B2B – Veronica Stenberg

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

The key to data driven decisions

Veronica — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 06:13:36 +0000

In today’s data driven world there is new data to gather insights from every minute of the day every day, from multiple locations, from multiple devices in various contexts about your customer, campaign performance and sales.

A monthly or weekly report for data is now obsolete, since the information you are viewing is not necessary relevant anymore and the information is already outdated when the PDF-reports start to hit your inbox.

And by the time you had the opportunity to get a gather all the relevant reports from all your relevant sources, the information is probably not relevant and in most cases only targeted to your marketing department within your organization.

To solve this challenge there are a plethora of new tools available to build a dashboard to vizualise the data in real time. Som simple apps you can download to your iPhone other more complex where you can add TV spot info and view in relation to visitor flow on your website.

The benefits of building a dashboard are many and here are a few:

Gather data from all relevant sources and access real time data for real time data driven insights and decisions.
Remove the noise and clutter of irrelevant information and streamline and visualise the data only containing the relevant information
Put the information in a relevant context for IT, Sales, marketing etc by creating custom dashboards only containing the information necessary and relevant for them
Add business KPI’s to the visualisation of the data and evaluate performance
Add indicators for actions when a metric drops below a certain threshold to take actions immediately
See the complete picture, not having to piece together information yourself from different reports. Get the holistic view of your business performance.
Design relevant dashboards for each department of your organisation.

Tools:

https://www.datapine.com

http://global.qlik.com/

Build your own dashboard in Google Analytics:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1068216?hl=en

Image source and copyright: slidemodel.com

How to create a KPi framework

Veronica — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 06:55:24 +0000

The key to knowing if you are investing in the right marketing activities and have a website that works for your business is to set your purpose and goals and have your customers pain points/needs and journey (as in path to purchase and beyond it) well defined.

Once you have established what your end goal with your maketing activities is (eg sale, lead etc) you can create a simple KPI framework that will help you understand if your website needs improving to investing and evaluating marketing activities which should follow the flow of the different states.

You will find weak points and be able to improve upon:

content
improve SEO
landing pages
conversions
marketing activities and material

A quick and simple way to do this is to use the following three areas:

Awareness
Engagement
Conversion
Loyalty/after care

See this as a framework to defining the most important questions you want answered on a regular basis and important enough to be monitored. The benefit of looking holistically and mapping this against your customers path to purchase, (eg. see, think, do and care – or any other preferred model) is that you look beyond the end goal of just generating sales.

In order to be able to improve your entire customer journey and your marketing activities you need to understand the said journey to be able to build relevant content for each stage, that means you cannot only focus on generating sales as a KPI, in order to get to the end KPI, in this case a sale.

Then you add KPI’s that corresponds with each area. For example:

Awareness: CTR in bought media, unique visitors, search on specific keywords such as your business name, reach in social media

Engagement: page visits (specific pages for this), sign-ups for newsletter, follow on social media channels, online brand mentions, return visits, time on specific pages, (pre-purchase) search on your business name + product, bounce rate etc

Conversion: lead or sale generated (value, average order value, etc) download of an app, document download etc. ROAS (be sure to add any agency fees into this calculation)

Loyalty: return visits, page visits (specific pages for this such as customer service, after care instructions etc) This can also be follows and sign-ups that you can track from people who have purchased from you (however in this case exclude them from the engagement section)

Add a further layer to this, perform the exercise per target audience that you target and perform the exercise specifically for each target group if you have more then one segment or use:

New/potential customer
Existing customer
(or your target groups if applicable)

If you want a simple KPI framework template to help you get started, I’ve prepared one for you here.

Action points

This is what you need to do in order to achieve this. If you know your customer and your website fairly well, you will have a draft ready within a few hours which you can refine, build on or modify as you go along:

Identify your customer journey, map it out using a simple model that works for you (for example see, think, do and care is straightforward and easy to follow and corresponds well with the above model)
Choose 1-5 performance metrics to track for each step – which is the answer to your questions.
Track through a report or simple Google Analytics dashboard, or anyway that works for you
Evaluate, optimize and improve upon both your website, media investment and modify the KPI framework as you go along

Global marketing strategy – the workflow

Veronica — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 13:12:46 +0000

Once you got your global marketing strategy signed-off you need to find an effective way of working on a large scale. Here are a few ideas:

Batch translate – then market adapt. English, French and German is spoken in more countries then England, France and Germany in Europe, Therefore batch translating using an agency, will help you save time – then market adapt.

Find global agencies with local offices if possible – this helps you to ease your workload in this process as well as helping you reduce prices for any digital marketing specialist that you need help from. Set-up one global agreement and get better hourly rates as well as enable the local markets to have local support and help. Also useful in terms of market adapting any creative material such as banners and copy if necessary if you cant do it inhouse.

Create frameworks from your global head quarter for: KPI’s, how to work with SEO, buying media, create landing pages, follow up and reporting etc. This ensures a set standard is met and that your digital marketing investments really pays off.

Reporting model – you need to find an easy way to get information to you – rather then having to ask for it, potentially 80 times. Set-up a template with what you need to know from the local markets and have them fill in this on a weekly or monthly basis. Perosnally I would use Google Docs to avoid infomation getting stuck in inboxes.

One account to rule them all – whether it’s paid search or analytics you should have one account which holds all the markets within it. This way you have all the data in one place and it’s easier to keep track of, benchmark markets against each other etc. Also this is the way you still regain control of a global presences and activities.

FAQ – use either wiki, Google Docs or your intranet to have one go to place for frequently asked questions, supporting documentation, checklist – make it as easy as possible to access and update – this reduces the amount of questions from the local markets which will come your way.

Educating and activating markets – starting out with something which may be new, you need to both educate and activate. This can be done by creating an market activation program containing education on what is to be done, the purpose of and the desired effect/goal. The level of knowledge may vary so you need to offer a webinar or similar to help the markets increase their knowledge.

Find local ambassadors and create incentives – there are always people within your organisation which are passionate about marketing, find these and encourage them to be your ambassadors. Incentives is another way to help increase the speed of a change, highlight, reward and show gratitude towards markets who achieve results in adapting to the new way of working.

Communication – have a plan, this is what is going to happen, when, what is then required of them to make it happen and how. If they need assistance who do they talk to etc.

Marked adaption – is always necessary. Not just from a language point of view, but also the creative material, specific local laws or similar. Down to platforms/channels. In Asia Baidu is the most common search engine, in Russia you have Yandex. In Asia it’s more common with “social search” e.g people ask their social network to provide answers to their questions rather then a search engine. And so forth. Both platforms/channels and behaviour are local. So pin down platforms/channels, languages, behaviour and technology per country together with your local offices. (They know their markets the best)

Follow-up – Following up on a vast amount of markets is easily done by simplifying what you need to know. Use a spreadsheet and track markets progress to get a quick overview of which markets who has what activity in place.

Want a nifty spreadsheet with all the countries in the world in alphabetical order with some example activities which you can customise? then download my market logging template over here. (you are welcome ? )

Use a KPI framework – to define success with the user journey as the base to be able to evaluate the entire process for the customer, view your website performance from a holistic perspective to find it’s strenghts and wekanessess to content gaps.

In Google Analytics you can set up dashboards – If you don’t need a more advanced dashboard you can set-up a dashboard with a few highlights from each markets in your global view. Help the markets by creating one on their level, with the most relevant metrics for them to keep track of in one view.

Share knowledge betwwen markets and regions – encourage knowledgesharing from what worked to what didn’t, to solutions to challanges. Don’t spend time reinventing the wheel when you can join forces.

Image credit & copyright: hubspot.net

Tips for digital marketing on a budget

Veronica — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 13:21:52 +0000

How to reach the right people for a smaller investment.

If you have a shoestring budget there’s a few things you can try to do a smarter investment in terms of your campaign budgets from actual features down to the actual evaluation. Putting these features to good use will help you to reach people who are more likely to want to hear from your company or will be interested in what you have to say.

Investment

Use your CRM database
Use the knowledge you have. By using email addresses from your CRM database you can enable custom audiences or find look-a-likes/twins;

Look-a-likes
Facebook and Twitter (and other platforms) offers you to use existing knowledge about your customers to find look-a-likes or twins i.e people with similar profiles as your existing customers. To do this a cookie, email address, phone no or device ID is used as an the the identifier to run an algorithm in their platform to find people similar to your existing customers.Read more in this article from e-consultancy in terms of how it works and how to set this up:https://econsultancy.com/blog/65505-lookalike-audiences-the-next-big-thing-in-marketing/

2. Custom audiences
By using an email address or visitor data from your website you can target only people who have shown interest in your company on Facebook or Instagram for your ads.

If you need help with this, there is a easy to follow guide in Facebooks help centre:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/341425252616329

Re-targeting
By placing a script on your website you can target people who has visited specific pages on your website with custom messages depending on their browser history. This is possible for most digital marketing platforms today (paid search, social, display).

Programmatic display
Rather then investing a chunk of money in a broad reach campaign use programmatic display instead to target the specific people you want to reach with your campaign. Use what you know in terms of age, interests etc to get a better match for your display ads.

Landing page
You website is key in terms of converting clicks to customers – invest in a landing page to your campaigns which you optimize continuously.
Use A/B testing from the traffic from your campaigns to really get the most out of your media investments. (e.g use a small portion of you traffic to page A and to page B – the version that performs (converts) the best is the landing page you use for the remainder of your campaign)

SEO
Do a keyword analysis and continuously work on improving your website against keywords with a high search volume will pay off in the long run.

Optimisation

A/B test your landing pages and campaign material
Pause of stop anything that does not convert or perform as it should. There is no reason to use a media budget just for the sake of it – if it does not give you any return of investment.
Use dynamic banners if possible

Evaluation

How you evaluate your campaigns are key. Look further and beyond the last click to get the complete picture of your campaign performance:

Attribution model – can be set-up in Google Analytics Premium (at the moment) and you can try one or more of the following;
Identify quickest conversion channel
Identify the traffic provider (channel)
Identify what channel visitors return to your website from after first visit from a campaign
Identify the device which converts

DoubleClick
This is a tool which helps you work smarter and faster. Both in terms of automised actions, dynamic banners but also proves a holistic view of you media investments. Those few percentages of your media budgets are a wise investment in the insight you get from this. More information on DoubleClick campaign manager can be found here:

(working with an agency? then ensure you get a contract in place stating that you own your own data in DoubleClick and the account is your intellectual property)

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Image credit and owner: fortunebuilders.com

Starting out with global marketing

Veronica — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 12:37:34 +0000

This article is suitable for anyone managing marketing activities on more than one market and with offices in more then one country wether it be B2B or B2C, it’s equally relevant and encapsulates ideas for both.

The focus of this article series is to help you manage digital marketing activities and get your company marketing strategy in place for a large number of markets.

It won’t cover the actual set-up of the strategy in terms of defining target groups, needs, KPI’s, technolgy etc – these articles are targeted to help you get in to action you after you have created your company marketing strategy and need to execute on a large number of markets.

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Data – first of all you need to ensure that you have your analytics account in order. That you have goals and events set-up so you can track activities. You should also have one account where you can access all markets analytics accounts within it. And DO NOT set-up a separate analytics account for a campaign site, if you need a campaign site at all, ensure its located within your main domain and that your one and only analytics account is set-up to track it.

Pilot campaigns – if your company is new to digital marketing and don’t know where to start you can do a pilot campaign:

Choose one or more activities – such as paid search, youtube ads and paid social for example.
Choose 3 or 5 markets which has significant differences, such as size of the country, potential (growth), technological maturity etc (I do recommend to do this per region e.g 3 countries in APAC, Europe etc – but start in one region first). Ensure you have an uneven number of markets. Or you could do a pilot in each region.
Run your campaign and evaluate the performance – what conclusions can you draw from this?

CRM – If you dont have one, get one. This will help you understand your customer, as well as be able to target them better. Your CRM will help you cut costs for marketing by enabling you to build custom audiences, find look-a-likes (or twins), re-target existing customers with speific messages and more.

Tools and technology – use technology to your advantage. From a CMS platform which assist in the roll-out of new content in different langauages, to using Slack for market communication and knowledge sharing to Google Docs or similar for documentation.

How to prioritise – Managing a company who are active in over 80 markets can feel overwhelming. However it’s easy to segment markets in terms of where you need to focus first. To help you prioritise ask your sales departments for help and map out:

Market size
Current sales revenue
Potential in the market (is demand increasing?)
Competition (high, medium, low?)
Technological maturity
No of services your company offers in that market
Brand awareness/recognition

Always focus externally – since your online presence should focus on your customer and not your internal structure. If you don’t have someone who is responsible for marketing in a specific market with huge potential for growth – then get the numbers, do your homework and talk to your board to invest in someone who can help you tap in to the potential in a region.

Do this with all your markets, then find a framework which you divide markets either into A, B, C etc, depending on what you prioritise the most, let’s say it’s sales revenue and potential in the market. Using this method its quite easy to find which markets to prioritise and plan actions for accordingly.

Processes – are covered in more detail in the next article.

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Image credit and copyright: yourglobestore.com

Why you should invest in expanding your knowledge through Skillshare

Veronica — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 10:55:43 +0000

I’ve been eyeing out Skillshare for a while. I’ve been longingly browsing the classes, dreaming about the possibilities but not had the time to really dedicate to really get my teeth into a subject. A class in particular that I’ve been interested in for a while is the Modern Marketing Workshop with Seth Godin.

Last week I finally got some time and the opportunity to sign-up and start my first class. I bought a one of class for $20 and it turned out to be the most well invested time and money I’ve spent in a long time on educational material. In this post I want to tell you why.

First, let me tell you how this particular class works. It’s divided into units with assignments to each unit. In this class you also get additional free resources and links to related content such as useful websites, examples of exercises and even books. It gets even better, you get a couple of Seth Godins books in PDF format for free as well. They are on my iPad as I type this.

Already halfway through the assignments, not even at the stage of putting together my final project yet, I’ve got so much value out of this class – the value has gone far beyond those $20 I first invested.

The Modern Marketing Workshop is by no means a walk in the park. While writing this, I have two assignments left – before I can create my project and submit for review by my classmates, I’ve been at this for a week now. Taking on an assignment each day, sometimes two. I do it this way because I really want to learn and for me its the best way to learn while juggling my day job.

The questions you get to answer are really hard, but so useful. They are straight on, focused straight on the important points of your work. Doing the assignments during this week has left my brain in a creative knot. I’ve constantly been thinking about the story, the brand the promise, all the 50 marketing concepts within Seth Godins action theory, the selection of P’s. The list goes on. I’ve constantly been scribbling on various sheets of paper I can find on the side while having a breakthrough thought while I’ve been processing the information and doing other things. Through all this I’m beginning to gain clarity on the example I will use for my final class project.

Key take aways from the class – why this class was and is valuable for me:

I get to learn from someone which I respect and who inspires me, a thought leader within the field.
I get to do hands on assignments to each video unit which further helps me learn and assimilate the information in a practical way. From analyzing other brands to assignments relating to my own final project.
I get a framework to work from, with any projects I take on I can refer back to, as well as 11 very valuable questions to use before I start a new project.
This class helps me put words on something that I’m already on par with, that “modern marketing” is different from “old marketing”. It’s about authenticity, connections and in a sense community. All those things that made internet fun for me when I was a wee kiddo.
I get to submit a final project as a receipt of my work with the class and hopefully get some constructive criticism to learn further from and fine tune my projects marketing schedule.
I can access a multitude of projects done by my fellow classmates to get inspired by.
And I get additional resources and material which I can go back to, and refer to when in need – as well as lifetime access to this class. So if I need to refresh my skills, I can always log back into Skillshare and view the videos again.

My thoughts on Skillshare:

This is a great platform for learning new skills and brushing up on existing.
You get loads of value from buying an ad hoc class, and the price point will enable anyone to learn new skills to reach their goals and dreams.
I really appreciate the life time access to the content.
I really appreciate the high quality of the Modern Marketing Workshop and I hope the other classes that I plan to take through Skillshare will adhere to the same high standard.
An online class will enable you to take it wherever you are in the world and connect with other people on a similar journey as you.

On a closing note, I decided to share one of the videos from SEO Moz which are linked to from the resources section within the Modern Marketing Workshop. This video really talks about the essence of a mindset that needs to shift within the marketing field and is from my perspective in the heart of the Modern Marketing Workshop.

I’ve put this class on hold now, and will let the information and knowledge settle, process and will put together my project later this summer and post for review. I’ll do an update this autumn – to share my final thoughts on this class and experience with Skillshare.

Photo credit to: Death to the Stock Photo