Leading marketers are pursuing multi-channel engagement with their customer and prospect audience as part of an overall Revenue Architecture. When measuring general performance from different on and offline channels, the digital channels are much easier to measure, so a game plan for tracking non-digital media is critical. With an organized plan of attack, firms can measure the results of campaigns across marketing channels and allocate dollars in the most efficient way possible.

A Focus on Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Marketing ROI analytics involve a range of variables that ultimately lead to capturing customer value. There are three ways to capture customer value:

  1. Acquire new customers
  2. Retain relationships with existing customers
  3. Expand relationships by increasing ‘wallet share’

All three of these dimensions help drive Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Clearly, a business can use their marketing and advertising dollars more efficiently by reaching customers who will engage in more business over time and be more likely to drive customer referrals from their personal networks. Through a lifetime, the customer will experience a wide range of events, offering a business the opportunity to engage at critical moments. Tracking this can be tied to LTV metrics and leading indicators from digital interactions between the customer and the various web, email and social media presence of the business.

However, many businesses attribute too much credit to the ‘last click’ – a single cost-per-acquisition (CPA) metric – and do not adequately consider how much should be invested in acquisition across different marketing channels. LTV helps highlight the value created over a long-term relationship with the customer by fostering an increase in wallet share through targeted marketing. Too often businesses have a single CPA number in mind, yet acquisition budgets could be allocated more effectively by increasing CPA budgets to acquire customers with attractive LTV metrics and reducing CPA investments in less attractive segments.

Campaign Insights

Paid, owned and earned media is a helpful top level framework for developing marketing strategies that capture customer value and drive Customer Lifetime Value. Paid media campaigns drive customers to owned media online properties that provide information, products or services that create earned media buzz that can build among customers through social media, PR and referrals.

Bringing Together Offline and Online Marketing

Digital marketing strategies, such as display and pay-per-click advertising, bring about clear opportunities to measure marketing investment return. Tools like Google Analytics and Adwords provide a rich array of funnel and conversion tracking. Offline programs are typically more difficult to measure beyond tracking broad business impacts (like web visits) that can be attributed to offline campaigns.

By bringing offline conversions online, it’s easier to track and measure the impact of marketing. As each visit is tracked, analytics provide the ability to view customers over their full sales lifecycle rather than through the limited lens of a one-time conversion-based transaction.

Through the implementation of different vanity URLs for offline campaigns, prospective customers can be driven to specific landing pages that redirect to the main business domain in order to measure incremental campaign performance. Other ways of tracking offline advertising related to paid, owned and earned advertising include:

  • QR codes attached to print media and outdoor advertising
  • Phone numbers specific to each campaign and marketing channel
  • Customized discount or offer codes unique to the marketing channel
  • Social media hashtags that connect the offline campaign to how customers interact with it online
  • Annotated analysis of direct traffic surrounding mentions of the business through other offline print media or television coverage

Ultimately, a lead can be tracked from cradle to grave using these techniques, allowing businesses to prioritize LTV while allocating marketing dollars more effectively.

Marketing Performance Measurement and Metrics

For the complex sale typical of B2B and service companies, a range of metrics can help to monitor the health of the marketing-to-sales funnel, enabling businesses to focus their best efforts and identify opportunities and challenges. The following outlines a sample of the metrics our clients are focused on day-to-day.

  • Multi-Channel Funnel (conversion rates across digital channels)
  • Lead Velocity (time for leads to move through the funnel)
  • Path Length (sequence of events and stops in the customer journey)
  • Cost Per Acquisition and Campaign ROI (measuring marketing performance)
  • Marketing Qualified Leads (# and quality of leads generated by marketing)
  • Sales Accepted Leads (# of leads qualified for pursuit by sales)
  • Customer Acquisition and Sales Conversions (sales completion)

Data produced by these interactions can be tracked through a range of tools including marketing automation, Google Analytics and dashboards such as Cyfe, which offers customizable analytics and detailed reports on the conversion process of marketing efforts.

LifeofLead

The ultimate goal is to have a single end-to-end view of the ‘life of the lead’ while tracking the impact of a variety of activities within marketing and sales to drive revenue performance.

To learn more about Marketing Performance Measurement and Attribution, please feel free to contact us.

 

 

 

 

sw_selectionA lot of businesses who use Constant Contact or Mailchimp or a similar app for email marketing are now recognizing limitations for expand digital and email marketing and more automated inbound programs. To address the selection of a new email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation solution is not easy. It is critical to understand business needs especially when there are different business areas involved. Some business areas may want to run their own campaigns from sales using a CRM like salesforce or MS dynamics or SugarCRM. Others may expect marketing to run campaigns and hand over qualified leads or flow them directly into the CRM. Without  considering longer term strategic direction and the needs of each business group, the choices are not fully clear and this makes a confident selection more challenging.

A further challenge is that today’s revenue technologies are evolving rapidly, and solutions range from email marketing point solutions to integrated marketing automation. As the industry consolidates and new entrants emerge, there is increased importance on ensuring that any solution will fit into a longer term ‘revenue technology ecosystem’.

We are often asked us whether a Marketing Automation solution should be considered over an ESP. While many of the capabilities of a marketing automation system can be found in ESP, Web analytics, and website CMS solutions, marketing automation systems offer additional levels of integration by combining features in a single product. This brings additional capability, including:

  • Behavior / known visitor tracking by maintaining a profile of website visitors and other activities of individuals. While Web analytics products capture page and session statistics, they do not link these to known individual identities. Marketing Automation houses the contact databases and links website visits. This helps inform lead scoring and prioritization.
  • Lead Scoring with website visits, downloads and other behaviors help to build a score to measure the quality of a lead or prospect. Priority leads can be provided to sales departments with greater levels of intelligence. Scores can include attributes (title, company, location, etc.) and behaviors (email responses, Web forms completed, pages viewed, etc.).
  • CRM integration and data exchange. A two-way exchange of contact, campaign and lead information between the marketing automation system and CRM or CIF systems are critical for master data management and intelligent contact and lead management. These capabilities help to ensure that marketing and sales are working from the same information.

OS2

To address these questions and ensure that the process fully considers business and technical requirements, you can use a selection process that reflects both short term and longer term business needs. An objective solution selection process uses an iterative and traceable process to move from requirements through to final selection:

  1. Identifying requirements including key business and technical dimensions
  2. Collaborating to establish the right criteria upon which to evaluate options
  3. Developing a long and short list of potential solutions based on key criteria
  4. Supporting the solution evaluation by engaging vendors where appropriate and applying industry experience, market insight and technical expertise
  5. Identifying a short list and supporting the due diligence process as required.

Want to learn more and get a selection checklist for Marketing Automation? Sign up here.

Of all the digital marketing disciplines, nothing keeps a marketer on their toes quite like Google. Google’s recent algorithm updates gave us the cutely titled Panda and Penguin updates, but don’t let the names fool you – they meant business. Those two penalized poor content and spammy links; cleaning house if you will. I’ll take a look at Google’s new algorithm update called Hummingbird and also look at two other significant SEO trends to carefully consider in your search engine marketing plan for 2014.

Humming to Google’s New Tune?

The truth is, this update appears less overtly dangerous than the previous algorithm updates, as if you have been doing well in search engines with honest content marketing, then you are probably no worse off right now. The challenge though, is keeping up with websites and marketers that are paying attention to Hummingbird’s perceived impact.

Here are 3 key points to consider:

  1. The usefulness of your content;

  2. The speed if your site;

  3. The user experience for mobile devices;

Around this point of providing ‘useful’ content, you blog is a key tool in providing ‘answers’ to searcher’s questions. The old tactic of optimizing your meta data around primary keyword phrases still holds true, but try to avoid keyword obsessing; the search engines are smart enough to understand context in the rest of your content much better these days.

Remember: long tail keyword searches make up 70% of all search engine queries.

For maximum impact, focus on adding new content that explicitly answers user questions, including “how to” blog posts, FAQs, and process tutorials. Your blog can help provide answers to some of these ‘how to’ questions and attract natural links and get picked up by press outlets – who often have a high domain authority – and can direct a high volume of traffic back to your website.

Mobile Device SEO

For mobile optimization these items are critical to ensure a quality mobile user experience, which keeps your bounce rate down – in turn – helping your search rankings on mobile devices.

  • Use Finger Touch Friendly Navigation

  • Disable Pop-up On Mobile

  • Don’t Use Flash Content

  • Scroll-to-Sections Speed up Navigation

  • Keep the number of videos to a page to a minimum

  • Compress images and combine CSS files

  • Use responsive design unless a traditional mobile site suits your content

What Is Structured Data and Schema Markup?

As with the importance of mobile SEO – its best friend is local SEO.

For many small online businesses and social media novices this has proved tricky to navigate while Google+ (which merged with Google Places) has evolved itself. Common mistakes are creating multiple profiles, confusing a personal account with a business one and generally not filling out all the information.

Structured Data and Schema Markup may not sound much fun either, but its function is to create a common vocabulary for describing the data on the web. Using the right expertise to implement, it allows search engines to display important information, such as hours, testimonials, reviews, menus and blog authorship.

You can find the Structured Data Markup Helper here.

You may be more familiar with Google Authorship by sight if not by name. It displays the blog authors Google+ profile picture potentially leading to greater exposure, traffic; especially if the person is an expert.

A combination of your Google+ business page and Schema, means that Google will pull in reviews and other schema information from your business and display it with your business’ Google+ page in search results.ert in the local community or industry.

A one-two punch for improving your local search results and satisfying your mobile device users, both of which will provide the proverbial nectar to Hummingbirds buzzing around your content.

Learn more about how Revenue Architects can take your SEO goals to the next level for 2014.

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