Tim Frick of Mightybytes is a speaker at the Content Marketing Retreat, Jan. 26-27
Welcome to another addition of 3Q4. Here, we have three questions for Tim Frick, principal and owner of Mightybytes, a Chicago-based creative firm, and author of Return on Engagement: Content, Strategy and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing. Tim shares his insight on measuring what matters; highlights of the latest Google Analytics update; and how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls we as marketers typically make in measuring effectiveness of our programs and efforts. Join Tim and other leading experts at the upcoming Content Marketing Retreat, January 26-27.
A recent McKinsey’s Global Survey on Marketing shows the gap between data-driven insight and know how or skills: 71 % say data-driven customer insights will be very or extremely important to their companies’ competitiveness during the next two to four years—but just 4 % say their companies now have the required analytical capabilities to manage their businesses more effectively.
1) Do you have thoughts on this gap or advice for where marketing organizations should start to build up required analytical capabilities?
An organization can never have too much data. The more data you collect, the more informed your decisions can become. Organizations need to have the right resources in place to make sense of collected data and follow-up with best practices for analysis, reporting, and devising informed recommendations to impact business performance.
From a web and social media perspective, it’s not enough to merely install an analytics package and check it every now and again. Reporting should be customized to an organization’s unique needs, be they driven by content, e-commerce, donations, ticket purchases, or other common site functions. There’s no sense investing the time and money to create a video, for instance, if it doesn’t perform appropriately once placed on your website. Software like Google Analytics offers the ability to track how many people clicked play, how many watched your video all the way through, and so on. You can also track file downloads, social engagement, user journeys through specific pages on your site, and many other elements that can help you make better business and marketing decisions.
Mightybytes approaches the task of online measurement by helping our customers first understand what they can measure, then coming up with a plan for what they should measure and implementing that plan over time. This is accomplished through a variety of methods, as each customer’s needs and resources are different. Setting up targets, objectives, and key performance indicators as benchmarks allow us to define specific criteria for success when measuring data. This affects everything from keyword analysis to configuring funnels for tracking specific goals. Once we have tracked that data over a set amount of time we can ascertain how effective our efforts are and make changes accordingly for altering or improving our approach.
2) What emerging tools or approaches to measuring content marketing and social media performance are rising up on the scene that are you most excited about?
There are dozens of analysis tools coming out every day, each ranging widely in cost and range of features. It can be challenging to keep up and find the right tool for your budget and specific needs, as some are free and other cost large amounts of money (but still may not do what you need). Google Analytics has always excelled at measuring web content and site performance. The latest version has new features that bring social engagement and more search data into your reports as well.
Some of these new features include:
- Custom dashboards
- Social engagement reports
- Visitor flow and goal flow visualization
- Webmaster Tools integration
- Multi-Channel Funnels
With this upgrade, you can dive deeper into deciphering what information will really help improve online engagement and drive more business through your website.
3) What are the most common challenges or pitfalls we as marketers typically make in measuring effectiveness of our programs and efforts?
Getting web design/development teams and marketers on the same page about business rules and marketing goals is an ongoing challenge. Design teams are focused on user experience but often overlook content strategy. Developers focus on features and functions but many times don’t consider community engagement or the long-term role of tools they build. Conversely, marketers often focus merely on consumer behavior or trends, and may overlook customers as individuals. They may also have challenges understanding the technical nature of the web as well. This makes effective communication across teams challenging. Teams that can come together under a common purpose with a shared understanding of creative and technical goals—and bring offline marketing efforts into the fold in the process—will ultimately create the best web-based marketing solutions.
These teams owe it to themselves and their customers to build up expertise across the entire spectrum of web-based marketing, not just the portion that directly affects their job description. This is particularly critical in the proper gathering of targeted metrics and other data. If something is not built right or properly optimized the data generated from its use can be compromised, thus undermining your ability to make the aforementioned informed decisions.
Analytics tools are vastly customizable and so few organizations effectively capitalize on what they can do. Many analytics activities get slapped on someone’s already full plate and that poor soul has barely enough time to master the basics. Thus, the reports they generate only scratch the surface, like page views or unique visits when they could be providing much more valuable information.
The new custom dashboards in Google Analytics should help in this respect. If an organization defines each dashboard’s requirements correctly, those who need to measure can analyze and benchmark data based on their unique needs. A mobile marketing manager could have a different dashboard, for example, than a content strategist who may be more concerned more about keyword and content performance rather than device operating systems or screen resolutions (though I’d argue that this data should be important to everyone).
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