A new report reviewing how we use data to take business decisions
One of my passions within digital marketing has always been around improving online activities using the data available on online customer interactions. It's why we're called Smart Insights and a lot of our posts and guides show how to make the most of this data by asking the right questions to improve performance and take the right investment decisions.
But this focus on data-driven improvement is a mindset and not one that everyone in marketing holds; it's not necessarily why they went into marketing as a career or they feel they must rely more on intuition and gut feel.
This infographic based on research from Nesta from their useful report, Rise of the Datavores, shows that Datacores are surprisingly rare. I wondered how this compared to Smart Insights readers, so please let us know in this poll.
How…
How should companies align their marketing activities with business goals?
By Jim Sterne, Founder of The eMetrics Summit.
Source: Gartner Hype Cycle for Big Data
Big Data, as the name would suggest is, well….big. With so much you can measure, what should you measure? With so many measurement options, the more difficult question is no longer about standards or technologies, but about goals. What are you trying to accomplish?
You can answer that question as a business: raise revenue, lower costs, increase shareholder value, etc. You can also answer that question as a profit center: increase profit, grow market share, increase customer satisfaction…
But the real attention-getting question to ask about goals is personal.
How are you compensated?
The manager who will only make his annual bonus if customer satisfaction goes up X% doesn't seem to mind going a…
4 tools that give you a fuller view of your online marketing spend
If your business receives a high volume of inbound sales calls referred from your website, then tying your telesales function into your marketing metrics is absolutely crucial to ensure you understand the overall performance of your online marketing spend. This key marketing requirement has led to different call tracking measurement tools being created and made available to marketers which I'll introduce in this post.
Why integrate call tracking?
Call tracking measurement has often been something restricted to a sales manager giving them an understanding of volume of inbound calls and then looking at the conversion rate to sale, generally broken down by agent. However as marketers, we need to understand what made a customer call in the first place. When we understand this we can make (more) educated decisions on marketing spend.
Without call tracking in place, if we look purely…
What is Big Data and how can it be applied for marketing?
It seems "Big Data" should be firmly on the agenda for business improvement according to all the major analyst firms. But what is Big Data? How does it differ from traditional data management and business intelligence?
In this post I summarise the view of three experts I talked to about "Big Data", asking how business can apply it.
What is the scope of big data?
Andy Mendelsohn, Senior VP of Database Server Technologies at Oracle.
One way to think about the scope of big data and how it fits in with previous data technologies is to consider the automobile industry, suggests Andy Mendelsohn. “Henry Ford invented the Model T 100 years ago,” he argues. “Today, Ford makes cars, and they have much better engines, and they have their full sensors and computer systems. But at the end of the day, they're still cars.…
How Facebook Test and Improve
It’s interesting to see recent details of how Facebook are now testing changes to their experience and ads using the vast amount of data at their disposal. I’ve been taking a look and thinking what this means for smaller businesses without this data and resource.
Facebook recently disclosed in a briefing on how it uses Big Data that its system processes a mind-boggling 2.5 billion pieces of content and 500+ terabytes of data each day. It’s processing 2.7 billion Like actions and 300 million photos per day, and it scans roughly 105 terabytes of data each half hour.
I’ve been reading about how they manage this in the Facebook engineering blog in this post by Andrew (Boz) Bosworth who is the Director of Engineering at Facebook and is naturally from Harvard and FWIW looks a cool dude!
…
Using AlternativeTo to find better ways of working
If you are anything like me, you like to find new tools and ways to improve what you are doing. Software, apps and online services are often ways to aid in process changes, but searching the web, looking for reviews etc can make this task very boring and costly (from a time perspective).
In this post, I'm recommending AlternativeTo (www.alternativeto.net), a site recently introduced to me. For any service you're already using, it will give you a user rated list of alternative apps, software and services to trial and use instead.
Another example of where this tool is relevant is if you are making the switch from PC to Mac (one I would recommend) you might want to find a similar tool you use on the PC for a Mac. Using the search, filters, categories & tags it is easy to what you are looking…
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July 24, 2012
Step Two - Talk
In this article we continue to explain the 6-step Conversion Architecture model we discussed in Part 1, which dealt with Step One – “Analyse”. This 6-step process has been developed over the last 10 years of our work to become the foundation of all our clients’ projects.
Step Two - Talk
If step one focused on data analysis from analytics, the ‘talk’ phase is all about the human analysis. In other words, you’ve perused all the hard stats, now you need to gain a more qualitative insight.
You are not the audience for your website. Looks obvious when it’s written down, but I see websites every day that have clearly been created with little consideration for the customer.
You need to understand your audience so you can construct a targeted strategy. I mean, truly understand them. You can look…
How to convert more B2B prospects
In the entire history of business you have never been able to access as much data as you can now, thanks to the plethora of analytics programs around.
And, today you can find out more about your customers than you could a few months ago - because analytics software is constantly being upgraded.
In fact, companies are now swimming with so much data that analysing it in any meaningful way is often too difficult.
Which vital data is unavailable from analytics?
According to the business intelligence company, BuiltWith, Google Analytics is by far the most popular service; used by just under half the top one million websites worldwide.
Google Analytics presents each site with thousands of pages of up-to-date information covering every aspect of their current and historical website use - in other words, what people did.
There is, however,…
Burberry case study
I’ve shown how many of the leading brands who use digital media successfully have clear statements of their vision for digital media to transform their brand and using BHAG to support these. Increasingly, these statements show how community and social media are important to support this transformation.
I think this is a really good example of how to articulate such a vision:
You may have seen the video late last year - it’s also a great example of how to use a customer testimonial by Salesforce.com as part of their “social enterprise" proposition, which promises to ‘incorporate social elements into every aspect of a business”.
I find many like this clarification of video, but many have seen it! If you have, take a look at the new video from Salesforce client Rossignol on how Social media has transformed their business.
In it, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts…
wherever in the world you are...
We're about to take a bit of a break, so we thought we'd say "Hope you enjoy your break".
I'd also like to say a big "thanks" to all who have shared ideas on marketing better through posts, comments and shares over the year. We're looking forward to sharing more of the latest insights with your help next year.
We would also like to thank all the talented folk who worked hard to create the new SmartInsights.com including designers Anna Weaver and Chris Leach of First 10, Paul Rouke of usability company PRWD, plus James Wray and Alasdair Wightman. Thanks guys!
Introducing Clicky Analytics
We've covered a lot of tools to help with analysis and planning, so will end the year with one more recommendation. Since we've launched the new site we've started using the excellent Clicky alongside Google Analytics. Here's an idea of where our site visitors are…
