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There are many metrics that are easy to measure when it comes to content marketing: pageviews, time on site, bounce rate, etc. But when it comes to lead generation, proving attribution and ROI on your content is tough. And we’re not talking about overcooked beef tough. What we’re talking about here is more like bringing Matt Damon home from Mars tough.
But fear not – there’s a readily available tool in your marketing toolbox right now that can help you track attribution from your content easily, quickly, and with actionable results!
What I’m talking about is a powerful, but often underused tool in Google Analytics called Assisted Conversions.
So hold on tight, it’s about to get attribution-y in here....
Lead generation might be a top goal for B2B marketers in 2015, but social media isn’t where they’re expecting to bring in qualified prospects, according to a new BrightTalk report.
In fact, social media and print advertising ranked the lowest on a list of 15 different lead generation tactics. A full 30 percent said these are ineffective lead gen tools and just 12 percent said they’re highly successful. On the contrary, email marketing was cited as the top tool, with 55 respondents saying it’s effective.
In an era when 7 out of 10 people utilize social media (and the average social media user is active 2 hours and 25 minutes daily), this is unsettling data. Marketers who consider social media ineffective for lead gen need to reconsider their current strategies and revamp what they’re doing to both promote the brand and nurture people to take the next step to learn more....
I can’t justify spending more than 6 hours a week on social media—the ROI just isn’t good enough.
And yet, I still utilize social media to drive traffic to my blog posts and guest posts. I just don’t spend more time than necessary.
In this post, I’m going to share with you 6 different ways you can save time on social media so that you can focus on more important parts of your business....
How many benefits of social marketing can you think of?
Social media can be used in so many ways – to develop your brand, increase SEO rankings, distribute content, acquire leads, and more. While many blogs talk about these benefits, there are very few that attempt to outline the “big picture” of social media or a comprehensive list of its benefits.
I decided to take a stab at it and ended up with 75 benefits of social media marketing. Below is an infographic with a compiled list of benefits. Check it out and see which benefits your brand is potentially missing on social media....
There are so many metrics that can be measured in social media, that sometimes it can be overwhelming to narrow it down to something bite-sized, and find a good measure of success. Since social media also touches everything from attracting prospects to delighting customers in the buyer’s journey, figuring out what metrics to report on can be a challenge.
In this post, I will break down the metrics we observe at HubSpot, how we define success, and how we make that decision each month. And the best part: we'll wrap up with how to actually measure those metrics at HubSpot....
Where do you get most of your traffic from?
Is it from Google searches, referrals from other websites, social media or somewhere else?Each form of traffic is relevant and useful.
But…. today, let’s focus on how to increase website traffic from social media....
Suspicious Web traffic in the U.S. rose 36% sequentially in the third quarter of 2014, and bot traffic grew by 35%. Data released Friday identifies 55% of the traffic on retail sites as suspicious with 34% of traffic confirmed as bot. The data defines "suspicious" as non-human behavior.
U.S. retailers could waste about $4.6 billion of eMarketer's projected $11 billion spent on digital advertising this year on bot traffic fraud, estimates Solve Media. The company's latest Quarterly Bot Traffic Market Advisory focuses on U.S. retailers.
Solve Media CEO Ari Jacoby believes 2015 will become the year of verified human audiences. Media companies are "demanding to purchase only human ad traffic and viewable ads."
Brands waste millions of dollars annually. If Bloomingdale's spends $200 million annual in digital, "we estimate $68 million of that could be wasted on bot traffic," estimates Jacoby.....
In the past few years, social has gone from being a consumer phenomenon to an enterprise opportunity. But many companies are struggling with how to implement strategies and realize ROI from their social investments.
The new IBM Center for Applied Insights study, “Charting the social universe: Social ambitions drive business impact,” found that as many as 74% of social decision makers recognized that a social business uses social technology to foster collaboration among customers, employees and partners, but only 20% felt their companies were truly social.
So how do companies navigate the social journey? The study found that companies adopt social capabilities through five primary social ambitions, or entry points -- distinct clusters of social capabilities aimed at realizing specific business goals....
Analytical tools can get you the feel good numbers, but they’re also about more than that. They’re about incisive, actionable data that gives reliable feedback on your current campaigns and practical insights to inform your next one. Marketers who think they’ll only get ‘soft’ metrics out of the data either haven’t been using powerful enough analytics tools, or they haven’t been using them properly. Social media isn’t a baby anymore, it has grown into a vital channel with powerful analytics available that can help you find the money amongst the noise.
Intelligent use of social analytical tools means that there is absolutely nowhere for substandard marketing campaigns to hide. Spending on social analytics is expected to grow from $620 million in 2014 to $2.73 billion by 2019.
With a few clicks you can get all the lowdown on how your campaign is performing online, what’s making you the most money, and how to change it if necessary. The best marketers will use this information to streak ahead of their competition with campaigns that are on trend, responsive, and deftly efficient at delivering results that their CFOs cannot ignore. Here’s how you can join them....
Of course we don’t want you to destroy your career. But if you were truly hell-bent on it, we know just how to do it.Don’t measure ROI. Seriously, don’t. Only good things happen when you do.
According to the 2014 State of Inbound survey, marketers that measure ROI are 12X more likely to generate a greater return year-over-year than a lower return. In other words, simply the act of measuring ROI correlates with positive results....
How much of our social media behavior is founded upon fact? I decided to dig into the data and do some research.
_...Since most of us use Facebook, we think we know how effective it will be, or what kind of posts garner the most attention and interaction. Since we have a Twitter account, we have a sense of knowledge about how it works, and what a business should do (or not do) on Twitter.All that is great, but how much of our social media behavior is founded upon fact?
I decided to dig into the data and do some research. What I’ve extracted below are five surprising data points that will have a profound effect on how you approach social media....
...To be competitive and successful in today’s cutthroat markets, companies must access historical data from previous campaigns, track activities in real time through a campaign, and compare changes in performance and results before embarking on a new campaign in the future. This means making intelligent, data-driven decisions based on in-depth reporting and thorough analysis.
Sound easy? Maybe not, but it can be when marketing teams are equipped with the most up-to-date marketing automation solutions to track, measure, and optimize all leads. But finding the right technology can be challenging.
For example, Google Analytics can provide reports on website activity and PPC performance, while voice-based marketing automation tools can track all phone leads from various initiatives. When marketing automation and analytics solutions are combined, the reports are more detailed and the insights extracted are more valuable. In other words, decision makers will have a much higher marketing IQ....
Marketing can be downright self-indulgent.
If you want proof that most CMO’s are clueless look no further than the social media bubble. The hype sucked in a lot of marketing dollars and only now are brands starting to really question the value of a “fan” or a “follower” on social media.
In the meantime a national retailer recently stated that, in the food channel, POP displays placed in aisles increased conversion by more than 50% and he wondered why more brands were not focusing in on purchase decisions which are often made in the store....
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As the organizations are gradually realizing the importance of social media, they are also increasing the budgets allocated for the same. But increasing budget also means that the marketers cannot do it casually. They must deliver visible and quantifiable results. This is exactly where the question of return of investment comes.
So, how to measure ROI and how to enhance it?
The latter will surely depend on your own creativity and skills but before that you need to get a clearer picture through analytics. Google analytics is of course a good free tool used by everyone. Even Facebook and Twitter offer their own analytics nowadays. It can tell you the amount of traffic generated by your social channels. But for better planning you will need to know more.
So, here are a few additional tools to measure your social ROI and enhance the same. Most of them have free to use features with some advanced paid options....
This growing mass of information and options–often combined with unrelenting interruption marketing–can be overwhelming. When the distracted consumer is the norm and it becomes increasingly harder to separate the signal from the noise, more is often less.
As our customers’ world grows ever noisier our reflexive response is often to dial things up to 11. Resist that urge.
The new battle ground is for share of attention. And we earn and command attention not through shouting louder than everyone else, throwing more at the wall to see what sticks or defaulting to using price as the only arrow in our quiver.
The antidote to a tsunami of stuff is to know more about our customers than the competition and to turn that insight into intensely relevant products and experiences....
Most of the data captured about our everyday transactions isn't very exciting.
However, when you compare all that information across millions of consumers and products and thousands of outlets, you enter the realm of big data, which can reveal previously unknown patterns.
A case in point is outlined in a forthcoming Journal of Marketing Research paper which identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the "harbingers of failure", with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop....
Before you can determine whether or not your content marketing strategy is successful, you need to know what behavior you’re looking to create in your audience. The go-to assumption is that content marketing will drive sales, but if you’re hoping to push more towards thought leadership and positive branding through your strategy, you may be looking at the process differently. You might want to see: • An increase in newsletter sign-ups • An increase in the number of customers who click through to a targeted sales site • An increase in the number of shares or comments on your posts
These different metrics drive different goals. Let’s look closer at some of these objectives to determine what might help you determine content marketing success....
The 2015 Loyalty Report saw an increasing number of people opt-in to a variety of loyalty programs in the past year, and revealed the extent to which programs are effective in influencing customer behavior show no signs of diminishing.
Here's a Top 5 list of what's trending in loyalty....
Consumers may tune into TV on a regular basis, but they mentally tune out rather fast in favor of the array of "second screen" options.
On average, television holds a consumer’s attention only 39% of the time, a rate that pales in comparison to the attention rates laptops (70%), tablets (76%) and smartphones (77%) command.
That’s according to a new report from Nielsen and YuMe, a digital video ad tech firm, expected to be released Wednesday morning. MediaDailyNews got an early look at the data....
The distinction between Geoffrey Moore’s “Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement” concepts is a hot topic amongst organizational leaders today. A quick primer, courtesy Wikipedia: Whilst a system of record (SOR) is the authoritative data source for a given data element (e.g. CRM, ERP and supply chain management), systems of engagement (SOE) “focus on people, not processes.” Texting, Twitter,Facebook and other forms of customer communities are cited as examples of the latter.
Whilst the pundits duke it out about what’s more important between the two, entire industries are going through massive and decisive digital transformation. And at the nucleus of this transformation is neither of these but networks of record. Networks of record are definitive market places that foster contextual engagement and commerce amongst buyers and sellers at much higher velocity than the traditional sales models that add extensive friction to the intended customer experience....
A Glimpse Into Marketers' Social Media Strategies - Even the big guys struggle to measure ROI.
92 Percent of marketers say social media is important channel for their businesses, reveals new study from adweek.z
"Almost every company puts much money and effort behind social media strategy, with goals ranging from enhanced brand awareness to direct leads or sales. But while 97 percent of those surveyed said they use some form of social media marketing, only 37 percent reported being able to measure ROI—and this problem extends to even the largest marketers, 78 percent of whom said they struggle with this measurement."
Take a look at this infographic called "A Glimpse Into Marketers' Social Media Strategies" for rest of the findings....
You'd think there wouldn't be much to say about a baked cinnamon roll with icing on top. But that hasn't stopped this mall chain with 1,181 locations worldwide from turning to Twitter literally every few minutes.
Usually, the news isn't exactly earthshattering, and often it's pun-heavy. (Example: "Glaze all you want at these beautiful buns.") But the food-porn shots help....
Social Media Profile (as of 9/15/14) Facebook Likes: 1.1 million Twitter Followers: 63,729 Instagram Followers: 20,765
It’s the end of the month, time to review your content marketing results from the past 30 days and analyze…but what do you focus on? Of everything you could be reporting, which statistics should you care about? What do they mean, and how do you know if your findings are beneficial or not? Below are 11 content marketing statistics you should know that will make your end of month reports outstanding!...
Measuring social isn’t about the total number of eyeballs that see your content. It’s about the actions that people take. Use this calculation for any channel, from YouTube to the blog, to see how that channel fares in conversion rates.
If you're going to invest time in social media marketing, you need to measure performance, but it can be difficult to identify relevant metrics.There's no one-size-fits-all method of measuring social media success, because goals vary from company to company. But you can certainly find ways to measure all the work you're doing on social.
This infographic from exacttarget.com looks at how to align your social media objectives, how to measure reach and share of conversation, and most importantly, how to track your leads....
Lifetime Value (LTV) is one of those metrics that keeps your CEO up a night. It's the estimated revenue that a customer will generate during the entire span of their relationship with your company. It takes into account not only the initial purchase, but also how much a customer is likely to spend in the future as they purchase more products and services from you.
By understanding how much revenue each new customer will generate, you gain valuable insight into how to properly set your marketing budget and how much you should be spending on customer acquisition and customer retention -- all things your CEO will love to see you focus on.
Check out the infographic below, created by KISSmetrics, to learn more about LTV, how you can calculate the lifetime value of your customers, and how you can use that information to optimize your marketing spend....
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Very useful guideline to setting up assisted conversions in your Google analytics account. It will give you ROI measurement capability.