Omni-channel, Cross-channel, & Multi-channel Attribution, oh my!
Cracking the customer code shouldn’t feel impossible. We’re all customers, after all. Yet making marketing decisions can sometimes veer too far into Mad Men-style gut checks and intuition, or too far toward a clinical analysis of data that leaves out that emotional element. Attribution modeling — whether you call it omni-channel, cross-channel, or multi-channel — begins to solve this problem by blending data with common sense and human behavioral patterns. Striking this balance is important in today’s fast-paced, always-on market, where consumers have limitless choices, and unfettered access to information about your brand and products. As Mark Braydon, the Content Marketing Director at Barclays UK explains, “I really like the concept that the modern day marketer needs to be part-artist and part scientist. That blend is what I look for in my team. You need to know all the things that drive short-term interest and intrigue but you also need to be able to understand what impact that is having on some of your ongoing trading and performance metrics, and that is where the deep analytical knowledge is required.” Braydon also agrees that cross-channel attribution modeling is one of the most important tools marketers have at their disposal when trying to solve for the customer journey. For us, there are three main reasons to invest in attribution marketing. 1. Attribution is the new digital currency: Traditional KPIs only reveal a piece of the puzzle as we explain in our recent blog post about how attribution unlocks your customer journey. While web analytics may reveal what your customers are doing, attribution helps you move beyond clicks and page views to a deeper, more intimate knowledge of your customers’ motivations and preferences. There are still some limitations when creating attribution models (specifically, linking multiple devices and online and offline channels), but these gaps are getting smaller every day. As more people lean in to attribution modeling as a way to support their analytics programs, these gaps will become smaller and smaller until they disappear and attribution is the new king. 2. Diving into big picture marketing: Even with gaps in attribution modeling, we already know customers are starting and finishing their shopping experience on different channels and across different devices. While this was occurring five or even ten years ago, the number of devices the average person has, and time spent on each of these devices, is increasing every year, making it even more important to understand the big picture customer journey rather than assuming that where someone starts their interaction with your brand is where you will earn their business. We predict that big picture marketing will be one of the fastest growing trends of 2017 and biggest drivers for success in 2018. And attribution is the way to understand that trend. 3. Breaking away from a one size fits all approach: Attribution modeling comes in many flavors: last touch, linear, decay, u-shaped, weighted … you get the idea. Because attribution modeling attempts to understand customer motivation, you can adapt your models to fit the actual behavior you’re seeing in real time. Attribution weighs and balances many variables, so, unlike static KPIs, you can adjust these variables to more accurately reflect what customers are doing and make decisions based on that information. It’s true that no model can perfectly capture each and every customer journey, but these models do present a more sophisticated and nuanced picture of the purchase path. You can even use a combination of attribution reports and models to get closer to a full picture of your customer experience. You probably already have several tools in place that can inform the foundation of an omni-channel strategy. Let us take a look at your current data and we’ll help you link these to your customers’ motivations and passions, so your clients are always a name and not just a series of numbers.
New year, new trends: Break through social media noise in 2017
It seems there is always another trend to chase, another metric to follow, and another golden rule to adhere to, so we try to consolidate the most important pieces of information to help you make strong social media marketing decisions. Without further ado, here are our top five recommendations to break through the social media noise and clutter in 2017. 1. Know your audience: Some brands are best suited for image-based social platforms (e.g., travel, retail). Some brands are best suited for education- or networking-based social platforms (e.g., financial services, education). You get the idea. It’s important to understand your audience so you can effectively choose which platforms to invest in and which platforms to steer away from. You don’t need to be everywhere for everyone to effectively use social media — you just need to be in front of the right people at the right time. 2. Use every tool available: Once you pick a platform, use every single tool available to you. Facebook recently released a “donate” button for nonprofit organizations that can be added to event tags and fan pages, Snapchat just released customizable event filters to promote local and geo-based marketing efforts, and Instagram’s native image advertising seamlessly blends user-generated content with ads so effectively users don’t even know they are being served a campaign … just to name a few. Each platform has certain strengths, so carefully consider how you can use every tool int our toolbox to maximize your reach and customer engagement. 3. Promote customer content: One of the most effective forms of social advertising — that also happens to be free — is promoting customer content. Simply sharing, commenting on, and promoting blog entries, social posts, and photos from past customers or potential customers can make your audience feel deeply connected to your brand and dramatically increase their likelihood to buy. For example, Nike is notorious for retweeting and liking budding athlete’s posts. When a first-time runner gets real-time social interaction as they post to the Nike+ app or Tweet about their run, they instantly feel connected to and supported by the brand in a real and authentic way that inspires action, it makes them feel good as an athlete, and will likely result in future goodwill and purchases. 4. Test to invest: Because social media gives marketers access to such a large body of people, it’s an easy place to begin testing and targeting your marketing campaigns. Don’t invest in any type of social media campaign without testing it first. Almost every platform has built-in testing tools that allow you to run multiple variations at once, track KPIs, and measure your success over time. Ignore these at your own risk. Testing allows you to verify what content speaks to your audience and helps you break through the competition and clutter. 4. A small part of the whole: Realize that social media needs to be part of your larger multi-channel marketing strategy that should ideally extend on- and offline, across traditional and non-traditional marketing platforms, and seamlessly support your customer no matter what information they need. Social media often links one channel to another, making it an integral part of cross-channel marketing strategy. Social media drives people from one platform to another and pushes people naturally toward the point of sale or call to action, so choose your success metrics accordingly. Social media can be very effective at driving customers into certain parts of the funnel, rather than simply going for the sale. To understand where your brand fits into the world of social media, and how we can help you break through the clutter, check out our capabilities as a social media marketing agency. We believe that social media is a strong foundation in any marketing campaign and want to get social with you today.
Attribution marketing unlocks optimal mix for on & offline efforts
When people think about attribution marketing, they often think of it as a digital tool. Although this mindset is somewhat misleading, it makes sense because many of the earliest attribution models focused primarily on tracking digital touch points. As our understanding of attribution has become more refined however, we know that the digital world is not the only channel that plays a part in the customer journey. Understanding your attribution model can help you plan for the best marketing spend possible and show you where to invest and where to scale back. Online and offline channels feed each other in a constant loop. We know that television ads drive consumers to their mobile devices, and that many purchases start online and conclude in-store. One cannot exist without the other. This can lead marketers to believe that they need to be everywhere at once and, as we’ve said before, that simply isn’t possible for most brands. Attribution modeling allows you to test for the optimal marketing mix on and offline no matter what your budget may be. With a little bit of patience, you can test your way toward a successful balance between your initiatives. Finding the right mix starts with understanding your baseline success metrics. In our recent blog post about managing multiple sources of data (found here), we explain the four key pieces of data you need to begin tracking to successfully start building an attribution model: online data, CRM information, social metrics, and offline performance. Establish your data tracking methodology, generate a baseline of data, then set goals against that baseline. You’ll begin understanding the right marketing mix as you decrease and increase spend across these channels and watch all your KPIs adapt in concert. While it’s sometimes difficult to separate which channel is driving impact, attribution marketing begins to solve that question by assigning value to each channel along the conversion process. Getting a leg up on your competition: Once you establish a baseline and preliminary hypothesis about how your channels are influencing each other, you can begin getting a leg up on your competition by balancing your on and offline efforts for maximum impact. The good news is that, according to Contently, only 49% of marketers are successfully serving content aligned to the customers’ purchase journey. That means, if you can unlock how much time customers are spending on and offline, your business will be ahead of the curve … way ahead. Serving the right content to your customers based on their needs increases the likelihood that they will purchase and increase their lifetime customer value. That’s why we believe that it’s better to have four quarters than ten times when assessing great marketing campaigns. When you serve the right content at the right time, the amount of content or marketing spend is far less important than the impact it’s having. Attribution marketing reduces costs by honing in on where to spend so you are focusing on that quality rather than quantity. When seeking a balance between your online and offline efforts, focus on how each of those channels can feed each other. Nothing you do online should be disparate from your offline efforts and vice versa. By creating content that works across channels, you can repurpose your assets as your mix becomes more intelligent. Click here to learn more about our attribution services and begin your journey toward the perfect marketing mix today.
True or false: Myths about cross-channel attribution marketing
Over the next three years, more than 73% of brands plan to increase their marketing analytics spend in an attempt to understand the ubiquitous notion of attribution marketing, according to Forbes . Attribution, or cross-channel marketing is a relatively new trend that has taken the digital world by storm and attempts to assign value to each channel touch point your customers interact with across the purchase journey. You can learn more about what attribution marketing is and why it’s important for your business in our recent blog post, here. As our clients delve into this new discipline, we want to dispel a few common misconceptions about what attribution marketing can and cannot do so you can make the most of your analytics efforts. Myth 1: Attribution can’t be accurately measured, so it can’t accurately forecast sales: It’s true that there are blind spots when trying to accurately measure attribution. When consumers switch between devices, are drawn to action by offline advertising efforts, or revisit digital content across a variety of channels before purchasing, it can be difficult to track their journey or assign an exact value to how those channels impacted their decision making process. But just because we can’t measure everything, doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Or accurate. Despite these shortcomings, attribution modeling still presents a more accurate picture than traditional analytics, which only assigns value to the first or last channel a customer touches. In this way, attribution takes us one step closer to perfection — even if we aren’t quite there yet. Myth 2: Predictive models aren’t accurate enough: To that point: predictive modeling based on cross-channel attribution can be upwards of 80-90% accurate depending on your sample size and the type of data used to create a forecast model. While we may not have perfect models, testing can get us pretty close. Even at lower confidence intervals, attribution modeling provides directional insight into your customers’ behavioral patterns, purchase path, and communication preferences. All this information can inform other, more traditional tests with easily measured KPIs. No testing is completely accurate, or can guarantee that customers will always perform the same way given the same set of variables; but it can help marketers invest more money in the right channels at the right time to meet their customers’ needs. Myth 3: Adaptive marketing and attribution marketing have nothing to do with each other: We’re always shocked at how infrequently cross-channel marketing is used as a tool to improve adaptive marketing. As automated testing and targeting becomes more common, adapted marketing helps businesses adjust their advertising spend on the fly as real-time data finds the perfect marketing mix. This automated fine-tuning process can be improved using attribution data to balance out your spend across channels. Adaptive marketing optimizes spend in each channel silo, while attribution marketing zooms out to optimize your entire marketing budget. Linking your data across channels is the number one challenge when using attribution to improve adaptive marketing, so work with your agency partner on the best ways to do this quickly and effectively. Myth 4: Attribution marketing means you have to be everywhere at once: Today’s marketers feel a constant pressure to be everywhere at once. There are so many marketing tools — from print and television, to social media and PPC, to earned and event coverage — it’s hard to know how and when to spend. This can tempt even the best marketers to try to do a little bit of everything. The problem is that very few companies have the resources to be everywhere at once without breaking their budget or tanking their ROI. Attribution marketing decreases the pressure to be everywhere to everyone by helping you understand which channels are most valuable to your best clients and where your biggest areas of opportunity to invest are. Myth 5: Attribution marketing is a digital term: Although cross-channel marketing is easiest to track between digital channels (i.e., email to social to lead capture, to close), it’s important to remember that offline influencers such as store promotions, merchandising, and traditional advertising can all influence customers to return to their devices or begin searching for your product for the first time. Instead of thinking of cross-channel marketing as a digital term, think of attribution marketing as a digital tool that transcends the physical world. We know…pretty deep, right? The offline channel is just as valuable as your online content when creating a holistic picture of your customer, so don’t fall into this classic attribution pitfall. Myth 6: Assuming your agency is already doing this: Many clients think their agencies are already modeling attribution as part of the standard testing process. Unfortunately, this isn’t true.At BIGEYE, we are pioneering attribution data capture and testing because we believe it is one of the most powerful tools to help small- and medium-sized businesses spend their marketing dollars more intelligently. When choosing an agency partner, don’t assume they are aware of or have the tools to track this emerging trend. Contact us today about how we can help your business or how to know whether your current agency is the best fit.
What is marketing attribution & why it matters to your business
Imagine that you launched a new retargeting campaign yesterday that serves website visitors a mobile Facebook ad after they browsed items in your e-commerce platform on their laptop. Now imagine that today you emailed your newsletter database a 20% off coupon code to kick off the spring season. When a customer comes into your store to purchase that product and use their 20% off code, do you credit the website for educating them about their purchase, the Facebook ad for reminding them to buy, the email marketing campaign that served them the discount, or the store for their point of sale support? The answer to this question is important when planning where to invest your marketing dollars. According to research, 90% of consumers switch channels and devices — such as cell phone to tablet, or online to offline — to “accomplish a conversion goal, with 67% of people using multiple devices to subsequently shop online.” Marketing attribution allows you to understand the impact each of these devices, and their corresponding channels, have had on the customer journey. And understanding this impact allows you to optimize your marketing spend around the channels and tactics that are most beneficial and cost effective. Single source attribution marketing: Most marketers use what is called “single touch” attribution modeling, which gives full credit to either the first or last channel a customer “touched” before purchase. In our example, that would be either the website or the physical store venue, with no credit going to the Facebook ad or email campaign. Yet, it is unlikely that the brick and mortar location, or any other single channel really, deserves full credit for this purchase when assessing their return on investment. Single source attribution marketing is commonly used because it is simple and easy to track. Stitching together how customers move between devices and marketing assets is difficult and sometimes limited, so we — as marketers — settle. The problem with settling is that many of us wrongfully believe that the data will normalize across channels because customers are always entering and exiting the purchase flow differently. Unfortunately, single touch attribution often leads us to believe that one marketing source is more valuable than others and doesn’t inform you about your most valuable marketing channels. This makes it difficult to accurately assign marketing spend and can lead to over or under investments in a certain channel. Multi-source attribution modeling: A common solution to the single touch dilemma is to systematically weight each channel in the customer journey. There are lots of ways this can be done: linear attribution, time decay, u-shaped, and full-path attribution are just a few of the models striving to systematize omni-channel marketing. Bizible provides a detailed overview of some of these models in their blog post, here. Depending on your sales cycle, each multi-source model has pros and cons. Multi source attribution marketing is certainly more accurate than single source attribution, but still has blind spots. Namely, the difficulty of tracking users across and between devices or accurately standardizing which channel has the most impact on customers when using a “one size fits all model.” If you are just dipping your toe into the attribution world, this is a great place to start. You can easily test and compare weighted attribution models to see which one is the most accurate for your business and use that as long as it suits your needs. While it may not be perfect, it will provide directional insight into where to scale your spend in a way single touch attribution cannot. Algorithmic and fractional attribution: The last, and most nuanced, form of attribution modeling is algorithm-based attribution. The goal here is to leverage big data from a variety of sources such as your CMS system, web analytics platform, social metrics, traditional campaign ROI, and even physical POS information when it’s available, to create a living, breathing attribution model that adapts based on how your customers are actually shopping. Agencies in particular have the power to do this because they can partner with large data organizations that help paint a complete picture of how, when, and where customers are switching between devices. This model assigns weight intelligently based on the amount of time customers spend on each channel, the frequency at which they use a platform or device, as well as where the sale and lead starts and ends. We firmly believe that as attribution modeling becomes a more standardized part of the budgeting process, this model (and the tools that support it) will become more prevalent. Even with the most comprehensive algorithmic attribution system, we are still learning about and adapting to the shifting nature of consumer purchase behavior. Realize that perfection is not the goal — yet. In our recent blog post debunking myths about attribution, we shed light on why this methodology is so important regardless of its inherent limitations. This new and critical level of insight into your customer journey lets you serve your clients while doing right by your business at the same time. Get in touch today and we’ll show you how.
10 Things Social Media Management Companies Do For Resorts
Social media management is so important in the tourism and hospitality industry. Bad reviews can devastate (or dramatically boost) hotel sales, and review sites and referral sources are king. Follow these simple best practices to ensure your social media management team is doing enough for you right now. 1. Nail your profiles: Before you do anything else get your profiles set up. Correctly. That means your cover photo and profile picture should seamlessly work together. That means your Twitter handle shouldn’t be too similar to other users. That means your Google+ listing and TripAdvisor site should be claimed. No excuses. 2. Promote pictures like crazy: Nothing sells hospitality like a picture. Every cliché you can think of is true. Seeing IS believing and a picture IS worth a thousand words. These things sound cheesy, but they are true. Vacations are an emotionally driven purchase, so put your resort’s best foot forward in pictures to inspire your future guests and help them envision themselves on your property. 3. And … just promote: During the 2008 economic dip, almost every resort and hotel kicked off an aggressive discount and promotion strategy. Unfortunately, customers are now trained to expect promotions, special offers, and giveaways when booking hotels. Use this expectation to your advantage by asking your social media agency how you can leverage your social platforms and best followers to make these opportunities lucrative while avoiding the temptation to give away the farm. 4. Make social media uniquely yours: Use social media monitoring tools to discover trending hashtags, topics, and pages then adapt those trends to your brand. Put a spin on popular hashtags, or kick off a social sharing and tagging campaign that lets customers share their experiences with your brand. These tactics will help you break through the clutter in this saturated market. 5. Service is everything: Social media management tools can help you monitor and respond to service issues. When people take to Twitter to vent about your brand, respond. When people give you a positive review on Yelp, thank them. We know this can be time consuming, so don’t be afraid to recruit an agency to give you a little extra support. 6. Partner promotions: Work with a loyalty program like Garnet Hill to host a giveaway or contest. The giveaway is good for them and the exposure is good for you. Social media management agencies can actively find and arrange these types of mutually beneficial partnership opportunities to keep you at the top of mind when customers are considering their next vacation. 7. Don’t be afraid to host events: Imagine a guerilla marketing campaign promoting your tropical resort in the New York City subway in the dead of winter inviting commuters to take a picture in a green-screen photo booth projecting them into the sun. The smell of sunscreen and coconut oil or sound of drums will be the icing on the cake. No matter what market you’re in, event marketing can have a global reach. You just might need a social agency who knows how viral event marketing really works. 8. Don’t forget about locals: Many resorts and hotels offer locals’ discounts but don’t spend a lot of time actively marketing to people in their own backyard who might be looking for a staycation or want to spend food and beverage dollars on site. Due to proximity, these customers are easy to reach and can be motivated with very little effort. Social media is one of the best and easiest ways to engage this audience – and they shouldn’t be overlooked. 9. Schedule everything: We get it. You’re busy. And social media is hard to quantify. Use social media management tools to schedule your posts, content updates, and social outreach so you don’t have to worry about these important initiatives slipping through the cracks if (and when) your days get away from you. 10. Track your work: If you are just building your social media presence, you can’t expect huge results overnight. Track your benchmark presence and impact and then set realistic, time-bound and measurable social media goals. Okay, so now you have a plan. Let us help you achieve it. Reach out to our team of social experts to learn how you can streamline this process and get the most out of your social media today.
4 ways influencer marketing can get travel brands on the map
Influencer marketing is more impactful for travel and hospitality brands than almost any other industry because these emotional purchases can be tarnished by misleading photos (we love a good wide angle lens as much as the next guy, but come on people), hidden fees, and outdated information. 68% of consumers rely on review sites to help form their opinion on hotel purchases, so if your travel brand isn’t taking advantage of this incredible marketing tool – you’re missing out. Here are four ways an influencer marketing agency can get your brand in front of your customers and on the map today. Reviews, reviews, reviews: One of the most obvious (but important) ways an influencer marketing agency can support your brand is through social review sites. Whether you need help registering your travel brand, claiming your physical space in the digital world, or encouraging past customers to write, an agency can support you. Following up with customers and soliciting reviews is a great way to find out what you’re doing well and where you can improve. In the service-based world of hospitality, there is no more valuable information than this feedback. Hopefully, you can showcase what’s going well and encourage other people to visit. If things aren’t going well, studies show that brands that listen and correct the situation openly are considered just as trustworthy as brands that didn’t have problems in the first place, so don’t despair. As an added bonus, influencer marketing agencies can stay on top of new comments as they come in so customers feel you value their feedback. Claim your local listing: Claiming your local listing, optimizing it for local search results, and keeping this information relevant is the first step in search engine optimization. Without this, your business can’t compete. This is especially true in destinations where you are competing with a variety of other travel and tourism brands. Influencer marketing agencies can link your Google+ reviews, customer ratings, and social media to your local listing so your brand is easier to find and engage with. Letting an influencer marketing agency take care of this for you ensures that all of the tagging and targeting complements your other paid and natural search efforts. These three pieces need to be working in perfect harmony for the best results. Don’t forget about the bloggers: While sending bloggers on a free trip to your resort or providing them with a free feast in exchange for an honest review may seem like a huge expenditure for your brand, it can have a tremendous impact. Your influencer marketing agency can help you identify bloggers with the most clout and largest following of potential customers who are likely to take action. By strategically targeting the right social influencers, you can gain the attention of their followers who will want to share in the same experiences their favorite blogger is raving about. In other words, you’re getting word-of-mouth referrals on steroids. Top bloggers have hundreds of thousands of followers and tremendous sway within the market. The trick is simply finding the right ones. In addition to helping you identify the right bloggers, your agency may have trusted relationships with certain social influencers to ensure their content honestly frames your brand in the best light. Connect your influencers with an app: If there’s one thing social influencers love, it’s connecting with other social influencers. Let your agency create an app that informs customers about events, special promotions, and unique opportunities for your most valued customers. This type of loyalty program can become a unique form of networking when it also links users together to mix and mingle during these events or share in these opportunities. The SoHo Beach House is famous for this type of social promotion thanks to their on-site app, extensive list of events, and exclusive directory. Everyone wants to belong to something exclusive and your influencer marketing agency can make that happen at the touch of a button. So what are you waiting for? Let’s get social together. Click here to learn more about how we can use your best customers to your advantage with a customized influencer marketing program.
Why you need influencer marketing to launch your new product
More than 40% of consumers base purchase decisions on influencer marketing, such as seeing someone use a product on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram, according to Twitter analytics. That’s a fancy way of saying: seeing is believing. Whether it’s a yelp review, a blog post, a YouTube “unboxing” video, or Vine tutorial – you’ve probably consumed your fair share of social influencer marketing content. As a marketer, it’s hard to control the messaging your customers release into the wild, and even harder to generate enough organic buzz for anyone to take notice. That’s why working with an influencer marketing agency or social media influence team is so helpful when launching a new product. Okay, so how do you find social influencer marketing champions? Think of your influencer marketers as your brand champions, enthusiasts, and experts. If you sell beauty products, they should be the first people to grab your products from the shelves and the first to post a makeup tutorial on YouTube. If you’re a restaurant owner, they should be the first to review new menu items and enthusiastic evangelists within the local community. You get the idea. But how do you find them? An influencer marketing agency can help you determine which platforms are best for your product because you won’t be able to have a strong presence everywhere. Certain platforms are more naturally aligned to different industries or product types. For example, Twitter is very popular within the technology sector, but far less popular in the hospitality market. Your agency partner will guide where you invest your time and resources to ensure the right people are seeing your efforts. They can also help you identify people who are already using your brand and understand what motivates them to write blog posts and share your content (hello, product samples and gift certificates). Influencer marketing agencies are familiar with the wide array of tools that support customer relationships and loyalty so they will have a few tricks up their sleeves to jumpstart your program with your budget and needs in mind. We have a social following…now what? Once you build a place where social influencers can congregate and share ideas, it’s time to test the waters with a product launch. Make sure you already have a foundation of followers before using influence marketing to unveil a new product so you can measure the impact of your efforts. Remember, if a tree falls in the forest and no one posts it on Instagram, it never happened. Your agency will take care of three critical elements of your product launch: 1. Defining your audience: They will meticulously target the types of social influencers who will be most beneficial to your launch and use market research to contact them or engage them with your brand. 2. Determining launch placement: This may include sending product samples, hosting a “soft launch” for key influencers, organizing a Q&A panel, and much more. Although you may want your influencers to post online, chances are, you’ll need to do something to get their attention first. 3. Tracking results: Building a community or curating social media can require a surprising amount of manpower and resources, which is why tracking your ROI is so important. Your agency can determine the value of your effort through metrics such as ad equivalency value (AEV), social reach, and engagement. But the most important thing to remember is that influencer marketing takes time. So click here and learn more about some of the programs we have built for clients just like you, and let’s start thinking about how to build your social program today.
How new metrics work to merge data on & offline marketing data
Tim McCormack, BIGEYE’s Digital Marketing Manager, briefly discusses online to offline marketing and how new metrics introduced by Google and Facebook work to merge data on what online ads consumers see and whether consumers who have been exposed to these messages are visiting physical retail stores and restaurants. Watch the video to learn how online to offline marketing data could impact your business. What if you could determine that a purchase made at your store was ultimately driven by your latest digital marketing campaign? This has long been a big blind spot in the world of digital analytics. Up until now, we’ve only had power in understanding and knowing how people react to our ads online and the ability to measure and optimize based on their online actions. But what if someone views your display ads and then goes into your store and makes a purchase as opposed to clicking on the display ad and making one of your purchases online? That’s where these new metrics come in. Both Google and Facebook have come out this year and refined, right in time for the holiday shopping season, these new metrics that they’re calling “store visits”. Store visits utilize cross-device tracking (tracking from both your phone and your computer when you’re logged into Facebook or Google) to identify users who have seen different ads through their ad networks, and then utilizing location services on your mobile devices to determine if you’ve actually gone into the store. This opens up a whole new world of understanding and attribution for how our online ads are performing. Thanks for learning more about online to offline marketing data with BIGEYE. As an agency we strive to provide the most comprehensive possible marketing data and insights to our clients, so we’re thrilled to have a new metric that provides greater transparency into the actions consumers take. Contact us today if you are interested in learning more about BIGEYE’s digital marketing services or attribution modeling services.
How to REALLY make actionable data really actionable
Actionable data is a buzzword that seems to get tossed around casually in job descriptions and team meetings all the time. But what is actionable data? And how do you use it … really? Data points in and of themselves simply point to action, growth, activity, or tasks completed. On their own, they only tell you what is happening. Not why. Actionable data transforms those data points into something you can use to guide your business strategy and make good decisions. Your data should track more than activity. It should reveal the causes, motivations, and psyches that guide behavior so you can adapt your business to meet your customers’ needs. Now, we’re going to tell you how to do that. Actionable data hinges on choosing your KPIs wisely Before you begin setting up data tracking tools and collecting information, ask yourself what you are tracking and why. Start by reviewing your business goals and choosing KPIs that relate to those metrics. Don’t focus on data that simply shows activity. Instead, focus on data that relates directly back to your goals. If you want to increase sales or customer satisfaction, consider what data might be an indication for sales or engagement success. Once you’ve picked a few metrics, confirm your choice with the following two question test: 1. If this metric were to dramatically increase or decrease, would the business care or feel a sense of urgency about this change? 2. If so, what types of action would you do in response? If you can’t answer those two questions, or the answers suggest the metric you chose is more of an activity tracker than a business indicator, don’t bother charting it. We can help you figure that stuff out. Don’t confuse correlation with causality To act intelligently in response to your findings, you need to be certain that the data you’re collecting shows causality – rather than correlation – to a business metric. For example, imagine that an electronics retailer began running two advertising campaigns: one online and one offline. Their goal was to determine whether their customers responded best to online versus offline advertising. Assume they had enough budget to run two ads in major newspapers, so they ran a promotion before Black Friday and around Father’s Day to appeal to holiday shoppers. The return on their investment was fantastic. Online, their budget allowed for digital ads every other week, but not on specific geographic or demographic targeting. The return on that investment was significantly less. The fact that their holiday newspaper ads outperformed their “spray and pray” online banners doesn’t show causality between amazing sales and newspaper advertisements. The cause was seasonality … not advertising channel. If, for example, that same company invested their entire budget in newspaper sales expecting the same return on investment week over week that they enjoyed before Black Friday, they would be sorely disappointed. Avoid this pitfall by doing a gut check on whether your data can point to an actual cause. Timing is everything for actionable data Good data doesn’t simply reveal what happened to your business. It can also help you predict what might happen in the future. Good forecasting can support your budgeting, planning, cash flow, pricing, promotion, and resourcing strategy. So yes, basically everything. This is why establishing causality between different variables is so important. Knowing that certain metrics influence other outcomes can help you prepare for likely impacts as variables change or work toward influencing driving behaviors. It is also important to deliver these forecasts with enough time to act or affect change. They say that hindsight is 20/20, but it doesn’t change your bottom line. Sync your forecasting and analysis around your natural business planning and work cycles. Telling your web team that they need to update your landing pages in a week, when you know that they work on monthly planning cycles, does not set yourself up for success. Pay attention to the competition While you might not have access to your competitors’ revenue and sales information on a granular level, you can easily track their social sentiment, media placement, reach, broad web metrics (such as visitor volume), and third party content about the brand. Some of these insights may be quantitative in nature, such as trending sentiment or page visits. However, competitors’ qualitative data can be an extremely useful tool as well. This is especially true if you want to increase your share of the market or focus on competitive switching. Qualitative data, in particular, can reveal how your competition’s customer service performs, what products customer want, what features give you an edge, or how you can serve your target audience differently. Make your actionable data easy to digest Once you’ve uncovered some great insights and establish some ideas about how to impact your business, you need to package your data – aka your proof – in a way that is digestible and contextual. Realize that senior-level audiences may not want to see all the hard work you did to get to your forecast or dig into the nitty gritty details of your data mining. Showing that you did a lot research doesn’t prove that you are right. Showing critical data and putting it in context against your business drivers does. Generally speaking, your decision makers will want to see concise, consolidated readouts that show what’s happening and why it matters. The people who can analyze and use data to its fullest advantage are not always the best people to translate that into “business speak.” Sometimes they are. But if they aren’t, team up with the right individuals to make sure your findings are presented in a context that is easy to understand and that inspires meaningful change. And yes, that means all those amazing Excel charts might not be your smoking gun. There’s a reason that data-driven decisions are so popular: they reduce risk and increase the likelihood of success. Increase your ability to use data by focusing on insights and actions first. Click
