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Marketing Performance Measurement and Attribution
B2B Marketing and Sales, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Growth, Revenue SystemsLeading 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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Email Service Provider or Marketing Automation Selection?
Newsletter, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Marketing, Technology & WebsitesA 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:
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:
Want to learn more and get a selection checklist for Marketing Automation? Sign up here.
What Does SEO look like in 2014?
B2B Marketing and Sales, Inbound Marketing, Newsletter, Revenue Growth, Revenue Strategy, SEOOf 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:
The usefulness of your content;
The speed if your site;
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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Association Websites – Using the Digital Experience Index (DXI)
Revenue Growth, Revenue Marketing, Revenue SystemsYet, many associations do not consider a complete picture when pursuing a website design initiative. In addition to the website as the hub, associations must think about their broader web and digital presence, including social media and applications, email and marketing engagement, to create a more unified brand experience on the web.
When pursuing a digital / web presence project, consider eight critical dimensions of an effective digital presence:
The Digital Experience Framework
A Digital Experience Index (DXI) is based on eight interdependent dimensions.
Begin with a Self Assessment
The following is an example of some of the the scorecard assessment elements for the 8-dimension model. Analysis could also include a peer review to reveal additional gaps and opportunities against best-in-class peers. A simple 1-5 scoring can reveal the ‘as-is’ and suggest opportunities for improvement. By using prioritization, like ‘Must’, ‘Should’, ‘Could’ and ‘Won’t’ do (MoSCoW), you can use the DXI to start building a roadmap for a ‘to be’ vision.
1. Brand
The overall positioning with respect to the target audience segments.
2. Visibility
Optimization major search engines using keywords for greater visibility.
3. Design
Delivering a professional, modern, engaging, and responsive look and feel.
4. Content
Ensuring relevant, dynamic, and credible information is offered.
5. Usability
How easy the website is in navigation and user interactions and the effectiveness in the delivery of functionality?
6. Functionality
The right applications, tools and web services needed to deliver value.
7. Conversion
The experiences that deliver greater levels of call to action conversions.
8. Amplification
How well content and messaging is amplified on social media.
LinkedIn for Financial Advisors: A Primer
Financial Advisor Marketing, Social MediaSource: Cogent Research
Linkedin is the most prominent social media network that investors use to research financial decisions.
With the large and every increasing number of affluent investors using LinkedIn, their expectations are that you have more than a presence. In order to provide value and differentiate from competitors, independent financial advisors need to actively engage. Very simply, an active and robust presence on LinkedIn will enable you to better retain and attract new clients.
Read more
Revenue Architects Holiday Greeting
Newsletter, Revenue GrowthThe team from Revenue Architects wishes you and your family a happy holiday season.
Our thoughts are with those less fortunate including the people of Syria, North Korea and the Philippines along with fellow Americans who need support. We know how lucky we are and are thankful to have the ability to spend some time this holiday with loved ones and reflect on what we have accomplished with our clients in 2013.
Thank you for helping to make this another great year for Revenue Architects.
We kicked off a range new client relationships, updated our branding and messaging, and continued our work delivering strategic revenue programs. We focus on integrated sales and marketing and building what we call a ‘revenue architecture‘ – agile, iterative and integrated design and execution of revenue strategies, revenue systems and revenue programs. We work with industries that manage a considered or complex sale, including B2B, financial services including wealth management and insurance as well as complex B2C products.
We are very optimistic about 2014 and see continued growth in our wealth management practice, working with leading asset managers and their engagement with intermediaries. Our B2B practice is growing with a deeper focus on complex sales and marketing. We are also expanding our body of work in Marketing Automation and CRM consulting – helping orchestrate the business change programs that are critical to capture customer value.
Of course, the intensity of our client work has taken some of our attention away from our own integrated marketing programs. So, one of our new year’s resolutions is to expand our capacity and re-focus our own team marketing activities. We also will look for leading new marketing professionals to join our effort.
Our clients focusing on their own integrated marketing programs:
As we enter 2014, the team at Revenue Architects sends along our best wishes to you and your loved ones for health and happiness and as you enter 2014. We also hope your revenue architecture helps you fuel the growth you seek!
(Image Source: https://www.elytradesign.com/news-article/elytra-re-design )