analytics – Veronica Stenberg

How to evaluate your marketing investments

Veronica — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 07:00:49 +0000

When working with digital marketing during these precarious times it’s useful to ask a few key questions to ensure the right investments are made. Every penny counts and with the right set-up and questions you can ask your team or agency to help you identify the following:

Are you investing in the right audience?

What does the visitor do on the website after click-through – compare to cost of audience, conversion rate against purpose.

What investment in what channel is generating which result?

Look at the quality of the target audience – what they do on the website after the initial click? And against conversion, exit/bounce rate.
If you are able, measure against generated revenue from the visitors of the channel to determine the quality of the new customers from that channel.

What campaigns/ad groups cost the most?

Compare against purpose and evaluate if the investment is worth it, based on the campaign purpose. (Eg reach campaigns should be evaluated against reach of desired target audience and interaction on your website – conversion driven campaigns against conversions generated)

What are your most successful ads – and why?

What ads cost the most against the purpose of performance?
Look at the quality of the audience through website interactions or conversions, match against targeting.

What customers cost the most to attract versus their lifetime value?

Compare CLV against CPA on target audience and compare on channel level. This enables you to determine if you are investing in marketing towards the right customers.

Are your creative assets (such as ads) relevant to each target group?

By evaluating the CTR from who you target versus who clicks, and then converts. (Depends on purpose of ad or course)

Take it a step further

You can also ask your agency or team, to dive deeper depending on channel and help you identify on a more nitty gritty level such as keywords for search ads, time a day, devices, geography and so forth.

Should you need help with analysis, you can contact med through Nimble & co.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Forget monthly reports – 7 reasons why you need dashboards for your business

Veronica — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 06:42:03 +0000

The purpose of a dashboard can be different depending on what you want to achieve. By applying specific dashboard reports for different target groups within an organisation, you help people who may not be used to working with analysis to more easily ask questions and make decisions that are based on data. Especially if you have key data in various platforms such as Google Analytics, a CRM, a booking plattform and so on that you need to be able to allocate into one comprehensive view.

There are a number of different opportunities in relation to following up on your marketing activities for both business management, sales, CX and the marketing department to understand perfomance and what you should act on in the near future. And by near future, I mean today.

Businesses often use a dashboard to identify and highlight key data in a format that is easily accessible, visual and easy to understand. By using a dashboard, you can avoid silo reporting of important data and you can get a holistic view of your business’ digital presence, performance and how it affects your business.

It is easy to adapt dashboard views to different target groups within an organization. If you have more than one agency they can also report into the same tool and give the business one report on how the digital presence performs in its entirety.

A dashboard provides focus and increases awareness of the role of the digital presence for the business. It enables you to work actively and efficiently with data that is available from more than one plattform. By utilizing automatic reporting you can quicker make decisions that will impact performance. From decisions to change focus in various marketing channels, redistribute marketing budgets to identify new needed actions based on data that is up to date. A crucial component in being able to work more data-driven is to actually make decisions here and now and not 6 weeks after receiving a monthly report. Then you base those decisions and actions on by then historic data. The faster you act the better you can increase performance.

From a business perspective, there are many benefits of utilizing dashboards to follow up, work with, and act on data:

Save time

By reducing the administration time to get the data you need for your reporting. As the data is ofter located in more than one plattform in order to get a holistic view of business performance.

Increase organisational efficiency

By reducing the time to obtain key data, and manually generate reports in order to analyse results and perfomance. Your organization becomes more efficient and can act faster from insight to executing any measures needed to optimize business results.

Get ahead start against your competitors

By giving your team the tools to effectively follow up on performance and act, they can thus spend more time and focus on working towards achieving the business’ goals.

Identify new potential

By actively working and following up on performance, your business will be able to identify new potential to increase sales/conversions, reduce friction in the conversion flow or act to redistribute marketing budgets accordingly to where the potential is.

Increase collaboration within your organisation

Place your business goals in the forefront for your team by making key performance indicators and data accessible and visible within the organisation. This increases the focus on the common goals of the business. An important key in getting everyone to work in the same direction.

Create a customer-focused mindset

Today it is increasingly important to follow up on the various customer journeys and experiences. By building a dashboard that handles customer-related KPI’s, your business can more quickly follow up on and view specific activities from the perspective of your customers.

Make the right priorities

When it comes to the digital presence, there are endless possibilities today in relation to what you can do. From testing new platforms, run experiments through A/B testing and more. By following up on performance against your strategy and correlating KPI’s, your business knows what activities to focus on and not. Since you will gain what works and what dosen’t. This ensures that both budgets and time is invested in the right activities for your business.

Photo by inlytics on Unsplash

An action list to build the foundation for modern marketing for your business

Veronica — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 06:44:27 +0000

During April I put down some of my thoughts on what I would have done if I was a CMO or CEO for a small business during Covid-19, in regards to marketing and communication. (It’s available over here, no email etc required to download it).

To make it easier the PDF also included a summary of actions that if you haven’t implemented them already, you should do so now. As some of them contribute towards creating a competitive advantage for any business that incorporates these. As well as some Covid-19 specific action points.

DOWNLOAD ADVICE PDF

Each action item is associated with the specific section from the PDF in question and is explained in more detail. So if you want to access all the full picture and explanations just download the marketing PDF.

Even though some action items are specific to communicating during a more sensitive time or scenario, many of the action items in the PDF are hygiene factors that should be part of your foundation when working with modern marketing. As they allow you to save time, work more effectively and focused as well as provide you with valuable insights for your business.

Therefore I decided to include the entire list in text and as a separate PDF to download in the end of this document.

Data

Utilize UTM-tags
Identify a few KPIs you should follow up on for your business

Paid marketing

Identify low hanging fruits
Target basket abandoners
Build audience lists based on behaviour
Twins/look-alikes

Automate

Use software plugins & functionality
Identify autoresponders
Use HubSpot’s list building functionality
Test responsive display ads

Follow-up

Ask the right questions from your data
Build automatic reports and dashboards
A/B Test

Marketing & communication

Be mindful and stay current
Be mindful of choice of images
Focus on giving
Double down on communication with your online community

Work with purpose

Know your priority
Have a strategy
Act with purpose – don’t react

DOWNLOAD LIST PDF

Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Uncover the power of human interactions – the benefits of speech analytics for your business

Veronica — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 08:00:41 +0000

Every day I try to feed my brain something new either it be a podcast, article, book or video. That offer ups new perspectives or knowledge that I can ponder and hopefully contribute towards me becoming better at what I can do for others.

The other day I was sipping green tea and getting to grips with Speach Analytics and how this can be utilized to provide both better customer service and business growth.

For you who did not have the luxury of attending this mornings seminar hosted by Access Nordics on this topic, here are my notes and key takeaways – enjoy:

What is speech analytics?

Speech Analytics is the method used to harvest insights from human to human interactions. Trough phone calls, (cal also be complemented with emails or social media) and gather actionable insights from these interactions. Its the use of analysis of the tone, words and so on to identify emotions, stress levels etc to uncover the reason for the call.

What is speech analytics not?

Speech Analytics is not the same as Siri, Google Home or Echo as today humans need to adapt their speech interactions to fit the software. Eg we do not speak normally to our home assistants – we need to adapt our speech to them. So they will understand us. (But I’m sure the big corporations use speech analytics in some form or another when they listen into to us through these devices, but that’s another topic )

Understand your customers

You can utilize speech analytics to faster and more effectively harvest insights to understand your customers from customer call centre interactions. Instead of listening in to calls, you can use this type of software to visualise, search for and work with customer call centre interactions to find the specific recordings that you want to screen.

Cultural differences do make a difference

When working with speech analytics between various markets, let’s say you work at are an international company, you need to take in account how that culture, generally express anger, happiness, frustration and disappointment when you set up the systems etc. As we tend to – very generalised express ourselves differently based on the country we live or are from.

Identify broken digital customer journeys

Utilising this type of software you can identify broken digital customer journeys and work to streamline the customer experience and minimize login problems, missing confirmation, technical issues and self-service failures/issues.

Here are 7 additional notes that are food for thought from this morning on how speech analytics can contribute towards both better customer experience and business growth:

Half of the calls to customer service centres are unwanted calls
Identify the pain in waiting for the customer and what your company can do about this
Identify what poor service sounds like
Identify insights that can support your digital agenda
Empathy increases NPS scores
Identify drivers for CSAT and NPS scores
Uncover insights for fact-based management decisions for your organisation
Identify how to improve the customer service agents performance and service levels

Photo by Lidya Nada on Unsplash

How to measure effectiveness of marketing activities

Veronica — Mon, 14 May 2018 04:35:33 +0000

The biggest mistake many companies still do and the one thing that can actually make a difference for your business, is not measuring and following up your marketing activities. In some cases, companies still – despite the digital age that we live in – even lack a why, to who’m and clear KPI’s with their different activities.

Even though you may argue that your business have limited resources both in terms of money and time, I say it’s in that context even more imperative that you actually assign both a purpose and a KPI to your marketing activities. This so you can follow-up in any analytics software what your investments actually generate for you.

If you can’t follow up on your marketing, you don’t know if what you are doing is working. Focusing on vanity metrics such as clicks, views etc in not sufficient to understand if a campaign is delivering business value for you.

This is a cornerstone and such an obvious thing to have in place, that it have never occurred to me, until recently that I need to address this on my blog. But it’s now started to dawn on me, that this is still lacking in different types of organisations today, that I just had to write about this. I hope I can help and educate others on how to set this up and how to get started. So let’s start with the basics of why you need this.

The benefits of following up your marketing:

You get full insight on how many sales or leads (or whatever else the end goal of a campaign is for your company) a specific activity generates for you
You get full insight in if a marketing supplier, channels etc that you invest in deliver value to your business
You will be able to make better media investments and distribute your budget more holistic depending where in the customer journey you may need to invest more, or less
Drive revenue by doing more of what works
Find a focus
Optimize your marketing activities – from media mix selection to creative and communication
Run experiments and pilot campaigns before you make larger investments, hence being able to spend your marketing budget more wisely by running initial tests

You do not need to invest in any complicated software, chances are that you already have Google Analytics installed. If so what you need to to, in order to follow up on your marketing activities are the following:

Install Google Analytics, if you don’t have this already
Install Google Tag Manager, which helps you track and “install” more tags and tracking on your website in a more orderly fashion
Ensure you have goal tracking (on the end goal, such as sales or forms filled in) and events for interaction elements that you’ like to track on your website (such as video views or downloads)
If you have an online shop, activate enhanced ecommerce for Google Analytics
Decide on a framework that you will use to tag your links with. I only use campaign source (for example newsletter) medium (email) and name (autumn_2018) as not to complicate things.
Tag your links using Google URL builder
Post your content, campaigns etc
Follow-up in Google Analytics

You may need help for a few hours of a developer that can help set-up the tracking on your website, but this is not a huge investment and long term you will earn that money back, just in a few months. In terms of the insight you now have.

If you don’t want to log in to Google Analytics and drill down to the data. You can do one of the following:

Drill down once in your Google Analytics account and save the URL and just update the parameters when you have to
Invest in having a custom view set-up for you in Google Analytics with only the data you need to see

Summary of free Analytic Tools that you can use:

Google Analytics – to track the interaction with your website

Google Tag Manager – a “container” for scripts and tracking. Helps you install new tags and scripts on your website without having to ask a developer for help

Google URL Builder – to tag your campaign and marketing URL’s so that you can track them in Google Analytics

Google Data Studio – free tool for data visualisation (limited functionality as this is more for reporting purposes) but a free tool to make custom views and reports

Not measuring and following up on your marketing activities is an investment you cannot afford NOT to do.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

The Foundations of Digital Marketing

Veronica — Mon, 15 May 2017 04:30:09 +0000

Either it be a new job or a new client. This is the fool-proof process I put in place to get the initial understanding to build a foundation for digital marketing and communication.

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Look at existing data and set-up

Identify what works
Identify what need to be improved or can actually be removed completely
Find hurdles in the customer journey – and take appropriate measures to adjust these. If you want a head start on what questions to ask the website data – you can get some inspiration over here.

Ensure you have the tracking in place to measure both goals and events

If you don’t have the proper tracking in place, you will never be able to evaluate performance nor highlight the results your work have generated. Always ensure that there is tracking in place and most importantly that it actually works. If there is – great – then there is the next challenge and that is event tracking beyond the last KPI which is often conversion or lead. Identify key pages in the customer journey and make your KPI framework reflect this.

Get insight about the target groups

If you don’t know who your customers are, their interest, driving forces, pain points and so forth. Then is hard to craft compelling and useful content, find the right marketing messages and start building that customer relationship that sets your company apart from all other companies offering the same product. Investing in getting the customer insight you need will pay off.

Ensure you have a campaign landing page for bought media

It doesn’t matter how much money you invest – or throw away – on bought media if you don’t invest in a landing page that is streamlined, to the point, de-cluttered and easy to convert on.

Make an “open” customer journey

Identify key pages in the customer journey and ensure you have the right content, messaging and also event tracking and KPI’s to follow the customers and work actively and regularly with improving the customer journey and experience in all your digital touchpoints.

These are however just the mechanics and the foundation – on top of this you need to ensure that you have something to say and that your company is using content, the right social media platforms where the target groups are. But once you’ve done this – you have the right foundation for starting the work with the really fun stuff as the creative and marketing

How to calculate potential ROI for a media investment

Veronica — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 05:00:52 +0000

This is my calculation which I use when I want to see if there is a business case behind a media investment for my clients or my own marketing initiatives.

There are so much information available today, and from that you can manually calculate predictions and potentials before you choose to invest in a specific media, channel or campaign. Armed with the right specific, relevant numbers for your business and some industry averages you can create a hypothesis for the potential for an investment if you are unsure, or just want to make a calculation in terms how you should re-distribute your media budgets and what the potential could be.

Marketing today, merges business savviness and analytical skills. There is just a question of time (I guess there already is someone out there who has turned this into a formula, if not, that someone could make some nice bit of cash on a software for this, collecting data from advertisers, merged with some kind of ad score to calculate predictions based on data available).

You need the following numbers:

Average order value for your website
Average conversion rate for your website
Average CTR of ads for the specific media
CPM or CPC price per media
Budget per media
Calculated impressions per media and budget
Estimated clicks per media
Estimated conversions from each media

= estimated revenue per media

NOTE:

This is just a calculation of potential and you use averages and generic numbers for the CTR for example, it’s just to get a clue about the potential and what specific budget can generate.
Your ads and landing pages, entire website and check-out process has a huge impact on if your campaign and marketing activities that your business do, are successful or not.
If applicable, you may want to deduct the VAT from the final calculation.
If applicable, you may want to do a second calculation on this, deducting a percentage, if you have that number, for any return rate you may have on your goods.
If you are doing a campaign for various geographical locations you need the conversion rate and average order value for each country and website store.
Each media needs to be evaluated and calculated separately. Since CTR and similar may vary from both media and country.

How to measure brand awareness

Veronica — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 06:38:19 +0000

To know how your brand is doing in terms of getting more or less know. Or the initiative you are working on, there are a few quick ways to find out without involving an agency or undergoing a big research project.

View these methods as a preview of if your brand are increasing or decreasing in awareness. A first step in an investigation that will give you an indication in terms of what to do next.

Google Trends

Google Trends is an excellent research tool to get an indication how brand awarness initatives have performed. Match this with events, PR work, product launches and exlplore the effect these have had on search volume relating to your brand and vertical.

Let’s use Elegantly Vegan as an example:

As you can see there are a few spikes in this graph in terms of search volume. (For you who don’t know Elegantly Vegan is my side project where I write about vegan food and lifestyle). These spikes in search volume has do do with press coverage. Every time a magazine, newspaper or a larger website has written about Elegantly Vegan – the search volume goes up. Since there is a specific correlation and its easy for me to remember, the conclusion here is that, there is low awareness of Elegantly Vegan since the blog is not that well known.

Compare this to the topic vegan recipes you can see what the potential and what can be achieved with a little bit (well a lot) more work.

If you view the page you can also see related topics that are rising and more detailed infomation which also heps you in establishing an understanding on how your brand are doing in terms of awarness. (Vegan recipes as an example)

Google Analytics & Google Search Console

If you haven’t already, you need to enable Search Console to get an indication of what keywords people are using to land on your website. Can you see a rise in branded keywords and queries? if so, this is an indication that you are increasing in awareness.

Google AdWords and/or other paid search

The same logic applies to your paid search, does the branded keywords and queries increase in performance? then you are on to something.

Followers in social channels

If followers are increasing and mentions are increasing, you are gaining. If not, you need to work on your brand awareness initiatives.

In terms of mentions – are they positive or negative?

Useful tools

Google Alerts – get notified when your brand or a topic related to a bradn is mentioned online (indexed as search result) to keep on top of what is written and said about you.

Mention – monitor your brand, competitors and industry on teh web and in social channels.

Trackur – if you want insight, but a free trial first, use this.

Klout – “scorecard” to measure influence

Image credit – aka borrowed from: pingler.com

How to start working with data to increase sales

Veronica — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 05:27:08 +0000

A cornerstone in your marketing activities is to work with the data you have. You don’t need to be a senior web analyst or a data scientist to do this. Today a Marketing Manager or CMO need to have the knowledge about key metrics and the competence to harness the power of data to transform it into ROI action for the business they market and work for.

Larger companies have already started working with more advanced techniques, such as Machine Learning, predictive analysis and so forth and every company, no matter how large or small, will have to improve the way and also increase the understanding of data, to be part of the future. Being data driven is now a competitive advantage and in the very near future it will be standard procedure for being able to stay within the competition for a customers attention or will to purchase.

Here is a simple framework that anyone can master that will help you start working with data, to turn it into insight and action. Without being complicated.

1/ Start small and use what you got
You probably have a website analytics software and perhaps a customer database of some sort. Establish what you have and then how you can use this for insight for simple improvements.

2/ Focus and ask questions
Remove the clutter of information by creating questions that are relevant to get the answers to. Such as:

What issues can you find on key pages such as decision and conversion process
Can you A/B test or test a new solution?
What patterns can you see?
Is there a trend?
Can you identify 3-5 tasks to test or changes to make?
(for more inspiration for questions, read this beginners guide to web analytics for businesses)
Can you segment the data you have?
Can you use the data in another platform? (for example CRM data to find look-a-likes on Facebook)
Can you ask your customer service department for insights and then cross-check with the data?

3/ Set aside 2 hours/week for this
Make this part of your routine and non negotiable. Rather spend 2 hours/week on this then emails. What activity will grant the most successful outcome for your work?

4/ Implement small changes and actions
Each week, identify 3-5 or even just one thing to change on your website, in your communication etc. And then make that change.

5/ Do this for 3 months
then compare before and after in terms of sales, customer satisfaction and other key metrics.

THE END GOAL: delight your customers/visitor/subscribers

IMAGE COPYRIGHT: broadly.com

How to optimise your business online presence or service (manuscript)

Veronica — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 05:30:56 +0000

If you are looking to improve your online presence, either it be through a website re-design or just to refine and improve your service experience and offering online, this is a manuscript you can use to help you in the process. Feel free to subtract, add and refine

Overarching questions & material

Information about your customer journey
Path to purchase
Internal purchase process – what internal touch points do you have for a sale to go through? who are involved?
How and when do you communicate with your customer during their purchase process? who does it? (department and responsibility)
Who are your biggest competitors? and how do your company differentiate from them?

Organisational questions (for internal use – meant to be answered by your company)

What is your biggest challenge/s today? and why?
Why do your business have a website?
What role does the website have in your business?
How can and should your company website can support your business?How do you measure the success today? (with the website and also your business – what is success)
What are your KPIs?
How can we measure success in the future?

Target audience

Who are they? define target groups (i.e working moms, business owners etc)
What do they need? what motivations do they have? What do they want? (Contact, book, buy, ask questions or answer to questions, learn more?) Define the pain points.
What “problem” solves does your business solve per target audience? (how do your business ease the pain or remove it completely?)
What information do you have about the existing customer today? surveys / studies?

Current site
Evaluate it against your current service offering with your customers in mind. Focus on their needs and questions and how the website can cater for this – within seconds:

What pages are important in their journey/path to purchase (if you are unsure, see the previous article on content audit)
Geographically – where do they come from and the service is available in their city?
Contact – who should they call? When? How? Are the contact details obvious and easily accessible if you offer your service in more then one location?
Can you offer price calculations for your service (if its a service that needs to be quoted individually you can ask for certain information beforehand and offer a rough pricing)
How do your company win your customers trust? (Testimonials from current customers, photos of people in environments they help in?)

Current customer
What is the goal of the website for a current customer, what should they do and what want to have to to do that? How do you take care of your customers today? Do you want them to buy more services from you? And how do they want to take care of them? what information do they need?

Your current customers – what do you know about them?
What percentage of today’s customer portfolio returns and purchases services from you again?
How long is the life cycle of the customers?
Why does a customer leave your business and choose another provider? (is it location, service offering? availability?)
How happy is your customer with your service and business today?
When a customer leaves you for another service provider – do you know which competitor they choose over you?
If you have more then one service and target audience – are there services that overlap between the different target audiences? Ie are there are solutions/services that different target audiences can buy from you?

Potential new customer – what should they do? Call? Fill forms? Book a time? Depending on the service you offer online – pin down what you want a potential new customer to do, i.e a person evaluating different options prior purchase – what do they need? and how can your website cater for this?

The sales process – applicable even if your website is generating leads for your sales reps or department:
What is your conversion rate today?
What is a lead? call / fill a the contact form / calculate a price / book or download?
How many leads do you get from the site today? And what happens then? and do you track how many leads are converted to customers?
What is the process? How do I book a time? How the process works today?

Or if your website sell gods or services – what is the process? before and after purchase?

Quick questions for your website analytics;

Where visitors come from?
Where do they leave the site?
What primary pages are important in the purchase process? investigate how they perform
Conversion rate? goal?
Geography – where do they come from?
Devices (in relation to mobile first)
Average time, pv / how long they stay? (on key pages)
Bounce rate on key pages
Exit rate on key pages
What keywords do your visitors use when searching and ending up on your website?
What exit rate do your lead form or sales pages have? (the pages that close a deal?)
What content do the visitors engage with? (download, forms, click to call, external and internal link clicks, etc)

Other digital touch points (not only your website)

What other digital touch points do your company have?
Social channels?
Newsletters?
Paid media?
How do they tie together? what purpose does each channel have?
Do they deliver? and what?
Are they on brand?
How can they support your company better?
Do you measure traffic and conversions from these?

Image copyright by: fleximize.com

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