What Data Is The Right Data?
It is no question that data and analytics are a driving force in marketing and sales. How can you really know you're making a profit from without some numbers to back it up? How do you really know what works and what doesn't?
Some businesses do not know what kind of analytics to avoid and they sometimes end up missing the mark. In the most recent podcast, Hollywood Branded shares how to increase your revenue by leveraging the correct data and analytics.
A Little More About Matt
Matt Bailey is the founder and lead trainer of SiteLogic, an agency that teaches companies how to leverage both data and logic in their marketing practices. With tremendous experience in analytics and digital marketing, Matt has trained some of the biggest brands around the world, including Orange, Microsoft, Disney, Yamaha and Lenovo. His training content is also used at Rutgers, Duke, Purdue and many other universities. Matt is additionally the host of the marketing podcast, Endless Coffee Cup and author of three books.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: How did you get here today? Because what you do with data and analytics, it's the backbone to a company. If you can't figure this stuff out, it's, everything else you do is kind of, "Is it being done right?"
Answer:
Absolutely. So to give you the full answer, and there's an extended version, I'll give you the recut, in the mid to late '90s, I was selling real estate and I didn't like the traditional way of doing it. I started building a website for our commercial properties because I needed a wider audience than just the local paper or whatever could do. And I'm doing this kind of in my own time. I remember distinctly, my broker telling me, "I wouldn't spend too much time with this internet thing." And so this had to be '96, '95, around there. Still wonderful friends with him. Great guy. Anyway, I'm building these websites at night and it struck me one time that, "I need to know, I have 20 things to do, what's going to be the most profitable for me to work on in the two hours that I have?" And that question just started impressing upon me and I had to find the answer, "What can I do that's going to make me the most amount of money?" So that got me into analytics. I started with early versions of Webtrends, if anyone knows that and really trying to figure out, not just where am I getting people from because if I had asked that question, I would've gone down the wrong route. I was getting 90% of my traffic from search engines but those weren't my buyers. And so if I stopped there, I would've asked the wrong question, answer the wrong question and done the wrong thing. And what I found was, the least amount of visitors were coming from links on other websites that were driven by PR. I was getting links and articles out there and people were coming from those and those were my buyers. And so that taught me what activities I'm doing, that not just result in the most visits but the most money. And by answering that question, it changed the trajectory of my entire career.
Question: So, what do you do? You start working with this company, I mean, you have the haloed companies out there that you have worked with, Microsoft, Lenovo, you obviously work with smaller companies too, for our listeners today who might not be at one of those, although we have lots of listeners from large companies. But what's the first step that you do with the company to help them figure this stuff out?
Answer:
All right. First step is strategic and well, let me just say step before we get to strategic, a half step before strategic, is expectations and definitions because I find that, let's take the word impression. I have asked 10 people in a class to give me their definition of an impression and I'll do this within a company as well. And it's very, very interesting that even among the marketing department, widely different definitions of what an impression is, outside of the marketing department, widely different definitions of what an impression is. And then I lay on them, "Here's Facebook's definition of an impression, which is anything greater than zero pixels that is seen for zero seconds." And it doesn't fit anyone's. So right away, we use these words in marketing but unless we have a shared definition, we are all working for different goals, different expectations.
So it starts with coming up with our own set of terms and knowledge of what we're trying to achieve and we're using these platforms that have their own definition. Do we match? Don't we match? Why? Where's the middle? So it's developing that shared understanding. Then it moves on to goals. What are we trying to achieve? What's our strategy. What's going to make that happen? And as we build the strategy, we're building the analytics measurements that are most critical for each stage of strategy. So we're not waiting until the end to say, "This is what we need. Oh, I need these measurements." No, we define them up front because usually they go to a stakeholder or a manager or an owner and what's the two measurements that owner wants to know every week or every month? Those are your most important measurements and that's what we focus on. But then there's also your measurements. If you're a product manager or if you're the marketer, you're looking at channeled content, channel data and you're making decisions about that. But that's not what people in leadership want to see. They want to see the numbers.
Question: And so, you've gone through here and you've named strategy as the next big thing that we need to actually be doing and that all of this needs to be part of your strategy but how do we do that? You said decision makers like having one or two points of reference. How do you funnel down into figuring out what those two points should actually be?
Answer: That's why I like not just dealing with the marketing team but let's look at the business as a whole, what's the business focused on and what is the overall purpose of the business and can you describe in two to three words, what do you want to do? Is it, "I want more leads"? Is it, "I want more sales,"? Or let's even get more complicated and say, "I want to be more profitable," because that changes what and how I'm going to measure. If you want more sales, that means I'm just measuring what's coming in.
Question: How hard does this get to, actually, be able to dial in and drill down into what is the trigger to making these things happen when you are a company that might do multiple things in different ways in order to attract those impressions, that engagement, that potential buyer?
Answer: It's a big journey and that's where I love doing this when I not only have marketing but I have different departments together. And this is where I like merging the analytics piece with the strategic, with the customer journey. Let's look at every place where there is a touch point with this customer, what's happening? What's it driving? Where's the progression? Where are we moving them to? Because marketing just can't look at this by themselves and own it without the input from other departments and understanding, "What are the opportunities along the way that we might it be missing?" So when you get the entire organization together to discuss what makes this machine run, you can't help but find the areas where there's money left on the table, where there's connections that aren't being made because marketing's running the show. And that's where it needs an organizational type push to develop a, "Here's where we are. Here's where we want to be and with all the players giving their input."
Question: We have a lot of listeners and just a lot of brands who are out there who have traditionally over the years, kept marketing and sales departments separated. And there's been a big move to bring those together and to house them over the last decade, really, of how do you make something that's a healthy organization? Some organizations get it, some don't. But what you're talking about here is not just marketing and sales. You're talking about all of operations. You're talking about all of the different divisions within a company where they might actually have ownership of a different piece in the marketing funnel that they could to be contributing to.
Answer: Absolutely. I mean, I started out in sales and then I went into marketing, so for me, it's like a natural, "It should be working together."
But yet there's also, if you're a software company and you're marketing it but you don't understand some of the technical stuff, how can you truly be marketing it? You've got to know the language. You've got to know what these things mean. So, absolutely, there is such a lack of integration in so many companies and I think that keeps marketing behind and when marketing's behind, who's driving the analytics? How do we know we're measuring the right things?
Check Out The Podcast!
Matt had so much great information regarding marketing analytics and impressions. Check out the full podcast episode below to learn more about leveraging data in your business.
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
- What To Know About Influencer Marketing
- The Great Resignation
- Personal Branding 101
- Attracting More Visitors To Your Site
- The Key To Building A Major Brand
Every week we release a new podcast featuring guest's with so much knowledge about marketing, you don't want to miss one! How can you make sure you don't miss an episode? Click below to subscribe!
