To succeed your start-up must be lean. These are key principles to apply to marketing
Around the world, thousands of new businesses with exciting new ideas for original products start up every day. To say most of them fail is an understatement. The reality is the vast majority fail. Yet some go on to transform the way we live, eat, shop, work and pay for things. Start-ups are remaking the modern business landscape by disrupting established players. It's an exciting time to work for a start-up, or even better to be a founder. However, that doesn't change the incredibly slim odds of success.
Why do Start-ups fail?
Start-ups fail for all sorts of different reasons. But they all suffer from a set of problems which more often than not are the primary reason for their failure. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, David Collis, outlines these problems as suffering from a…
Using a bottom-up model to guide your analysis, you can gather amazing insights from the data you already possess
The key to data analytics lies in asking the right questions, but success can often hinge on the person who is asking those questions.
Traditionally, organizations have analyzed their businesses from the perspective of the boardroom, approaching problems from the top down. But in trying to address how to best use their data to solve problems without first understanding the data itself, errors of human bias and oversimplification of the issue may occur. Consequently, company leaders may invest time, money, and resources into technology and products that don’t deliver on expectations. Just because a software package comes with a flashy dashboard and a colorful knack for highlighting correlated relationships doesn’t mean it’s all that great at proving the causal ones.
But there’s no turning…
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time
You’ve probably heard this expression before. The “elephant” is the project, or goal, which is so large and challenging that you feel totally overwhelmed by it, and can’t even see where to start.
The advice is not to tackle it all at once, but to start with small steps. Take enough of them, and before you know it, you will have made serious progress – and no longer feel so overwhelmed.
For many business owners, online marketing is that elephant.
All those social media platforms….. So much to learn and understand …. Such an investment of time and money required…..
Where do you even begin? How do you make serious progress?
It can be totally paralysing.
In three months’ time, I…
Focussing on the wrong metrics can be a distraction and a waste of time but there are ways to keep your focus and make measurement worthwhile
When it comes to marketing metrics, do you ever feel like you’re chasing the wind? In the case of false metrics, that’s exactly what you are doing.
False metrics are the metrics that distract you from the metrics that really matter. They’re likely to be everyday KPIs, but they don’t really have an impact on the bottom line.
In the world of marketing, false metrics appear all too often and it is commonplace to hear about the wrong metrics being measured and reported.
Examples of the wrong metrics would be:
Chasing Facebook ‘likes’ or Twitter followers
Looking at social media reach
Undertaking an SEO campaign in order to increase traffic to your website.
There is a tendency to just gauge what…
Separating ROI from data noise
Learn what metrics can help you truly understand the value of your spend, and what technologies really deliver on this most important metric.
Small-to-medium businesses are investing in their marketing at jaw-dropping new levels. BIA/Kelsey predicts that 2015 will be a banner year for local media expenditure on the part of these organizations, with investment exceeding $50 billion. Digital investments are at the forefront, with 28% of marketers reducing their traditional advertising budget to fund more digital marketing and search marketing capturing the largest share of online spend at 47%, according to Business2Community. But with so many dollars on the line, how can a business know what investments are really paying off?
Return on Investment is the gold standard that today’s marketers are seeking. But with each new media channel, there is new complexity in the metrics…
Maps for reviewing the range of insights tools to improve digital marketing
We love tools for managing digital marketing as I think many working in marketing today do... When I'm talking at conferences I often see most pens to paper when I'm recommending the many freemium tools to gain insight to improve results from marketing.
Sharing advice on selecting and using these tools to get better results from digital marketing was one of the drivers behind setting up Smart Insights and we'll soon be launching a marketplace to feature these tools - get in touch if you'd like to be featured in our new directory.
However, the range of tools to gain insight is daunting and this has been highlighted again by the new Gartner Digital Marketing Transit Map - newly updated for Spring 2015.
It's a great complement…
The massive volume of analytics data can confuse and point you in the wrong direction. Here’s how to understand what your website visitors are really doing...
Web analytics can be extremely useful, but it the data can also be a curse. Indeed, online we now live in a world swimming with data, so much so we have to call it “big data”. The problem with big data is it needs big analysis. The more analytics you collect, the more time it takes to wade through the reports and try to work out what is happening with your website.
Google Analytics, for instance, has 103 standard reports you can look at. That’s before you start adding your own specific requirements and comparisons. In addition, there is a problem with all of these reports; none of them tell you “why” a visitor did what…
Track and optimize these 5 metrics and watch your profits surge
As a digital marketer with access to Google Analytics plus your multiple inbound marketing tools, you have hundreds upon hundreds of metrics to consider while judging your results. Where to start? For example, here is just a tiny list of metrics to consider to start:
Number of website visitors
Website bounce rate
Email subscriber list size
Email open rate
Advertising CTR (click-through rate)
Number of new leads
Overwhelming... I know.
The natural question that arises is, which metrics are the most important to track, and why? This article will answer just that. I'll explain the 5 most critical metrics for your business, and how tracking them will boost your profits immediately.
Business Asset Metrics vs. Operating Metrics
Before we go over the 5 key metrics, I want to briefly explain the importance of Business Asset Metrics and Operating Metrics, and the difference between the two.
Operating Metrics are the numbers that gauge your current…
8 steps showing how to combine SMART and RACE to set campaign goals
SMART goals are a commonly referenced concept in marketing, to help check that goals are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Time bound (i.e. have a deadline). Goals have their place at all levels of planning whether business planing, marketing planning or campaign planning. It can often be the difference between a successful campaign and not. As my previous post on goal-setting for marketing showed, they have huge benefits in:
Empowering, aligning and focusing teams and colleagues
Managing senior management
Giving you and your team a sense of success
Allow you to understand a campaign within a wider marketing activity context
But in practice, it's not easy to select and set goals, they are very rarely obvious especially when you put them against the SMART test. Setting goals requires a numbers of thing's…
Working with your HiPPO
Data / analytics can be both liberating and restrictive but the one thing it will always do and do well is ensure we remain commercially focused. I was at a clients HQ for the first time 2 weeks ago and this quote summarises my belief about business and why being commercially minded is fundamental to success: “We need freedom to shape our future; we need profit to remain free”. This quote is the one thing that can unite teams if understood and even help with the subject of my blog post. I spent a lot of my junior marketing days in data analysis tools like Omniture & Google helping to craft my story of how me / my team were performing and to show our contribution to the business, it rarely went as I expected in the early days, but I learnt and learned fast, here are 5 ways I found to help me that I…
