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10 Nov 2015

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With 2 Comments Permalink

SEO and Lifecycle Marketing: Understanding People’s Needs

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist On November 10, 2015 With 2 Comments

In the world of online sales and search engine optimization (SEO) lifestyle stages aren’t always the same as they are in “real” life. There are growth and change, but they’re not age related. When it comes to SEO and Lifecycle Marketing, growth and change refer more to the commitment level and involvement of your customers. Let’s review the stages briefly.

Visitor: These people visit your site and are aware of what you have to offer.

Shopper: A shopper is someone who has expressed an interest in making a purchase or going further with your product. (Maybe they’ve put something in their virtual shopping cart)

Information Seeker: They’re interested in buying but they need to scope out the product a bit more.

Determined Shopper: A determined shopper is a person on the cusp of making that sale. (Clicking on that “buy” button)

Customer: The customer has made that commitment and made the purchase.

Loyal Customer: This is a customer who comes back repeatedly and probably makes referrals on your behalf.

Clearly, you want to move your visitors through all of the stages and get them to become loyal customers where they not only go through with the purchase but they become your cheerleader and send other people to you. This can be done through SEO and Lifestyle Marketing.

The key is to use search engine analytics to identify and group your customers. Then take that data a step further and see what it is that makes the ones who engage further follow that path. There is a good chance that what they found appealing will bring others through the process.

You can also customize each step in your transaction to be more compelling to the potential loyal customer and the earlier stages can be “less painful” to the browser, which may make them want to continue. One way to look at that is to realize that the behavior and interest level through lifestyle marketing changes. Initial visitors would probably be captured by short, one word keywords. As they get more involved, they want to know more about the product and whether or not it suits their needs. This means that by bringing in more specific, long-tail keywords later on in the process, you’re using SEO to draw them in and give them what they want and need.

As an example, let’s say you’re selling cars online. The visitor wants and needs a car. They go to your page. They see cars, and they decide they want to click on the minivan link. That’s where you can explain the minivan’s specific information in detail. They like one brand and click on that link to learn about the features. They decide on a vehicle and before they actually work out the financing, they’ve got to pick the color, read the fine print etc. The experience you’ve tailored to answer their questions and pull them through your process was so well thought out and appealing, they decide to engage in your social media efforts to show off their new car.

You can see how each stage requires a little more selling, a little more targeted keyword approach, and some deeper information into the motives of your audience. Interested in learning how SEO and lifestyle marketing can help your customers? Filament can help you tailor your web pages to answer more of what your customers want and need, and that will also help create more of what you want and need: loyal customers.

04 Nov 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Top Strategies for Creating Killer Lifecycle Email Campaigns

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist On November 4, 2015 With No Comments

Customers at each stage of the buying lifecycle have different interests, needs and history with your brand. Your job is to determine which messages will resonate with customers at each stage so you can focus your lifecycle email campaigns appropriately. In this post, we’re going to take a look at how this might play out by discussing which email marketing strategies to use at various stages.

But first things first. Why do we want in on the lifecycle marketing fun? Because we can use it to build better relationships with customers at every stage along their journey, from the buying stage all the way through the post-purchase stage. That’s right. Post-purchase. Email marketing doesn’t end with conversions. Instead, it starts with potential customers searching for information to find a fix for some challenge they’re facing and continues all the way to brand evangelists who happily promote your products and services.

Alright, on to the strategies…

Welcome Emails

Liga Bizune from Mailigen offers a great idea for starting off your lifecycle marketing with the right kind of personalization. She suggests tracking where your subscribers signed up for your email newsletter:

If subscribers joined your email list while making a purchase, you can include a survey, invitations to complete their profile, or upsell offers.
If they signed up for your newsletters on your blog, you’ll know they’re already fairly informed about your products and services.
If the source was a Facebook sign-up form, they’ve probably only heard about you. However, you can include encouragement to share your news with their friends on social media.

For brand new leads with no knowledge of your offerings, you’ll want to teach them about your products and services and how they might match their needs. Let them discover what’s relevant for them and then track their behavior accordingly. For those who’ve just purchased your product for the first time, you can create a getting-started message to help them get the most out of it.

Thank You Emails/Quid Pro Quo

Chris Sietsema of Teach to Fish Digital calls this strategy the “Quid Pro Quo” message. When newer customers make a second purchase or respond to your welcome email, you can take that opportunity to gather more information about them in exchange for something they may want. You’ll want to provide an incentive. Sietsema suggests offering special access to premium content while incorporating a short survey that lets you gather key data for further segmentation. You can also add a simple thank-you note. A little positive reinforcement goes a long way.

Reactivation/Reengagement

When you haven’t heard from a customer in a while, it’s an opportunity to reach out again and try to re-stoke your relationship with them. Here you’re trying to ascertain whether or not your customer is still interested and what incentive would provide the necessary impetus for another purchase or more engagement with your company. You have lots of options for messaging here too. You can create a “we miss you” email with a special offer, a simple reminder about your offerings and their usefulness, or announcements about new products, services or maybe your new website.

Remarketing Emails

If you have a good understanding of what your customers want from your business—via tracking behavior or collecting interest data through surveys, you’re in a good place to launch some remarketing campaigns to encourage customers to engage further. Use the data you’ve collected (including responses to previous email campaigns) to inform and inspire your efforts to provide relevant content and strengthen ties with your customers.

Upsell/Cross-Sell

For customers who readily engage and have a long history with your company, upselling and cross-selling just makes sense. If you’ve been able to collect key data, you can use it to segment these folks into specific audience groups and craft stories about your offerings that speak directly to them in a more personalized way—based on purchase behavior, geographic location, demographic info, interest data and more. It’s a perfect opportunity to highlight features of your products and services that they haven’t yet used or new offerings relevant to their specific situation.

And, of course, don’t forget to track responses to your upselling and cross-selling campaigns in order to get a sense of what messaging opportunities might lie ahead.

Loyalty Emails

Lifecycle marketing—all marketing, really—is about building relationships with your customers, and like any relationship, your relationships with your customers will wither and die if not given attention. You can help these relationships flourish with positive and meaningful content that keep your customers engaged and happy while encouraging them to take that next step forward into brand advocacy. For example, customers at the retention and loyalty stage might be the perfect recipients of a loyalty program campaign that allows you to acknowledge their best-customer status and give them something special in return.

Advocacy

If you’ve managed to keep repeat customers happy and engaged, well done. Now’s the time to take advantage of word of mouth and let these customers do some of your job for you by giving them opportunities to share what they love about your company and what you offer. This sharing can be in the form of product reviews, social media shares, or even “forward to a friend” buttons.

You now have 7 lifecycle marketing strategies that can help you make sure every touchpoint with your customer conveys relevance and builds a solid relationship. Using event-triggered messaging like cart abandonment emails or browsing history emails, you can meet your customer wherever they’re at in their journey and continue to develop a meaningful dialogue.

Are you ready to get started? Visit Filament to find out how we can help with anything from planning lifecycle email campaigns to creating relevant content for your email segments.

03 Nov 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 3 Comments Permalink

What We Mean When We Talk About Lifecycle Marketing

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist On November 3, 2015 With 3 Comments

Getting the right content to the right customer at the right time is key when it comes to Lifecycle Marketing. What we’re talking about here is matching content to the customer lifecycle; creating content for customers at each stage in their journey to help them advance on to the next step. This might mean creating infographics and sharing them via social media for the awareness stage or crafting detailed product descriptions on a website for folks at the evaluation stage.

cus•tom•er life•cy•cle |ˈkəstəmər ˈlaɪfˌsaɪkəl |
noun
the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using,
and maintaining loyalty to a product or service.

Matching content to the customer lifecycle is a smarter way to create and distribute content. On average, only 4% of the visitors to any given website are ready to make a purchase. So what about the other 96%? That huge percentage of visitors to your site is mostly in the buying stages of the lifecycle. They need content that teaches them about your company and its products and services and how you’re the perfect choice for solving whatever problem or meeting whatever opportunity has arisen for them.

Some of that 96% are also returning after a purchase, so don’t stop engaging customers once you’ve clinched the deal. These folks are in the satisfaction/retention stage, and they have needs, too. Think about what content would be useful now that they’re using your product or service. That might be a FAQs page to address any issues past customers have had, or it may be webinar specifically for clients to learn how they can get more out of the services they’ve already purchased.

And then there’s always the upselling/cross-selling stage. Since it’s easier and less expensive to sell to an existing customer than it is to convert a brand new lead, why not pitch new products and services that perfectly compliment existing products and services to the people who are already using them? If you keep engaging existing customers with content they can use, they’ll be more likely to speak highly of your products and services to their colleagues. Word-of-mouth is a powerful ally when used effectively.

Our recent post on customizing content for each stage of the buying cycle gives helpful examples of effective content you can create for each stage. In order to create this content, you need to understand your prospects and customers throughout their entire journey and know what happens for them at each point of contact with your company (and the people working for and in it), at the buying stages and—just as important—the post-purchase stages where customer retention, loyalty and advocacy come in.

Ready to get started? Contact Filament or check out our services to learn how we can help you create content for customers at every stage in the customer lifecycle.

30 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Social Media Analytics Tools: What Works?

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist On October 30, 2015 With No Comments

Before you think about social media analytics tools, stop and think for a moment about your favorite social media sites. Just focus on the major ones for now: Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Think about the ones you use most.

Which ones do you use at different times of the day? Do you connect throughout the day during the workweek, or are you a nights and weekends social hound?

How about your activity levels on one versus the other? Are you a daily visitor, or do you just check in once in a while?

Are there some that you use for different reasons? For example, do you use Facebook for updates on friends and family, but rely on Twitter to keep you “in the know” on current events?

In what ways do you interact? Do you scroll through your feeds and toss an occasional Like on a pretty picture or two? Do you comment often and engage in conversations with other followers? Or, do you just watch what others are doing?

Are there certain things that really seem to catch your attention, or do you find that your preferences seem to change from day to day and season to season?

Are there certain social media sites that you really dislike? If so, what is it about them that you don’t care for? Have disliked them from the start, or did your preferences change over time?

Do you focus on the same social media sites for your business as you do for personal use? If yes, then, why? Because you like them better? Because they’re more familiar to you?

Now, while your head is spinning a bit thinking about everything we just ran through above, here’s a thought that’ll [hopefully] throw you in a completely different direction:

You are not your customer.

There are reasons beyond what anyone can “put in a nutshell” for our individual preferences. With that in mind, friends, we cannot afford to assume that we have all the answers to what our customers prefer.

While that seems fairly obvious, we often forget to disengage our personal preferences when it comes to making decisions that impact our customers and the people we want to attract as our future customers.

What in the world does all this have to do with social media analytics?

So glad you asked!

Social media analytics is like a toolbox – or a set of toolboxes – filled with all kinds of tools that will help you build the social media communities you want based on what you already know. Those same tools can also help you build the communities you need based on what you don’t yet know!

In earlier articles, we’ve talked about getting to know our customers better by defining buyer personas. And, we’ve talked about how to better understand what our customers want from our businesses through buyer segmentation. To bring it all home, analytics can help with both of those elements and more.

The only way to decide what works best for your business or brand is to try different things.

Sorry, there’s no magic ticket that tells you everything you want to know about your customers, but here’s a rundown on some of the basic resources to start with:

FACEBOOK

Page admins can access Facebook Insights to see how different page posts rank, how many fans they currently have, and what the page’s general reach is. Admins can also set notifications to determine when their page is getting the most interaction.

TWITTER

Twitter Analytics can be a bit of an eye opener in that it’ll provide a month’s worth of data all within an infographic-like format. In it, you can see how your tweets have performed: How many favorites and retweets they’ve received, how many impressions and mentions they’ve had, and how many times followers have clicked on them. You can even generate reports with Twitter Analytics to better hone the information you collect.

PINTEREST

Aaah, Pinterest. The quiet little social media site that started as a virtual scrapbook has become quite the powerhouse of social influence. If a brand or business can tell a story within a photo, Pinterest is a must have.

If you want to find out about the people following your Pinterest boards and see what kind of engagement is happening with particular pins, Pinterest Analytics is where you want to be.

To gain a broader understanding of what’s happening in your web and social circles, you can also enlist third party tools such as Google Analytics and Buffer. Both have free and paid options to get you what you need.

With Google Analytics, for example, you can create reports that will help you understand which social sites your website visitors are coming from and what they do once they land on your website. With Buffer, you can actually create and schedule posts, and analyze post engagement.

Tools are great. But please don’t get caught up in analyzing everything with tools and stats.

Think about it like this: If you move into a new neighborhood and do nothing to get to know your neighbors but watch them through your windows, you’re probably only going to get half the story about them – if that. If, however, you get out there and shake their hands, talk to them, meet their spouses, and hear what they have to say, you’re going to get a lot more out of your neighborhood experience.

Make sure not to lose focus on the fact that social media is called social for a reason! You need to be there, too. Building and maintaining social media communities takes effort. Only when you interact with and listen to your followers will you truly understand what value analytics provides.

So… What works?

First, choose the social sites that fit your business goals, and use best practices within those sites consistently. Then, watch what happens – both personally and analytically – with your followers. You know all those questions we asked you up above? Those are the questions you’re going to want to be able to answer about your followers and customers.

Keep track of the indices that matter specifically to your business – don’t try to track every single statistic possible.
Follow trends – your trends – not those of another business.
Take educated risks with new campaigns, and always communicate with your followers – not to them.
Above all, have fun with social media – It’ll make a big difference in the experience that your customers will have with your brand.

If you’d like to meet more of your “neighbors,” Filament can help you make great introductions!

27 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With No Comments Permalink

Fine Tune Your SEO Efforts

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist On October 27, 2015 With No Comments

There are different approaches to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that offer varying degrees of success, but we’re going to give you a tip that will help you fine tune your SEO across the board no matter how much work you’re currently putting into it! Some websites that don’t do SEO at all will see big benefits when using this technique. And, companies that funnel a lot of effort into their SEO will also get better results by slowing down and taking a minute to use this fine tuning SEO technique.

Now we’re not asserting that there is only one way to fine tune SEO. There are many different ways to do it. But we’re going to focus on a tried and true method which has been at the core of SEO since the very beginning: focusing on search queries and keywords.

The first thing you need to do is discover what searches are drawing people to your pages. This requires a tool such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools or some other proprietary company tools. You may even have a person or company who compiles this data for you. The information you want from these reports is a list of your top pages (this you will use to prioritize your efforts and pull weak performing pages to the forefront) and a list of what search terms or phrases are organically drawing people to your website.

Once you have that information in hand it’s time to begin reviewing. In a perfect world you did something similar in the very beginning of your website that helped you craft your web content, headings, alt attributes, meta descriptions and title tags. And guess what – those are the areas you’ll be focusing on once again. If you did this initially and your past keywords and phrases still apply today – Congrats! This is the sign of a well optimized website that is working hard to pull in new visitors. If they don’t – that’s okay, and it’s actually quite common.

Depending on when your website was created, the market may have changed, you may have changed your focus, social media may be working in your favor – there are numerous different ways that your website may have slowly fallen away from its original optimization. Now that you know what is working for you, you can go back and fine tune your keywords in your content, title tags, meta descriptions, alt attribute tags, and headings. If you would like some help with your updates, just give the experts at Filament a call.

21 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With 2 Comments Permalink

Email Analytics: What to Measure & Why

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist On October 21, 2015 With 2 Comments

You can send better email campaigns—that is, emails that are more engaging and relevant to your subscribers—by tracking subscriber engagement with your emails and taking action to improve your campaigns based on the results you get. We’re going to cover the first part of that equation—tracking subscriber engagement via email analytics—in this blog post by defining the most important metrics, explaining how to calculate them, and discussing why they’re significant.

Your email service provider (ESP) can provide a lot of the data you’ll need to track and calculate the metrics below. However, you can also pick an email marketing tool that integrates directly with Google Analytics.

Setting goals for these metrics is important, too. Be sure you set your own benchmark and gauge your performance by that, instead of using industry standards.

And now, on to the gory details.

Bounce Rate

What: Percentage of total emails that couldn’t be delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.

How: Divide the total number of emails that bounced by the total number of emails sent to get the total number of bounces per email. Multiply your bounce-per-email rate by 100 to get your bounce rate as a percentage.

Why: Tracking your bounce rate can indicate potential problems with your email list. You can divide your bounce rate into two kinds: soft and hard. Soft bounces indicate temporary problems, and your email service may try to re-deliver these emails once the issue resolves itself. Hard bounces, on the other hand, result from invalid, closed or nonexistent email addresses. You’ll want to delete any hard bounces addresses ASAP since ISPs (internet service providers) use bounce rates to gauge a sender’s reputation. If your bounce rate is too high, you can start to look like a spammer. How can you prevent that? If you have a strong, recognizable brand, put it in the “from” address of your emails. If not, start using personalization and segmentation to get the right email to the right subscriber at the right time.

Delivery Rate

What: Percentage of emails delivered to subscribers’ inboxes.

How: Subtract hard and soft bounces from the total number of emails sent and then divide that number by total emails sent.

Why: Your emails need to get into people’s inboxes in order to work their magic. If they’re not getting there, you need to know so you can sort out why. A low delivery rate can mean there’s a problem with your email list or some issue with the content in your subject line or email body that’s setting off spam filters.

List Growth Rate

What: A measure of how fast your email list is growing.

How: Subtract opt-outs and hard bounces from the number of new email subscribers gained in a given month. Then, divide that number by the original list size.

Why: It’s perfectly normal for your email list to decrease over time—if you’re not continually working to add new addresses. There are lots of reasons for this that have nothing to do with your company or your campaigns. People change jobs, switch ISPs, or pick a new email program. You can use your list growth rate to ensure you’re staying on your toes and getting new folks to subscribe.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

What: Proportion of subscribers who clicked on one more links in an email message.

How: Divide unique clicks by the number of emails delivered. Or divide total clicks (including multiple clicks by the same recipient) by the number of emails delivered. Whichever method you choose, make sure you use it consistently.

Why: CTR is a great way to find out if your content was relevant and useful enough to your subscribers to inspire them to take action. It can also show patterns of behavior to help you gain a better understanding of your subscribers needs, wants, and interests. Different kinds of emails (promotional messages vs. transactional messages, for example) will have CTRs in different ranges, so be sure to benchmark them according to the different types of emails you send, not against each other.

Open Rate

What: Percentage of emails opened.

How: Divide the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent, excluding the number of bounces.

Why: Open rate can help gauge the success of your subject lines to inspire your subscribers to click. But, and this is a big but, this metric can also underreport or inflate true numbers. In the former case, opened emails aren’t counted as opened because the embedded images in them weren’t opened due to image-blocking software. In the latter case, emails are opened automatically by email clients (like the iPhone’s native email client) when the subscriber hits delete on the previous email in their inbox. These opens clearly wouldn’t reflect a subscriber’s interest vis-à-vis your subject line. So just remember that this metric may not be telling you the whole story.

Email Sharing & Forwarding Rates

What: Percentage of recipients who clicked on a “share this” button to post email content to a social network and/or who clicked on the “forward to a friend” button.

How: ESPs can often track this directly. For shares, you’ll need integration between your ESP and your web analytics platform.

Why: If your subscribers care enough about your message to recommend it to their friends and families, then they really dug it. You’d want to know if there was an email that had a particularly high forwarding rate or share rate. It’s a major indicator of the value of your email messages. Once you start tracking sharing and forwarding rates, watch for the kinds of emails that get shared to get a better understanding of the offers, topics and products that are most irresistible to your target audience. This knowledge will be invaluable for planning future campaigns.

Conversion Rate

What: Percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in an email and completed a desired action, such as making a donation or purchasing a product.

How: Divide the number of desired actions taken by the number of emails delivered.

Like sharing rates, this metric requires integration between your email platform and your web analytics. You can perform this integration by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click to your website as coming from a specific email campaign.

Why: Conversion rate is, by all accounts, an important metric. It again shows the level at which your subscribers found your email content valuable and relevant. Remember though that conversion rate isn’t only dependent on your email content. It’s also affected by the landing page your subscribers are sent to.

Revenue Per Email Sent

What: Measure of the return on investment (ROI) of an email campaign.

How: Divide the total revenue generated from the campaign by the number of emails sent minus bounces. Once again, you’ll need to use data from your ESP and web analytics platform here.

Why: If you’re looking to generate income with your emails through direct sales, revenue per email sent can be a useful indicator. While it doesn’t reflect profit (or loss), it can give you a good feel for how much revenue you’re generating from your email list. It may be a bit more difficult to calculate than open and click-through rate, but it’ll be a better measure of your email campaigns success.

That about sums it up. Do you think we missed a major metric? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Looking for more ways to improve your email campaigns? Learn more about Filament and how we can help shine a light on your content in inboxes and on other digital channels.

19 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

6 Tips for Better Web Analytics

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist On October 19, 2015 With No Comments

Web analytics – and the good, the bad, and the ugly behind it all – is key to understanding and optimizing how people interact with your brand digitally. You can use the data you collect to get to know the people who interact with you or, better yet, the people who don’t interact with you. Likewise, analytics can help point you in the right direction for building relationships with these folks.

But first, you need solid, accurate data. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by data if you’re not careful, so we’ve put together a short list of tips to help you create a foundation for a clean and reliable data set and provide the right message at the right time to the right customer.

1. Keep it real.

Be realistic about your web analytics tools’ capabilities and your expectations of what they’ll deliver. We can be easily bamboozled by unrealistic promises that we really want to believe are possible. But don’t be fooled. You’ll only end up repeating those unrealistic expectations to the higher-ups, and when the tool inevitably doesn’t deliver, you’ll be the one who has to take responsibility for it—not the salespeople that sold you the tool.

2. Define in advance.

Doing the defining work in the beginning is critical. We discussed this last week in our blog post about identifying your business goals, key data points you’ll want to focus on, and more. You can read that here. As you’re defining, remember that you’ll want to start with your customers’ needs and work back from there.

In addition, remember that you’re dealing with different customers at different stages in the buying cycle who use different devices and come from different places. This will help you understand where to start to get the most from your analytics investments.

3. More isn’t always better.

Instead of trying to measure everything, look for high-quality data for those key data points you defined in #2. You want to collect and analyze data that maps to strategic business objectives.

Regardless of how much data you need, you want your data to be high quality—that is, data that’s applicable, analyzable and that you can have confidence in. In his post on good data vs. Big Data, Rudi Shumpert of Adobe Marketing Cloud suggests answering a few realistic questions to keep your data from exploding:

Do you have the capacity to store the volume of data you intend on collecting?
Can you create a platform that allows you to organize data in a way that permits generating useful reports?
Does your company employ real data scientists who know how to deal with data sets of the appropriate scale and volume?
Are you able to make sense of all that data before the next batch of data hits the servers?

4. When the data doesn’t balance, don’t freak out.

Since reporting methodologies between tools differ, you’ll inevitably see data discrepancies. For example, you might see discrepancy between your email system and your web analytics tool. Just make sure your data stays within an acceptable range and make decisions based on overall trends.

5. Make sure your data is accurate.

Since tags sometimes break or get duplicated, you’ll want to QA them. You can research the toolsets your web analytics tools offer for emergencies and prepare a response plan for those that pop up. In addition, we suggest conducting data audits to catch and manage data anomalies. There are several options available for automated tag checking and data quality audits such as ObservePoint and WASP (Web Analytics Solution Profiler).

6. Take action on what you’ve learned from the data.

The whole point of collecting data is to improve your marketing efforts. Once you’ve collected and analyzed the data, don’t forget to put the knowledge you’ve gained to work by translating the results into meaningful action that you then carry out.

Don’t let data overwhelm you. Instead, follow these digital analytics best practices to help focus on the data points that matter most. Use it to find critical segments of your target audience and identify key behavior patterns. You’ll begin to understand all the variables at play through practice and time.

Learn more about Filament and how we can help you create and execute effective digital marketing campaigns for your target audience.

16 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Using Analytics to Improve Your Social Strategy

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist On October 16, 2015 With No Comments

Did you know that more than half of the “top” websites in the world use Google Analytics? It makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, checking in on your website’s daily statistics is important.

We all like to know how many page views we’re getting and where our traffic is coming from, right? At least, that would be the general consensus indicated by most of the people using Google Analytics.

But what if we told you that “daily statistics” is just the beginning? What if we told you that Analytics can play a much bigger role in your social strategy? And, what if we told you that measuring those factors could actually help magnify your social marketing efforts?

It’s true.

After a quick glance at Analytics, we know we can learn more about how many people are coming to our websites, and where they’ve come from once they arrive. That’s all beneficial, but what about the things that aren’t quite as obvious? What about the statistics we don’t know much about? That may be where the analytical “gold” is really hidden.

While it’s critical to pay attention to the higher numbers – and it makes sense to keep doing what seems to be working – it’s worth looking into the dark holes in your data, too.

For example, a queries report will show you what words you’re ranking for. If you’re not using the words and phrases that you’re ranking for, or if you’re not using them enough, it might be time to build new campaigns around those higher-ranking words and terms. This one little element could potentially open doors to entirely new business categories, so it’s worth taking a second (or third…) look.

A landing page report is another important indicator. This will tell you which of your website pages people are coming to – or landing on – most frequently. This is where your social media efforts really stand out. If you’re noticing that more people are coming from a particular social media venue, you need to determine why that is. Is it simply because you put more time and attention into that venue? Or, is it because your target audience is naturally attracted to that venue?

Once you determine why you’re getting more results from one social media venue or another, you need to decide whether or not to continue with those that aren’t producing results. Look very carefully at your data, and then analyze your social marketing strategies to see where the goals, shortcomings, and opportunities lie before making any major changes. You don’t want to keep using resources unproductively, but you also don’t want to shut down any channels that have unknown potential.

The same goes for the pages of your website. While it’s pretty clear that your most popular pages should be getting most of your attention, you also need to consider what’s happening with pages that don’t have much traffic. We’re talking about the pages that people are clicking through and/or bouncing from fairly quickly. If those pages aren’t bringing traffic in or helping retain traffic that comes to your site, then what is their purpose? Is it possible to update them so they provide more interest to your visitors? Or, can you use them to re-direct visitors to other beneficial areas of your site?

Social media is the “appetizer” that you serve to your customers, and your website is the “main course.” Analytics is like the “dessert,” if you will. Not only does it keep you informed, but it can also help direct you to new opportunities that you may not be aware of. More opportunities equate to more business, and more business is definitely the frosting on the cake!

We’ll be talking about specific analytical tools in our next article. Until then, we’d like to hear about your experiences with Google Analytics. Tell us about your “A-Ha!” moments and what your biggest surprises have been. We’d love to know what new opportunities have come from Analytics discoveries. And, of course, if Analytics has shown you more than you can handle yourself, we’d be happy to help!

13 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With 1 Comment Permalink

How to Measure SEO Success

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist On October 13, 2015 With 1 Comment

There was a time when all you needed to do to measure SEO success was look at where your website fell in the search rankings. Even though that practice was a poor results model back then, some people still cling to that belief today. To really determine search engine optimization results you need to start measuring SEO efforts and then comparing those results – tracking them and making adjustments as needed.

There are a lot of different ways to track results, and more than a few companies out there that will do it for you. But one quick, efficient, and easy way to track your own results or set up an in-house SEO “team” is to use Google Analytics. Google is definitely the expert in the field, and their Analytics is free and fairly easy to navigate.

Next, you need to determine what you want to track. This can get pretty involved, but to start with, it’s driven by what your company’s goals are. According to Google Analytics, you may want to pay particular attention to traffic sources and keywords. If you’ve chosen to use another program these areas may have another name, but you’re looking to review where your customers are coming to you from. Determining this will help you track your affiliations and advertising efforts, and whether you’re using the right keywords.

The most powerful information you can get from these pages relates to your keywords and what words/phrases people are using to find you and your products. If they’re coming to you via words you haven’t even optimized to, it’s definitely time to contact Filament to update your keyword optimized web content. Then, continue following the trends to see if that makes a difference in the success of your business.

If you really want to play with analytics and the success of your ad campaigns, consider doing two different campaigns to see which one gets more traffic and attention. You may discover that people love it when you do a “BOGO sale” as opposed to a “Columbus Day sale” by doing both and then tracking the end results. This would indicate that, going forward, you may want to focus on the BOGO versus holiday-related advertising.

Another really important item to note is which page your visitors are coming to first. Typically it will be a home page but there are times when that doesn’t happen, whether it’s inadvertent and needs attention or it’s totally planned and your approach is going the way you hoped.

Finally, use the information about where people are coming from to help strengthen external ties and links, and formulate a solid social media campaign. The extra effort will really pay off!

07 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Email Campaign Tracking for Beginners

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist On October 7, 2015 With No Comments

In the past, digital marketers were in the dark about whether or not their emails were even received let alone opened. Now, however, we can tell when a subscriber opens the email, how many times they open it in a day, clicks on a link within that email, whether a video gets any views, and more. Email campaign tracking lets us build better relationships with our customers because we find out firsthand what they’re interested in.

You can track your email campaigns with Google using campaign tags called UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters. Campaign tags let you track for things like the campaign name and specific content within the email—perfect for when your email has multiple calls to action—in order to track how your subscribers interact with the emails you send. How and what you tag depends on your business goals. Check out our recent post on web analytics for some tips on clarifying those goals and translating them into meaningful metrics.

Campaign tags consist of additional information that you apply to links. Google offers a great tool for generating tagged links called the Google Analytics URL Builder plus helpful resources about email tracking in general.

Alternatively, you can also simply choose an email service, such as Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, that automatically applies campaign tags in your emails.

What do you do with the data collect? You can use it to track how well your email campaigns perform, your return on investment and learn where you can make improvements. But the usefulness of email tracking data doesn’t stop there. You can also use it to help create buyer personas and a killer segmentation strategy.

Need help setting up your Google Analytics for email tracking? Get in touch with Filament. We can also help you create irresistible subject lines that cut through the inbox clutter and email content that’s engaging, shareable, and relevant to your target audience.

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