MARKETING

What it is and why marketers should care

Published

1 year ago

April 28, 2022

Measurement is a challenge to every aspect of marketing from attribution to campaign optimization. To meet that challenge, marketers need insights into the vast quantities of data being generated from the wealth of customer touchpoints. New technologies surface insights faster and create the opportunity to visualize and share data. Tools are even giving marketers the ability to predict interactions in order to increase efficiency and allow for real-time adjustments.

Data and analytics take the guesswork out of marketing. They help you get more value from your marketing budget (e.g., better efficiency), improve customer experience, and understand what channels, touchpoints, and strategies are working.

Marketing analytics is an approach to data analysis that helps businesses understand the performance and impact of their marketing investments. Businesses use marketing analytics tools to facilitate the collection, modeling, analysis, and visualization of marketing data.

New technologies are making old channels more accessible. For example, more digital marketers are expanding their campaigns to offline spaces thanks to technologies like programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH), which enables them to reach hyperlocal audiences on the street and at public venues.

This expanding digital ecosystem, combined with the proliferation of consumer and marketing data and the impending loss of third-party cookies, requires that marketers have a proactive marketing analytics strategy.

In this post, we’ll cover the basics of marketing analytics — what it is, why it’s important, and how marketing teams can use it effectively. Key points covered include:

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

What is marketing analytics?

Marketing analytics is an umbrella term used to describe the processes and technology involved in measuring a company’s marketing activities. Data is central to marketing analytics. Marketing data includes (but is not limited to) the following:

Website analytics: Website visits, traffic patterns, referral sources, bounce rate, etc.
Social media interactions: Social engagements, follows, profile views, shares, and DMs.
Online purchases and transactions: Leads, signups, and sales.
Paid ad campaign metrics: Ad views, clicks, CTR, CPM, CPC, conversions, conversion rate, CPL, and overall performance.
Customer data: Feedback, behavior, and purchase history.

The people involved in measuring a company’s marketing activities use technology and software that gathers marketing data, aggregates it, and provides visualizations to help them understand what tactics are working and how best to optimize marketing spend.

Types of marketing analytics models

There are three marketing analytics models that marketers use when planning, managing, and optimizing marketing campaigns. The goal of all three models is to help marketers make more insightful decisions about how to plan their campaigns and allocate their budgets.

Descriptive: Descriptive models use historical data culled from prior campaign activity to understand what happened and, based on this, inform future campaign planning. This is the “hindsight is 20/20” model, which looks at what happened with past campaigns and uses this information to inform future strategies.
Predictive: These models go a step further than descriptive, taking insights and using insights from past campaigns to try and predict customer behavior. This approach seeks to predict influence customer behavior to create a more informed (and targeted) marketing campaign.
Prescriptive: Prescriptive models use data from all touchpoints, weighing the impact of each interaction and initiative, for the purpose of creating a campaign that influences customer behavior and/or is more efficient. Prescriptive campaigns are highly targeted and often hyperlocal or focused on a current trend.

Why should you care about marketing analytics?

Marketing analytics can surface insights that you weren’t aware of, like how offline and online channels work together and how each consumer interaction influences the final sale or lead or signup (e.g., marketing attribution).

Here are some more reasons you should care about marketing analytics:

It provides tangible data around paid marketing initiatives — CPC, CPL, ROI, and brand lift.
It informs how your marketing campaigns and initiatives are performing, often in real-time, so you can optimize for improvement.
It connects your marketing campaigns to your website traffic and other metrics, enabling you to understand how various tactics and channels impact user and customer behavior.
It surfaces opportunities that influence future marketing and content strategies (e.g., a paid search campaign can inform your organic SEO content strategy).
It helps you do more with your advertising dollars and increase efficiency by reallocating spend to the most effective channels.
It provides a trove of data and information on customers and prospects which can be used to inform customer journey mapping and test the viability of new markets, products, and services.
It validates marketing expenses by tying ROI to initiatives.

What it is and how it identifies vital customer touchpoints

Explore capabilities from vendors like Adobe, Pointillist, SharpSpring, Salesforce and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer journey analytics platforms.

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Who uses or works with marketing analytics tools?

Marketing analytics tools are generally the purview of marketing teams. Here are some use cases that highlight how marketing data is used.

Budget optimization. Your marketing budget has been cut by 10%, 15%, or 30% and you need to refocus your marketing strategy on the best-performing channels and tactics. By analyzing the performance against predetermined KPIs, you can reallocate your budget to the historically best-performing channels.

Media planning. Marketing analytics provides historical data which can be used to make better media planning decisions. You can use results from past campaigns to inform ad creative, media mix, and test new channels. Importantly, marketing analytics ensures that your media choices reflect your audiences’ preferences, and not just what your gut is telling you.

Content planning. Website traffic metrics, paid search campaign reports, keyword trends, and user behavior provide valuable information about what your customers are interested in. You can use this information to plan your content and messaging strategies, for example, by reviewing top content on your website, the most engaging social media posts, and using social media listening tools that surface insight and buzz around a given trend or product.

Create audiences and build customer personas. Marketing campaign data can help you better define and understand your customers so you can build more targeted audiences for future campaigns. Identifying customer content preferences can help you craft content that specific audiences are more likely to engage with. This also helps improve a customer’s experience with your brand.

Key goals of marketing analytics

Here are some of the main goals marketing analytics tools can help brands meet:

Understanding what marketing channels, tactics, and approaches work best to achieve a business goal (e.g., growth, sales, leads, etc.).
Measuring ROI from marketing and advertising initiatives.
Capturing data from website sessions to better understand what content customers value.
Observing how users interact with website features and objects like buttons, video, and forms.
Monitoring, managing, and optimizing performance for digital and offline marketing campaigns.
Creating audience segments for more precise ad and content targeting and personalization.
Providing clear data visualizations to better analyze and act on data for a variety of audiences, including executive/board level as well as tactical reporting.
Enabling different teams and departments to share campaign performance and collaborate on marketing strategy.
Understanding how content, marketing, sales, customer behavior, and all marketing and sales initiatives are working together (e.g., customer journey analytics).

The variety of touchpoints connected to the modern customer journey are transforming the way marketers track their campaigns. Where once data analysis was focused on browser and website activity, now consumers are combining online and offline channels to learn about companies, brands, and products.

A recent Google poll revealed that over 70% of people described themselves as channel-agnostic, meaning they were more flexible about whether they buy offline or online. Analytics tools can help marketers keep track of this growing subset of customers.

There are a variety of ways that marketers get the data they need to, plan, analyze and optimize campaigns and no shortage of tools available to help get the job done. Some of these tools can also collect data from offline channels and integrate it with digital campaign data. They include:

Website analytics tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and MixPanel.
Campaign analytics tools like Semrush, Cyfe, and Klipfolio.
Social analytics tools like SproutSocial and HootSuite.
Social listening tools like Brandwatch and Falcon.io.
Customer journey analytics (CJA) software like Sprinklr, Thunderhead, and Pointillist.
Sales intelligence tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and ActiveCampaign.
Marketing data aggregators like Domo and Supermetrics.
Company financial data.

Many of the above-listed tools have features that intersect with each other. Google Analytics has robust website traffic analytics, campaign analytics, and some journey mapping capabilities.

SproutSocial provides social media engagement analytics and social listening to help users surface trends and insights from social data.

It’s standard operating procedure for marketers to use more than one tool or platform. Thus, it’s becoming increasingly important to connect and integrate your marketing data sources into one (and please forgive us for this buzzword) “single source of truth,” which lets you understand your entire marketing ecosystem. Tools like Domo and Supermetrics integrate data from multiple sources, where it can be used to create marketing reports and dashboards.

Know how your customers interact with your advertising today and into the future. Explore the platforms essential to predictive analytics and marketing attribution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

How marketing analytics can help marketers succeed

As customer journeys shift and new touchpoints and channels emerge, showing how ad campaigns and marketing initiatives work together to achieve a goal will become more important. The marketing ecosystem is also becoming more digital, with digital marketing comprising nearly 60% of marketing budgets according to the AMA’s 2021 CMO Survey.

Marketing analytics can help CMOs demonstrate the effectiveness of their campaigns. It’s the best way to illustrate the tangible impact that marketing has on business success. And as marketing budgets become fragmented across more channels, tools, and initiatives, marketing analytics can help ensure there’s adequate funding for the next quarter’s ad and marketing campaign spending.

Resources for learning more about marketing analytics

Do you want to learn more about marketing analytics? We recommend the following resources:

Marketing attribution and predictive analytics: A snapshot

What it is. Marketing attribution and predictive analytics platforms are software that employ sophisticated statistical modeling and machine learning to evaluate the impact of each marketing touch a buyer encounters along a purchase journey across all channels, with the goal of helping marketers allocate future spending. Platforms with predictive analytics capabilities also use data, statistical algorithms and machine learning to predict future outcomes based on historical data and scenario building.

Why it’s hot today. Many marketers know roughly half their media spend is wasted, but few are aware of which half that is. And with tight budgets due to the economic uncertainty brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are seeking to rid themselves of waste.

Attribution challenges. Buyers are using more channels and devices in their purchase journeys than ever before. The lack of attributive modeling and analytics makes it even more difficult to help them along the way.

Marketers continuing to use traditional channels find this challenge magnified. The advent of digital privacy regulations has also led to the disappearance of third-party cookies, one of marketers’ most useful data sources.

Marketing attribution and predictive analytics platforms can help marketers tackle these challenges. They give professionals more information about their buyers and help them get a better handle on the issue of budget waste.

About The Author

Jacqueline Dooley is a freelance B2B content writer and journalist covering martech industry news and trends. Since 2018, she’s worked with B2B-focused agencies, publications, and direct clients to create articles, blog posts, whitepapers, and eBooks. Prior to that, Dooley founded Twelve Thousand, LLC where she worked with clients to create, manage, and optimize paid search and social campaigns.

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MARKETING

B2B SEO in 2023: What’s New and How to Adapt Your Strategy for Success

Published

4 hours ago

June 7, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

B2B SEO in 2023: What's New and How to Adapt Your Strategy for Success

The author’s views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

In the fast-paced digital landscape of 2023, having a strong online presence is crucial for B2B companies to drive traffic, generate leads, and stay competitive. SEO is pivotal in achieving these goals. This blog post (and its accompanying comprehensive guide) aims to provide B2B marketers, SEO specialists, and business owners with the knowledge and tools necessary to create a successful B2B SEO strategy in 2023. From understanding the latest trends and challenges to implementing effective keyword research, on-page optimization, backlink building, result analysis, and staying up-to-date with SEO trends, let’s discuss what actually “moves the needle” in B2B SEO.

Understand the B2B SEO landscape in 2023

The SEO landscape is constantly evolving, driven by updates to search engine algorithms, changes in user behavior, and the increasing influence of voice search and AI. To create an effective B2B SEO strategy, staying informed about the latest trends is essential. Some key trends in 2023 include:

Mobile-first indexing

With the majority of internet users accessing websites through mobile devices, search engines like Google prioritize mobile-friendly websites in their rankings. This was rolled out years ago, but it is the case across all industries. The B2B industry usually does have a slightly larger audience that views content and websites on desktops (due to the target audience usually being at work when they are researching companies or vendors). However, many still do check their email, conduct research, and view websites on their phones and tablets just as often.

Voice search optimization

As voice search is still widely used with smart devices and now some vehicles (such as Toyota’s new operating system for their lineup, which allows drivers and passengers to look up questions, businesses, and other information from their vehicle’s infotainment system), B2B companies need to optimize their content for voice queries. This involves incorporating natural language, long-tail keywords, and structured data markup to increase visibility in voice search results.

AI in search and marketing

ChatGPT has blossomed in popularity over the last year, reaching a new record for the fastest-growing user base in February 2023, according to Reuters. It now has over 1.16 billion users, according to DemandSage. OpenAI, the owners of ChatGPT, are said to be rolling out a business/enterprise level for organizations who want to make ChatGPT’s offerings available to employees via an encrypted platform (so they can share proprietary information that remains secure), and Microsoft plans to use its technology to let enterprise organizations “create their own” ChatGPT so information stays secure.

Additionally, Google announced at Google I/O in May 2023 that it plans on adding more AI experiences in user’s search journey on Google. This is likely the biggest development with search engine results pages (SERP) changes we’ve seen in a while.

User experience and core web vitals

Search engines increasingly focus on user experience metrics, such as page load speed, mobile responsiveness, and interactivity. Optimizing these factors improves both search rankings and user satisfaction. In 2023 and beyond, a user is much more likely to exit out of a slow page load experience within seconds, figuring they will just find the information they need elsewhere.

Continuous Google algorithm updates

Luckily for those in the SEO industry, Google has started announcing some of their bigger algorithm changes and updates, including when they are going to be taking place. To stay updated with Google changes, be sure to bookmark our Google Algorithm Update History page.

SEO, no matter the industry, is always evolving, so it’s important to regularly read SEO publications (like the Moz Blog), learn from subject matter experts in the space, and continue to stay on top of updates so your strategy can pivot accordingly

Conduct keyword research

Keyword research forms the foundation of a successful B2B SEO strategy. It involves identifying the keywords and phrases potential customers use to find products or services in your industry. To conduct effective B2B keyword research in 2023, consider the following steps:

Understand your target audience

Develop buyer personas and identify their pain points, needs, and search intent. This insight helps you choose keywords that align with your audience’s interests. It’s important to pay attention to the “curse of knowledge” and don’t assume your audience has the same level of knowledge about your product that you do. Just because you know how your products work (or that they even exist) doesn’t mean that your audience does. This is a unique opportunity for SEOs to identify the operating knowledge of their target audience so they can best produce content that answers their search queries.

Utilize keyword research tools

Tools like Moz Keyword Explorer provide valuable data on search volume, keyword difficulty, and related keywords. Leverage these tools to identify high-potential keywords. It’s also important to look at your own data in Google Search Console or Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Today’s keyword research is becoming more and more accurate when compared to search engines, and these are all invaluable tools forSEO and keyword-related research.

Focus on long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific search queries that tend to have lower competition. Targeting these keywords can help you reach niche audiences and generate high-quality leads. Most B2B product offerings serve a niche purpose, so try to go after keywords that explain the problem or solution of your product or service instead of its name.

For instance, if your company was an “iPaaS” (integration platform as a service), going after keywords around integration, data architecture, and application integration would likely get more traction than repeatedly building content around the term “iPaaS”.

In order to complete effective keyword research, you have to know where to start. Better target audience identification, high-quality tools, and a focus on keywords that users are actually searching for (which are usually problem- or solution-oriented) can help B2B SEOs get the right phrases they need to bring in more users and potential leads.

Optimize on-page content

On-page optimization involves making your website and its pages search engine-friendly. Here are some best practices to optimize your on-page content:

Meta title tags

Craft compelling, concise, and keyword-rich title tags and meta to briefly describe your page’s content and entice users to click within 70 characters. The advice on whether or not to include your business name in a meta title tag still isn’t concrete, but if you have the character space, include it at the end after a pipe: |.

Meta descriptions

It’s best practice to write compelling meta descriptions, because that first paragraph on your page not only tells the reader what your content is about, search engines also pull it into the search snippet in a SERP. It is known that Google frequently rewrites meta descriptions, but it’s still worthwhile to spend about 180 characters describing the page so search engines, and search engine users have a good idea of what it’s about.

Header tags

Use header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to structure your content logically and improve readability. Include relevant keywords in your headers to signal the topic of each section. This can also serve as a table of contents if your blog article formatting allows it, improving readability for longer pieces of content (usually over 2000 words). Header tags also get pulled into the SERP and can be used in SERP features such as the ‘People Also Ask’ feature, if they are used in a question-answer format.

Image optimization

Optimize images by compressing their file sizes (for a better page load experience), using descriptive file names, and adding alt text that includes relevant keywords. This helps search engines understand and index your visual content. It also helps make images more accessible to users with visual impairments.

Site architecture

Good site architecture is essential for SEO success because it helps search engines and users find your website pages easier. By doing this, effective site architecture improves user experience, facilitates efficient crawling and indexing by search engines, distributes page authority effectively, and contributes to website speed and performance.

Meta titles and descriptions, headers, and site architecture may seem like SEO 101, but they are still valuable cornerstones to properly optimized content that is going to get indexed faster by search engines and have a longer time on-site for users. Google has preached time and time again about always doing what’s best for users and making sure content is fast, findable, and easy to read checks all the boxes.

Build quality backlinks

Backlinks remain a critical factor in B2B SEO, as they signal the credibility and authority of your website. However, it is essential to focus on quality rather than quantity. Consider the following strategies for building quality backlinks:

Create link-worthy content

Produce high-quality, informative content that provides value to your target audience. This increases the likelihood of other websites linking to your content as a valuable resource. Consider running your own research studies for new industry data that others will want to share, or create infographics, white papers, and other guides.

Split content into separate areas (when it makes sense)

This strategy won’t work for everyone, but if you are at a large organization, it might make sense from a site architecture standpoint to separate different types of content.

For example, Moz has the SEO Learning Center and Blog, and the strategy (and the types of content we produce for each) varies. Many large corporations also have a press mentions section, as well as a media/PR blog, where they release company announcements or press releases.

This helps news outlets and other organizations parse and subscribe to whatever type of content section they’d like. You can see Moz’s “News & Press” page for an example of this type of content area.

When it’s easier for news outlets and others to find your company announcements, they are much more likely to find and link to them more quickly and easily. It’s all about getting users the information they need quickly.

Partnerships

If your executive leadership team agrees to it, working with other organizations that cater to your same target audience but aren’t competitors can be a great way to get more exposure (and traffic) to your brand. Partnerships can entail sending a dedicated email about the other brand to your email list (and they do the same), or collaborating on a promotion through other marketing channels (such as blog posts, white papers, or videos) to get more leads and engagement.

Many organizations still buy backlinks, but in my experience, this is a risky and low ROI strategy. Companies that offer this can’t promise backlinks from high-quality places, and the ones that do may be using nefarious tactics (such as not fully disclosing links in the content they are sharing with the other website to get a link). It’s usually best to think of link building as an inbound strategy, rather than outbound.

Partnerships can be fruitful, but it takes it a lot of planning to make them reputable and pay off for both sides of the deal.

The end game: Optimization to drive results

From on-page optimization to working on your backlink strategy, SEO is truly a sum of its parts: it’s only as good as each component. To see where you’re making the most headway, all of the above efforts need to be tracked properly with accurate revenue attribution so you can see where SEO is moving the needle for your B2B organization. To learn more about measuring and analyzing results, visit the measuring success chapter in Moz’s ‘Beginner’s Guide to SEO’ and learn more about measuring organic search traffic quality from Adriana Stein.

Once you have a good understanding of where SEO is making the most impact, you can choose what to prioritize in upcoming quarters and long-term future planning. This can help your B2B SEO efforts compound over time, as most parts of SEO utilize one another to work more effectively. For example, a better site architecture and experience will likely lead to more users linking to your content. Make sure you have a well-rounded program to ensure better results over time.

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MARKETING

WordPress.org vs WordPress.com: What’s the Difference?

Published

11 hours ago

June 7, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Wordpress.org vs WordPress.com: What’s the Difference?

WordPress is one of the best website-building tools available, but it can be tricky to figure out how to use it for your purposes best. One of the most confusing parts of using this tool is deciding between WordPress.org vs WordPress.com.

wordpress.org vs wordpress.com: image shows a laptop with gears on the screen and a tab button

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MARKETING

What Apple’s Vision Pro means for AR and VR marketing

Published

18 hours ago

June 7, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

What Apple’s Vision Pro means for AR and VR marketing

Apple’s Vision Pro. Image: Apple.

This week Apple announced the Vision Pro headset, available early next year. Here’s what we know so far about the device and what this means for marketers experimenting with AR and VR engagement.

“Spatial computing” and AR. The use cases demoed at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) show augmented reality (AR) experiences where users interface with a digital layer on top of their real-world environment.

What this means practically is that users will be able to select and run apps from menus they see floating in their living room, office or other real-world environment. They’ll use voice commands, subtle hand gestures and eye movements to manipulate these objects and apps.

VR. Users will also be able to select virtual environments and adjust how much of their display is taken up by those environments. This means that Vision Pro users will also have the capability to plug into full VR experiences should they so choose.

Media. Vision Pro users will be able to watch movies and other streaming content. The improvement with the Vision Pro over TV screens is that these shows can take up a user’s full field of vision on their headset display. Content made or adapted for this system can also take advantage of the Vision Pro’s “spatial audio” sound, which promises to make it feel like sounds are coming naturally from the environment around the user.

Why we care. Apple has held off on getting into the AR/VR space while Meta struggled over the last two years to get headsets and the “metaverse” to seem cool and get widely adopted. Marketers remember the watershed moment when Apple’s iPhone spawned the mobile marketing ecosystem, and therefore there’s good reason to wait until Apple throws their hat in the ring.

It’s also worth noting that many AR experiences already exist using smartphone apps. The Vision Pro will make AR wearable, and if done right, will make these experiences more intuitive with natural eye moments and hand gestures.

Dig deeper: What marketers need to know about the metaverse, Web 3.0 and NFTs.

Price point. The Vision Pro is priced at $3,499. To give some perspective, that’s about half the current price of Apple’s newest Mac Pro. Back in 1984, the first Macintosh started at $2,495, which is over $7,000 in 2023 dollars.

Consumers who buy the Vision Pro will be spending three times more than what an iPhone costs. Businesses that want to equip their employees with Vision Pros will have to invest sizable budgets on par with new laptops or other significant hardware upgrades.

Consumer and B2B adoption. Being able to watch popular shows might be a gateway for consumers to adopt the new device and begin to explore AR and VR applications. Another adoption strategy is for people who use VR at work to bring the devices home. This explains Meta’s push for using their Meta Quest Pro headset for videoconferencing and other business uses.

Apple’s WWDC presentation showed how the Vision Pro uses machine learning to create a lifelike 3D model of a user’s face so that users can videoconference without their headsets being seen. This might be a more acceptable alternative to virtual meetings using cartoony avatars.

“Businesses are at a point where they want to get started with VR technology,” said Rolf Illenberger, CEO of enterprise VR platform VRdirect. “People in the office are asking about it. What’s missing is a general decision about which ecosystem to use.”

The Vision Pro inaugurates a new operating system, visionOS and a new Vision app store, where users will be able to access an anticipated flood of AR and VR apps.

AR and VR in marketing. Businesses in a number of verticals are adopting or considering VR for training and safety initiatives, Illenberger said. Widespread adoption for more general uses like virtual meetings is still several years away.

AR will likely be the first channel to get enough users to be of interest to marketers.

“There is a logical progression from AR marketing to VR marketing,” said Darwin Liu, founder and CEO of ecommerce services company X Agency. ”One needs to take off before the other one can. I expect AR marketing to really take off in the next 2-4 years and VR marketing to become important in 4-7 years.”

When enough customers are using a specific VR ecosystem, it will be important for brands to create a presence within it. This is still a far cry from an interoperable “metaverse” where users can jump from space to space seamlessly and bring digital assets with them to spend on merchandise wherever they want to. The customers that use visionOS will be within Apple’s walled garden. The price to reach them will likely be a steep one.

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