can’t have successful inbound marketing – and no way for analytics to tell you what should and shouldn’t change regarding your blog and other content.

Stay tuned for next weeks topic – Social Media – as it pertains greatly to the aforementioned marketing tactics as well! You can’t have just one piece to the puzzle… to be successful at digital marketing you need to have them all!

Take Out the Guesswork with A/B Testing

Ever wonder what it is about your webpage that could be preventing users from making a sale, or increasing your bounce rate? This is surely a problem that every business owner with a website must face at some point. Now have you ever wondered if there’s a way to fix that problem? With A/B testing, there will never again be a doubt about which style/format/colors/buttons, etc. you should have on your website. A/B testing can help all business owners reach their end goals – to make a profit. This method takes out all of the guesswork, and you can see first hand which version of your webpage will get the best response out of users.

So, what exactly even is A/B testing? Its the best way to determine which versions of your website will produce the best results from your customers. It involves having one version of a webpage (“A”), the “control,” and stacking it up against a second version of that same webpage (“B”), the “variation,” and a specific goal you want to achieve. This way of testing results in hard data and evidence regarding which version of the webpage got you closer to your goal.

Here’s an example of a situation that A/B testing is perfect for. Suppose you determine your main goal to be increasing the number of downloads from your webpage. The “download” button should be then the main focus for your testing. In version A, you would leave the page how it is, and keep it the standard version. In version B, the variation, you might make the button larger, a different color, or different font/size in order to hopefully draw more attention to it. Now, the A/B testing is put in place and website visitors are equally distributed among version A and version B. There will then be measurements of how many people saw each variation, and how many of them actually clicked the download button. When the data collected becomes statistically significant, then you’ll be able to see which webpage is the winner!

The term HiPPO was created by Microsoft and stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Basically what this means, and what it has to do with A/B testing, is that the opinions of the customer are what’s important – not just the HiPPO’s. For companies to strive, they need to listen to their consumer’s feedback and act/respond accordingly. A/B testing is the exact way to eliminate the HiPPO and see exactly what customers respond to on your webpage instead of following the opinion of whoever is in charge.

Amelia Showalter has had plenty of experience with A/B testing. She and her team worked on the Obama 2012 campaign and did intensive testing on which emails would generate the most donations. To keep it simple, anyone who shared an address with the campaign would the get messages from Barack Obama with subject lines that were tested to trigger donations. Amelia and her team predicted which subject lines would produce the highest amount of donations and what that actual number would be, as well as testing the messages themselves and even the different formatting variations of each email. On some subject lines and emails, there would be up to 18 different variations for testing before the winner would be chosen and the email blasted out! Clearly there were countless tests that had to be run, but in the end it proved to all be worth it. Amelia and her team’s findings were that the uglier the message looked, the more money it would raise in donations! Clearly something they were surprised about. Even the use of mild profanity was a hit for some time.

I believe the biggest take away from the Obama 2012 campaign is that your predictions are probably (more often than not) wrong. It’s so very crucial to listen to the customer and users instead of stubbornly only following your instinct. Amelia herself mentioned in the Businessweek article just how shocked she was that her predictions were always off. She never would have thought that the uglier everything looked, the better response it would get out of the viewers. Without A/B testing, she and her team never would have come to the conclusions that they did.

I found another blog that is A Beginner’s Guide to AB Testing, and explains how you need to make sure you plan correctly for your testing and make sure it matches with the goal you want to achieve through it. There are also A/B Testing Mistakes, such as random testing, that you want to avoid. And here are 5 companies that have successfully applied the A/B testing method, as well as their conversion rate results.

Inbound Marketing: Get With It or Get Lost

Why spend excessive amounts of money on advertising when some money could be saved with a specific strategy? I think anyone who knows what money is is in favor of saving it – and for marketers, inbound marketing is that specific strategy. It’s a tactful method that involves customers coming to YOU – instead of you going out of your way to grab the attention of potential customers. By combining inbound and outbound marketing efforts, a company can “see bottom-line results” according to an e-book written by the company Marketo. This article explains how, when done right, inbound marketing succeeds when traditional marketing efforts fail. Marketing is in the digital era along with the rest of the world, therefore the main focus of inbound marketing centers around creating unique content that is searchable, and will drive potential customers to you! The use of social media is key with this idea, because the more your content is able to be searched and shared via Facebook, Twitter, and other websites, the more publicity your blogs, press releases, videos, etc. will get.

Search Engine Optimization is an extremely important tactic that will help your inbound marketing efforts. You know those first pages and links that show up in your google search? Those companies are using SEO, and it’s working for them. When your content is ranked close to the top in a search, it means you’re using the right keywords that your potential customers are looking for – thus driving them straight to you.

Marketo makes sure to mention how inbound marketing can go wrong:

• Leads can be in high volume at first but dwindle over time.
• People might not know you are searchable in the first place
• People might know you’re a company, but have no idea what it is you do
• The inbound marketing efforts might just not be enough to break past the leading companies for a specific search

Market also explains how a successful use of the Inbound Marketing Multiplier has 3 components:

• Change Brand Recognition & Business: the more your content gets found and shared, the more people will recognize your brand and company, therefore they could potentially turn into a future customer!
• Make Prospects Speak your Language: by integrating a consistent language throughout all of your promotional marketing materials, customers will pick up on this language and use those words to search for your brand
• Capture your Target Market: this component does exactly what it says! And it’s achievable through both inbound and outbound marketing.

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the founders of HubSpot, can also be considered the founders of the term “inbound marketing.” HubSpot was the first company to quickly adapt to the ways of Web 2.0 and was “…considered a thought leader,” stated in the Harvard Business School case titled HubSpot: Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0. In 2011, it became apparent that if a company was resistant to adapting to the new digital ways of the world, they would imminently suffer the consequences. HubSpot and the founders were ahead of the curve and through implementing inbound marketing, they realized there were effective ways to actually pull customers to you, instead of pushing your products and/or services at them.

The HBS case emphasizes that for inbound marketing to be effective, you need to have compelling content. This is probably the most important component. If your material is lacking, no one will care to share it, and your brand and business recognition is going to remain low. Clearly that’s not the objective of any company. Therefore, having creative, unique, and memorable content is going to be what gets your blog etc. passed around through various social media sites, and therefore into the minds of your future customers. Another important component to inbound marketing stated in the HBS case is that your content must be easy to find. If you aren’t searchable, then what’s the point of your inbound marketing efforts? They will all have been for nothing if you can’t even be found. HubSpot is the company that created inbound marketing and since then, other companies have adapted to the new ways of digital marketing.

In an article written by David Klein, titled 5 Companies With Inbound Marketing Strategies That Work, he shares some insight into how 5 different companies have used inbound marketing and their success. The companies he lists include Salesforce, Cisco, Dell, GE, and Starbucks. Each of these 5 companies uses inbound marketing in their own way that works specific to their company, proving this method of marketing has many different functions for a business. It would be near impossible to argue that inbound marketing would not help a company.

So, back to my original question. Why spend all of your advertising money strictly on outbound marketing efforts? The answer is you shouldn’t. Inbound marketing is the digital trend and it would be tough to find a company that decides against this strategy.

Google Analytics Platform Fundamentals

Google Analytics requires more than just data to work and provide it’s users with an output to analyze… it has 4 components that all work together in order to give Google Analytics users the most “bang for their buck,” if you will. These 4 components are collection, processing, configuration, and reporting. I will discuss why each of these factors are important to making Google Analytics what it is!

First, there is collection. This part of the platform requires you to add Google Analytics coding to your website, mobile app, or other device – this is how GA is able to collect data that is specifically useful to you because you will tell it which interactions to pay attention to and what data to actually collect. Depending which digital environment you want to collect information from, you will either use Java Script or an SDK (software development kit), but both essentially do the same thing, just for different media outlets. GA can record all activity from a user on your website or mobile app and will store this activity as “hits.” Then, the information is sent to Google Analytics for the next steps…

Processing and configuration, steps 2 and 3, go hand in hand with Google Analytics. Processing is taking those hits that were created in the first step, and transforming them based on the settings that you have specified in your configuration. Through your configurations, you can set filters. For example, you can filter out all data and hits gathered from employees (recommended), and that way the data you receive will only be from potential customers. Something very important to know is that when your data has been processed, it’s no longer able to be changed.

The fourth step is reporting. This is where all of the configured and processed data that has been gathered eventually goes, giving GA users the final report and data visualizations. The report is shown as columns of data that first contain values of a dimension with the corresponding metrics in the following columns. When requested, data can be retrieved almost immediately!

Google Analytics uses a data model made up of users, sessions, and interactions, to organize the data collected. The user is the visitor to the website, a session is the time they spent on the website, and an interaction is what the user does during their session. What I find amazing about Google Analytics and this data model is that they can recognize returning users from their multiple sessions over time. This is the same as restaurants recognizing regular customers.

Some things that I found interesting:

• On a mobile device, when a user uninstalls an app, the SDK deletes that users anonymous identifier. If the user reinstalls the application, they are given a new identifier and are then seen as a new user, instead of a returning user. I feel like this could create duplicated data even though it’s emphasized how the GA data and reports aren’t affected.
• Google Analytics users are able to track the same user over multiple devices by assigning the same identifying number to each of those devices, rather than a new number for each device.

This blog helped me gain a better understanding of how Google Analytics works for mobile devices. It explains the specific actions taken when you’re on your GA page to find when a user is using a mobile device rather than a computer website, and specified the differences between the “Overview Report” and the “Devices Report.” Mobile optimization is the future of marketing and I believe it’s been proven time and time again that companies who use mobile optimization whether it be through an app or mobile version of their website, have noticed the difference in hits and sales.

Google Analytics can help any and every company find the information they are looking for through the easy 4 step fundamentals that make up the Google Analytics Platform. My real question is why are some companies still choosing NOT to use Google Analytics?

Web Analytics – The Present & Future of Digital Marketing

In just about one week I’ll be taking my test to get certified in Google Analytics, and I won’t even undermine the fact that I’m completely nervous about it. The only things I’ve heard about the GAIQ exam are that it’s intense, long, and daunting, but completely worth it. The importance of being certified in Google Analytics shouldn’t be underestimated, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity I have to become certified and add such an accomplishment to my resume. Not only do I want to pass the GAIQ exam, I want to be able to say I mastered it. This certification is a specific one that I believe will set me apart from other candidates during my internship search for this upcoming summer, and my post-graduation job search as well.

Web Analytics is not only collecting, measuring and analyzing web data, but it’s being able to do something important with that information found. For marketing, it’s the perfect way to provide full integration and understand just where your target market’s media habits are. It also allows businesses to measure the effectiveness of their websites and other media outlets. While reading The Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q2 2014 written by James McCormick, I learned that there is now a trend of much more emphasis on businesses using web analytics and not only the technical, IT department of a company.  For marketing specifically, it holds true that web analytics is where the digital era is at, and any company that implements this practice is ahead of the rest. According to this article, there are 4 core functionality categories that are used to differentiate different Web Analytics Vendors. These include data management and availability, reporting and analysis functionality, integration support, and services and support; each with their own evaluation questions/criteria that should be considered. In James McCormick’s article, he explains evaluation process used to find the leading Web Analytics vendors as well as the outcomes. The 75 components that made up the evaluation criteria can be categorized into three groups

• Current Offerings (data handling; metrics, dimensions, & correlations; reporting and analysis; application usability and administration; integration; and service & support)
• Strategy (how well each vendor is positioned for success given their strategies)
• Market Presence (evaluation of financial strength, client base, & employee base)

In the final assessment, only 6 vendors were left: Adobe, AT Internet, Google, IBM, SAS Institute, and Webtrends. Of these 6, McCormick explains how each of them possessed the following

• A significant base of enterprise-class clients
• A healthy, sizable business
• Invested in the future success of the product

The data showed Adobe, AT Internet, IBM and Webtrends as being the leaders of Web Analytics. Google Analytics is able to offer a more competitive option while SAS Institute offers Analytics for existing customers.

So… with all of these options, why Google Analytics? It’s simple. Not only does Google Analytics integrate the full picture across different sources of media content, but also different media sources, such as differentiating between a tablet and a smartphone. GA can help a company break down the path their consumers take on their way to a purchase, as well as the device(s) used to get there. This can help a company decide whether their presence in one area is lacking, or if it’s just right across the board. Google Analytics also offers a feature called In-Page Analytics. This tool is useful for visually understanding how customers interact with a businesses web page. A business can then learn what each customer likes, and tailor their marketing strategies to get the most out of their media and spending. There are endless routes a customer could take to eventually make a purchase, and Google Analytics helps you figure out just what it was that made them think “Yep! I’m buying it!”

Through my own research, I found that 67% of Forbes 500 Companies used Google Analytics as of 2014. The vendors that followed are Adobe, Webtrends, IBM, and Other. In 2014, IBM had a 42.9% decrease in its use among Forbes 500 Companies. Google Analytics has been on the rise for the last few years and it doesn’t look like that will be slowing down anytime soon! All the more reason I’m excited about being GA certified – those are the kinds of bragging rights I’m looking for 🙂

Don’t just take my word for it – check out these other articles that helped give me an even better understanding of just how important and useful Google Analytics really is!

Measuring the Impact of Google Analytics

Google Analytics Success Stories

How Many Websites Use Google Analytics?

Abby Heintz – Newbie to the World of Blogging

My name is Abby Heintz; a 21 year old Marketing Major attending Western Washington University. I enjoy exploring Bellingham and all the beauty it has to offer, however sincerely miss my hometown of Sammamish, WA. I look forward to returning there after I graduate in the Fall of 2015. I’m an avid cat lover (high potential of being a future cat lady), enjoy dancing and training in many different styles, and consider health and fitness to be a priority in my life. I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason even if we can’t see the reason right away, and music is the best therapy for anything.

I’m very excited to take digital marketing this Spring, and look forward to what I will learn, along with the crucial certifications I will receive. Not only will I be able to build my resume throughout the next 3 months, but I will learn how to make myself more marketable for a future internship and future employers. I want to be able to stand out in a stack of applications and resumes, and I believe the things I will learn in this course will help me get closer to achieving that.

During the course of this next quarter, I’d like to learn more about ALL the different types of digital marketing. The first thing that comes to mind is social media marketing, and then email marketing; I know there is a vast world to digital marketing that I just haven’t had the proper opportunity to understand yet. Digital marketing is much more than creating a Facebook page and sending an email, so I’m interested in learning other ways to digitally market and advertise.

While reading the article, Knowledge and Skill Requirements for Marketing Jobs in the 21st Century, it was upsetting to see the research of how there were serious differences in what students in marketing were learning in school, versus what was actually practiced in the workplace. Before, marketing students were never taught how to acquire quantitative analytical skills and learn database marketing – both of which were crucial for a real marketing job. Techniques used for internet marketing are constantly changing, therefore the skills people have to work with these techniques must be changing and adapting as well – and I believe that’s something extremely important to learn in class, and in the real world. I found it very interesting how knowing the Microsoft Office Suite was only of the most importance to entry level jobs, and least importance to higher level jobs – perhaps because the higher level jobs assume someone else can do that work for them? Just my own theory. What I personally liked seeing, is that all of the marketing aspects that were surveyed (marketing research, promotions/advertising, selling, internet marketing etc.) were at roughly the same level of importance throughout all levels of a job. This means that not only will they be important for me to get a job in the first place, but they’ll remain an important aspect of my career throughout any level I happen to be in – meaning these are long term skills.

After reading the Marketing Forecast article, it got me very excited for where the future of marketing is headed, and it seems to be in the right direction. Advertising expenditure is moving more towards the internet and now mobile media – more than ever before, and it makes me appreciate that I’ve grown up using this technology from a young age. People my age have an advantage, I believe, when it comes to handling these technologies and understanding the ways in which you can grab someones attention through different media outlets. I used to believe that email was going to become a technology of the past, however as I get older I realize how more and more important it has become, and I think it will stay that way. Email connects everything together with internet marketing.

Lastly, while reading Digital Marketing Talent, I was surprised to see that the entire point of the article is to emphasize the gap between the skills employers want their employees to have regarding digital marketing, and the skills their current employees actually have. Analytics is considered to be the most important talent for applicants to have, while it also has the biggest talent gap of 37%. This is another reason I’m extremely glad I’ll be given the opportunity to become Google Analytics certified! Prospective employees who can fill that gap and make the 37% shrink will be the more hirable candidates. I found that to be something extremely important that the article shared.

All in all, I believe I am looking forward to this specific class the most out of all my other marketing courses. This class is the one that will make me a hirable candidate, and teach me very important skills that all employers will be searching for!