How to Use Google Analytics to Help Shape Your Marketing Strategy

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, it can be a little daunting at first. With so much data available to dig through, it’s hard to know where to look to find the most important metrics.

Marketers that want to better understand their audience, and strengthen their marketing strategy, need to know how to best utilize all of the data available inside Google Analytics.

Without knowing which sections to pay attention to, you could spend hours digging through the platform and walk away with your head spinning.

Similarly, without analyzing your website traffic, it’s hard to assess the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy and know when it’s time to make a shift.

If leveraged correctly, Google Analytics can provide valuable insight into who visits your website, how they got there in the first place and what pages they spend the most time on; this is powerful data for marketers that can be used to enhance their strategy.

An Overview

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for brands, bloggers or businesses alike. Through use of Google Analytics, you can uncover a tremendous amount of data about your website that can be used to enhance your marketing and business development strategies.

The back end of Google Analytics is broken down into eight main sections: Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.

Almost all eight sections contain sub-sections that provide a ton of data, but not all sections are critical for marketers to pay attention to.

Before we dive in to the sections that matter most to marketers, let’s get familiar with some basic Google Analytics terminology:

• Users: These are people who have visited at least once within your selected date range, and includes both new and returning visitors.
• Dimensions: These are descriptive characteristics of an object. For example, browser, exit page and session duration are all considered dimensions.
• Metrics: These are individual statistics of a dimension, such as Average Session Duration or Screenviews.
• Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of single-page visits, meaning that someone left your site from the same page at which they entered; aka, they didn’t interact with your site.
• Sessions: A session is the period of time that a user is actively engaged with your website.

Now that you’re familiar with the Google Analytics sections and terminology, let’s dive in to the areas that you want to pay most attention to in order to save time and strengthen your marketing strategy.

Zeroing in on what matters most

There are three sections that matter most to marketers: Acquisition, Audience and Behavior.

The Audience section provides a tremendous amount of data about your website visitors. It contains multiple subsections that provide information about the gender, age and location of your website visitors. You can also uncover information about their interests, as well as the browsers and mobile devices used to access your site.

The Acquisition section will provide detailed information about how people arrive to your site. Digging in to the “All Traffic” tab will show you exactly how people are arriving at your website – whether it be a search engine, social media site or blog that you’re a contributor for.

The Behavior section helps you understand how people are interacting with your site. You’ll visit this section to better understand which pages on your website are the most popular.

Focusing on these three sections will help you save time when digging through Google Analytics.

When used together, the information uncovered can help you make decisions about which marketing efforts (be it guest blogging or social media posting,) are most useful in driving website traffic.

Analyzing these sections within Google Analytics will provide you with insight that will enable you to make smarketing (smart, marketing) decisions about the type, tone, and placement of content that you use on your website.

Traffic Channels

Before we dive into who exactly is visiting your site, it’s important to understand how they’re getting there.

To see your various traffic sources for a set period of time, go to the Acquisition tab and click the “All Traffic” dropdown. Select the “Channels” button, set the time period at the top of the viewing pane and scroll down to see the results for the give timeframe.

Here’s a simple breakdown of what these different channels mean:

• Direct: Visitors that came directly to your website. They either typed your URL right into their browser, clicked on a bookmark or clicked a link in an email. Direct traffic is a strong indicator of the strength of your brand.
• Organic Search: You can thank search engines like Google and Bing for these website visitors. An organic visitor is someone who got to your website by clicking on a link from a search engine results page. A lot of organic traffic is a strong indicator of the value of your content and SEO strategy.
• Paid Search: You’ll find any paid search (think Google AdWords) campaigns in this viewing pane. A lot of paid search traffic means that you’re Google AdWords are working well.
• Referral: This represents visitors that clicked a link on another site to land on your website. Years ago, before social media was what it is today, all other traffic (that wasn’t direct or organic) fell under the referral tab. Within the past few years, Google created a separate tab for social traffic, which makes it easy for marketers to focus in on just the websites that are driving traffic to their site. If you guest blog, this is the section to visit to see how much traffic is being driven to your site from your guest blogging efforts. A lot of referral traffic means that you’re being talked about (and linked to) from multiple other websites.
• Social: As a social media marketer, this is my favorite section within Google Analytics because it shows me exactly what social media channels drive the majority of traffic to my site. This data can be used to shape your social media strategy.
• Email: The number of visitors that came to your website from an email campaign. If you do a lot of email marketing, you’ll want to dig through here to see how effective your campaigns are.

Looking at the traffic channels will allow you to see which channel is the largest driver of traffic to your site. You’ll notice that the Channels are listed in order of driving power; the Channel at the top is the one that drives the majority of site traffic.

To dig deeper into the data, click each Channel to see more information.

For example, when I click Social, I can see the entire list of social media sites (again, listed in order of most to least powerful) that drove traffic to my website during the selected timeframe.

Analyzing the power of different channels will help you decide which efforts to focus on, and potentially spark ideas to increase traffic from other channel types.

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Make better marketing decisions by knowing who is sending you signups, not just which channels are sending traffic. Request a personal demo of Kissmetrics to learn more.

Here are a few ideas to increase traffic across all channel types:

• Direct: Share the link to your website with friends and family the next time you’re with them. Tell them to type it directly into their browser and voila! You just got a nice direct traffic boost.
• Organic Search: Make sure that you’re utilizing H1 and H2 tags, meta descriptions and keywords in all of your website pages and content updates. The stronger your SEO, the greater likelihood that someone will find you on a search engine.
• Paid Search: Try adjusting your keywords and/or targeting options to make your ads more relevant.
• Referral: Start reaching out to popular blogs and forums in your industry to see if you can guest post or perhaps be featured on their site. Contributing content to other sites is a great way to increase your referral traffic.
• Social: Increasing the frequency of your posting, and the number of links you share on social media will undoubtedly result in a boost of social traffic. I recommend increasing your efforts on one channel at a time to see what drives the largest impact. For example, make February your Twitter month; aim to tweet a lot of links that drive back to your website and at the end of the month, analyze the website traffic. Then, come March, turn that attention over to Facebook and see which social channel drove more traffic. (If you want to learn how to see which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website, refer to this Kissmetrics blog post that I wrote on setting up Advanced Segments.
• Email: Start including more calls to action and links in your email campaigns. Make sure that your calls to action stand out in your email templates and serve to drive people back to your website.

Once you’ve implemented some of these ideas, take the time to review the Channels breakdown again to see the impact of your efforts.

If your efforts to grow traffic from one channel go unnoticed in your analytics, try a different one!

For example, let’s say you have a ton of referral traffic and very little organic traffic. If your attempts to improve SEO and grow organic traffic have little impact, it’s probably not worth the effort. You’re better off continuing to guest blog, as it’s proven to be a critical marketing activity that is worth your time and effort.

Audience Demographics

Understanding who is visiting your site in terms of their age, location and gender is the best way to tailor your site to suit their interests and preferences.

If you want your website content and imagery to appease and resonate with your audience, you need to know who they are.

To find this information, head over to the Audience tab. You’ll want to focus on the sub-sections of Demographics and Geo.

First, let’s look at the Demographics of Age and Gender.

As you can see, the majority of my website visitors are aged 25-34, followed by those aged 35-44.

Knowing this, I aim to create content that is geared towards, and valued by, young professionals. Some examples are tips for professional development and advice for managers leading a team of employees.

Understanding how old your website visitors are, and whether they’re male or female, is helpful if you’re looking to capture their attention when they land on your site.

For example, if 90% of your website visitors are women, you could deliver a more personalized website experience for them by starting your “About” or “Welcome” page with “Hey ladies!”

Through analyzing the Gender section, I can see that the majority of my site visitors are female. It’s not skewed too heavily though, so I don’t want to tailor my site to females only. That’s why I’ve chosen my website colors to be black, white and green; I wanted to create a sleek and clean aesthetic that would be appealing to both men and women.

Digging in to the age and gender of your website visitors is useful if you want to craft creative content for your blog posts and website pages that captures their attention and gains their trust.

For example, telling your fans to “Treat yo self” to a free guide on your website isn’t going to resonate with individuals in their 60’s. However, it WILL get a chuckle from millennials.

Finally, you want to look to see where your website visitors are from. Looking at the Location tab under the “Geo” dropdown will show you the countries, states and cities of your website audience.

When you first click “Location” you’ll be shown the list of countries. Not surprisingly, the majority of my website visitors are from the United States.

Looking at the different states is a great way to gain insight that can be levered for any AdWords or paid Facebook campaigns you’re going to run. You want to target those states and cities that you see are frequenting your site.

I can see that New York dominates the results by a large margin. That’s not surprising since I live there and the majority of my mentors, friends and family live in New York as well.

Clicking on the individual states will bring you to the list of cities, within that state, that your website visitors come from.

Since I currently live in Buffalo, I’m not surprised to see Buffalo and other Western New York cities at the top of the list. I also see New York City, which is expected since that is where the majority of my friends and family reside.

If you don’t see your city as the top city, you might want to consider shifting your marketing strategy, and content, to target those in your geographic area.

Content Drilldown

Last but not least, it’s important to dive in to the content to see which pages people spend the most and least time on.

To do this, click the Behavior tab and go to the Site Content drop-down. You’ll want to look at the Content Drilldown, as well as Landing and Exit Pages to see which pages are most viewed on your website.

Content Drilldown is the overview of which pages on your website are visited the most.

Seeing which pages, and blog posts, are most viewed by your audience is helpful in guiding your web development strategy; you want to create more of what works.

Through analysis, I can see that my homepage and services page are the most popular. I can also see that the page on my site that has all of my marketing blogs is more popular that the blog page itself, which shows me that my audience values marketing content.

Now, you want to head over to the Landing Pages view in order to see what pages people are landing on when they get to your site.

The Landing Pages view is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your social media and promotional strategy, as you hope to see the blogs and website pages promoted most at the top.

For me, that would be my homepage, services page, free social media guide page and Bravery Beats blog post. Those pages are the ones that I promote the most, as they provide the most value and information that I find relevant for my audience.

It’s important to me to see my free social media guide at the top of the landing page list, as this page is a free giveaway that I’m using in part to provide value, and in part to build my email list.

Analyzing the traffic of this page is a good way for me to assess both the value and popularity of the giveaway.

If you don’t see your most important and/or promoted blog posts and website pages in the list of the top ten landing pages, it’s time to either reevaluate their value and/or your promotional strategy to ensure you’re driving traffic to those pages through social media and email marketing campaigns.

Spending time in the behavior section will allow you to develop an awareness of what content your website visitors find the most valuable. You can use this as a guide for what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to blog topics and page types.

For example, if you notice that the top visited pages are all blog posts about social media, yet none of your design blogs are ranking in the top, you want to spend more time blogging about social than you do about design.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool.

By paying attention to the demographics of your audience, you’ll be able to create content and imagery that you know your audience desires. This allows you to craft a customized and relevant site experience for your audience that will keep them coming back for more. (Thereby increasing your direct traffic!)

When you start monitoring your referral traffic, you’ll start to see which guest blogs are helping to increase your online visibility. This will help you save time by focusing only on the guest blogs that provide a return (in the form of website visits) on your content creation efforts. Similarly, by diving in to your social referrals, you’ll be armed with data to decide exactly which social media channels are the best to share your blog posts on.

By utilizing, analyzing, and focusing on these various sections within Google Analytics, you’ll have a deep understanding of who your audience is, what they want and how they find you.

About the Author: Julia Jornsay-Silverberg is a social media marketing consultant and coach with a passion for helping small businesses use social media to build brand awareness and connect with customers. Check out her free guide, “Socially Strategic” to help you get started strategically on social media. You can also find her on Twitter and Periscope.

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3 Resources to Help Invigorate Your Standard Content Routine

You’re probably familiar with “art imitating life” and “life imitating art.” I know I am.

We can apply this idea to content marketing, as well.

Your content may imitate life if it’s engaging, entertaining, and useful. You take recognizable, relatable elements from life and infuse them into your content to connect with your audience members’ worldviews.

But how can life imitate your content?

Well, winning content marketing is often the product of trying different experiments to see what works best for your message and your business. These experiments help you get to know your audience better and may help you uncover a new, more effective content strategy.

You see this in life when you try a new activity and broaden your outlook of what you thought was possible.

Today, we’re going to focus on techniques that could expand the types of content you offer your audience. This week’s Copyblogger Collection is a series of three handpicked articles that will show you:

• How to use content marketing to sell your creative work
• How to take your Pinterest marketing to the next level
• How to determine if you should publish a curated email newsletter

As you work your way through the material below, think of the following lessons as a mini content creation course.

A Simple Content Marketing Strategy for Creative Folks

In A Simple Content Marketing Strategy for Creative Folks, Rafal Tomal admits that he promoted his business the wrong way for a long time.

Just like many designers and artists, he built a portfolio and posted his work around the web. Then, he waited for feedback.

The problem with this method was the assumption that people — who are not design experts — would recognize his work as superior to the work of other designers and artists. Rafal soon realized he should focus on content marketing instead.

You’ll want to find out about the changes Rafal made to his strategy because it produced stellar results: with just six blog posts, he grew his email list from 800 subscribers to more than 5,300 subscribers between June 2014 and February 2015.

5 New Ways to Take Your Pinterest Marketing to the Next Level

Beth Hayden wants to keep content marketers informed about the world of Pinterest marketing and the latest changes to the platform.

5 New Ways to Take Your Pinterest Marketing to the Next Level outlines how to take advantage of new developments on Pinterest.

The Pinterest user base keeps growing exponentially every year, so it’s likely your readers and prospects are already on Pinterest looking for the types of content and products you produce.

Do You Have What It Takes to Publish a Curated Email Newsletter? [Infographic]

Curating is essentially sifting through a mountain of information on a specific topic (news, health, HTML, entertainment, lifestyle, content marketing, etc.) and plucking out the best content.

To create a curated email newsletter, you package that curated content into an email message, add a brief commentary about each link, and deliver it to your email list subscribers.

Some do it daily. Others do it weekly. But why go through all the trouble? And do you have what it takes to publish a curated email newsletter?

Demian Farnworth will help you answer those questions and decide if this type of content is right for you … with a little guidance from his Aunt Ona.

Move one step closer to your desired results

Review this post (and save it for future reference) as you think about ways to produce the best content experience for your prospects and customers.

A small change in your standard content routine could move you one step closer to the results you’ve been waiting to see.

The post 3 Resources to Help Invigorate Your Standard Content Routine appeared first on Copyblogger.

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What Lies Ahead for Social Media in 2016

If it's Friday it must be Friday Five time, our weekly roundup of five stories from one specific topic. This week it's Social Media. 

Examining the Current State of Social Marketing (Infographic)

Social media may be an integrated and essential part of most marketing strategies, but measuring the return on the investment and taking action based on social media insights still presents a challenge to many marketing teams. An infographic from Morrison Foerster examines the current landscape of social marketing, and the challenges marketers still face.

Read the full story on Adweek.

How Social Media Marketing Is Set to Change in 2016

Hard to believe the first month of 2016 is nearly over (didn’t it just begin?) and even as I type this, tactics, strategies and options in the world of social media are changing. I know as a small business owner you’re not only on the lookout for the most effective use of your digital marketing dollars, you’re also looking to easily digest the latest offerings to see how they may benefit you. Here is a breakdown on what to expect in 2016.

Read the full story on Business 2 Community. 

10 ways brands are using social media marketing for good

Using social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to promote philanthropic content is an effective way to engage consumers and humanize your brand.

Asking questions, running contests, sharing pictures, promoting products and services; there are many ways for brands to attract attention on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the like. Included among this list of ways to get people to sit up and take notice on social media is to show the softer side of your brand and declare your support of a worthy charitable organization.

Read the full story on ClickZ.

The Impact of Big Data on Social Media Marketing Strategies

The amount of information now available to crunch and parse in the service of analyzing absolutely anything is massive—and growing every second. In the face of this sheer overwhelm of data, an individual business owner or social media marketer can feel powerless to make any sense of it, let alone productive use of it. But as with any shift in the tide or evolutionary leap, a smart adjusting of strategy can help even the smallest of small fries to compete with the big guns and harness this unwieldy data deluge to work for them.

Read the full story on Tech.co.

The 5-Minute Social Media Competitive Analysis

We’ve talked about why you should monitor your competitor’s marketing, and how to set up a monitoring dashboard to do so. But really, all that data you’re collecting on competitors is worthless if you don’t know what to do with it. Smart data needs to lead to smart decisions.

And that means doing more than just hoarding competitor mentions in your dashboard. You need to sit down, dig in, and get analytical. Monitoring your competitors isn’t enough—you need to sit down and analyze the data.

Read the full story on Search Engine Journal.

Social media has of course become a ubiquitous part of every marketer's arsenal. To understand how to fully leverage the power of social media download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Social Marketing.

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It’s All Been Done Before, Why Should I Bother (FS147)

The Five-Step Process for Writing Powerful Call-to-Actions By Reverse-Engineering Customer Mindsets

For me, growth hacking is more than just a mindset. It’s about the desire to take tradition and flip it on its head. It’s about leveraging the way we’ve always done things and manipulating those processes to achieve a much better result. It’s about the various interpretations of data and the creative inspiration we draw from them to solve problems and create opportunities.

If you’re growing a product or a startup, you’re probably already aware of the importance of testing which calls-to-action drive the most adoption. Without supplying a nudge for a user to take action, you might get no traction at all, even though your offering may be outstanding.

A call-to-action is the final frontier, separating the discovery of your product’s value proposition and the actual journey a user will take to experience it. It’s like the starter’s gun on track day. After you have attracted users (i.e., runners) who have found the start line, then you need to motivate them to run the journey to the finish line (being a point at which your business objectives are met, such as making a sale, hopefully repeatedly).

Where to begin, though? You could start with the usual “buy now” or “start today” and keep A/B testing to find the most frictionless point of entry. But that approach, even though it may be effective, assumes what you’ve seen elsewhere is “best practice” and therefore should work.

What if you had a starting point so powerful it was almost an unfair advantage? Enter the psych-dive.

How Did This Come About?

I sat down with a psychologist friend of mine the other day, and after all the pleasantries were exchanged, we got to talking about product growth and human behavior. While I’m sure most psychologists are used to putting people on the spot, it was an interesting sight to see how uncomfortable I made him with the question I posed.

I asked something along the lines of: “Michael (name changed to protect his professional integrity), you deal with people and data sets all the time, and you know all about psychological profiling and making educated assumptions in order to help people overcome compulsions, right?”

“Yes,” he nervously replied.

That was my green light. “What would you need to do to turn the tables? To use profiling and data-driven stereotyping to amplify a compulsion?”

He paused, conflicted, partially by the thought of flipping his power for doing good on its head and partially by the surprise of such a request.

What followed was a discussion of the process one could use to profile, generalize, and deconstruct marketers’ tendencies to create more impulsive calls-to-action.

Flipping the Way a Psychologist Cures Compulsion

The main building blocks for the way a psychologist helps someone out of their compulsive need to do something include the following: helping them understand themselves, their habits, and their psychological needs and helping them understand how they use an addiction to fill those needs in an unhealthy way. A psychologist then helps them find new, healthier ways to address those needs (like using exercise to feel better instead of drugs).

Cognitive Modeling of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Source Paul M Salkovskis, Elsevier)

Theoretically, to reverse-engineer that process and increase the likelihood that someone would become compulsive around a product, you would do the opposite. You would try to keep them from being aware of themselves and their habits. You would keep them out of touch with themselves, and encourage them to use an easy, quick-fix solution.

This is already happening in real life. People use Facebook unconsciously. Users have never made an active decision to start spending a lot of their time online looking at other people’s posts and photos. It just happens.

People rarely say they LOVE Facebook, or that Farmville is the BEST. They probably say something like, “I waste waaay too much time on Facebook” or “I spend sooo much money on my farm.” This compulsive relationship, albeit seemingly invasive, is a sign the user has been drawn in to the experience and is there to stay.

Ethically, there also are a lot of questions to answer here. Yes, your business needs to make money. That’s the bottom line. However, at the same time, each person and business has some decisions to make about “how bad” something is. Most of us wouldn’t rob people at gunpoint even if it was rather profitable, because that’s just wrong. But most of us wouldn’t feel too bad about selling chocolate cakes, even though chocolate cakes are technically bad for people.

Somewhere on that scale is a place where it starts to get a little gray. Is it unethical to deal drugs to poor people who can’t afford them? Or, are they the ones who decide to buy the drugs and you’re just providing a service? In other words, how comfortable are you with your business model and the extent to which you encourage/market/manipulate people into wanting your product?

With that said, here’s how to immerse yourself in the deep workings of your target audience for better calls-to-action.

Psych-Dive Analysis for Better CTA Triggers

Different segments of society are compulsive in different ways. You have an aging demographic that was brought up in the era of glorification of cigarettes and alcohol (before cigarette companies started to pay out compensation for smoking-related impairments), just like you have a sector of the technologically-native young adults who take to Snapchat and Candy Crush as if they were the only things keeping them interested in life.

Here are four steps for how to uncover compulsions in your key target audience and craft better calls-to-action from the get-go.

Step 1: Craft a Survey

To craft brilliantly effective calls-to-action laced with compulsion, you need to get a solid idea of how your typical market segment thinks and acts with other things generally considered compulsive behavior. These types of assumptions are easy to guess, especially if you classify yourself as similar to the very users you’re trying to target. But, like most assumptions, it’s easy to get it wrong.

Clarity around how your users become compulsive can only be achieved with research. If someone else has already done the hard work and you find your answers via a research piece on Google, then great. But, chances are, what has worked for someone else might not work for you. If, like 99% of scenarios, existing data just doesn’t cut it, you need to take charge and source these answers yourself.

The most effective (albeit, most annoying to respondents) method is a survey. It’s important to be concise if you intend to get a decent rate of response. I always try to keep my questionnaires to a maximum of 10 questions, and largely base these around behaviors. Behavioral questions are some of the most powerful insights into your target market because they unlock answers about how the user’s mind operates. I also ensure absolute anonymity to increase the likelihood of natural responses.

Questions you ask here should serve the purpose of unlocking insights into the behavior of your target audience. These are questions that, once collated to create an overall persona, tell you exactly what motivates their actions.

With limited bandwidth, each question in your survey needs to count. So how do you decide what to ask? Humans, regardless of demography or psychography, always “want” something. Generally those things include elements of personal, social, and career life. Here are three things to consider when formulating questions for your survey:

Biological Compulsion

It’s easy to understand and relate to biological urges to eat and sleep. Questions that relate to demand-based acquisition of biological needs and desires that truly make us “human” can unlock a lot about what intrinsically motivates a user. Biological compulsions cannot really be switched off, and they drive our very existence.

Primal instinct at its finest. Deliveroo’s “Find Food” call-to-action says it like it is.

Experimental and Social Compulsion

Another great avenue for discovering compulsion is to explore things like relationships, social interactions, and drug and alcohol use. These types of insights can tell you if a user relies on external influences to trigger a decision. A great CTA in this instance would be something like “Join your friends” or “Let’s socialize” because these tap into urges to be “connected.”

When all you want to do is belong, click Meetup’s “Start a Meetup” call-to-action.

Aspirational Compulsion

Finally, studying attitudes about money, career, and material things can help you understand how a user may be motivated to part with their money to make a pain point go away, as well as what their end goals are in life. This assists with understanding what angle you need to take in order to get a user to believe they “need” your product. If you’re aware that your target audience is driven by the desire to excel in life, you’ll be able to create a CTA that reflects this, like “Make money now.”

By tying in the money aspect, Uber’s call-to-action attracts exactly the type of driver they want.

It’s also a good idea to provide an incentive for completing the survey. This method may be frowned upon by market research experts who argue that an incentive will skew results. But I’m of the belief that, with enough responses, those that are skewed positively or negatively will be outweighed by the respondent majority. SurveyMonkey has a great little guide to calculate how many responses you need for statistical confidence.

The incentive could be as simple as offering use of your product for free for the first year, or a substantial discount, or a limited early access. Alternatively, it could pay to supplement your survey with incentives of products or services that target the same market segment you do (for example, a free three-month trial of a non-competing and popular SaaS product).

The way to do this is to include an optional field at the end of the survey that asks for an email address and stipulates that the email will only be used to notify the person about their eligibility for your incentives.

Step 2: Find Your Market

Once you have your survey and incentives ready, it’s time to get your target audience to actually take your survey. Finding people to complete it can be hard. If your target audience is easy to locate physically, try going there and asking as many people as possible to take it. If you have contacts that are highly influential in your target market, try to leverage them.

Alternatively, you can always post your survey to an online medium that your target audience uses prolifically. Or, you can demographically and geographically target your audience through paid advertising.

For example, we compiled a survey at GRONADE for a recruitment startup. Once the survey was ready to go, we sent it out to the founder’s existing database. We supplemented those responses using LinkedIn’s ad targeting system, targeting by job role, seniority, and geography, for better quality survey results.

Targeting the right audience for a survey using LinkedIn

Step 3: Supplement Your Data

When you’ve collected your responses and have an idea of what the general consensus is about the behavioral activity of your target audience, it helps to get extra context. A good idea is to take your target market criteria and search for census and journal research data that provides supplementary information about your target audience.

For example, if you’ve discovered that your dominant target market is entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, it might be beneficial to also search for information about what they earn, how uncomfortable their living arrangements are, or even how well they do at mathematics (see page 45 of the 2015 Silicon Valley Index). This helps you build a complete profile of your audience and helps you make better decisions about what might motivate them to click your call-to-action.

Searching Google for related journals on the survey topic

With census data, you get a very particular insight into household, employment, financial, and cultural information. Some journals and other market research (which has been made public) might help you understand saturation data around device and app usage, and maybe even motivations for what makes a specific user set purchase.

Step 4: Create Hypotheses about Your Market

So now you have your collected your survey responses and supplementary data. This collection of knowledge about your potential user base is pretty powerful. With this information, you’re able to create hypotheses around what makes your audience “compulsive.”

In any particular demographic, you’re not often going to have just one psychological profile, but many. Every person has a pretty unique cocktail of needs, wishes, and desires based on who they are, how they grew up, and what’s on their mind.

Here are some example assumptions from previous research we performed at GRONADE. If we were to address a segment of Australian males aged 18 to 21, some common threads we could leverage are:

• Isolation: They feel lonely and want to be closer or more connected to other people. It’s the same reason people do ecstasy (which promotes feelings of closeness) as a drug and use Facebook – it makes them feel as if they’re bonding, they have friends, and there’s some kind of common ground.
• Boredom: Life doesn’t seem interesting. Their job is boring and nothing new is happening. They need to find something to keep themselves entertained. This is where the thrill of trying something dangerous, like drugs at a wild party or solo skydiving, comes in to play. It’s also the driver of many television successes like House of Cards and Breaking Bad because they can immerse themselves in something far more exciting as an escape. They live vicariously through television characters.
• Distraction: Things aren’t going well. There is a problem at work, at home, with relationships, or they just doesn’t feel good about themselves. They feel anxious, stressed, or worried. Something offers a distraction, often one that numbs or soothes the pain or stress. They’ll use any means to distract and relax, such as scrolling through Instagram, instantly responding to snaps via Snapchat, or they’ll smoke. It’s a way to deal with anxiety at the expense of productivity.
• Lack of purpose/accomplishment: They feel they are not achieving anything and not getting anywhere. Some habits, like playing World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or Angry Birds make people feel as if they’re really getting somewhere or making a difference (like saving lives and becoming a war hero) and that makes up for the fact that their real lives don’t offer much sense of accomplishment.

Most people aren’t very aware of their own psychological needs. If you ask someone why they bought a Ferrari, they will say, “because I have always loved cars” not “because I feel unaccomplished and having an expensive car makes me feel important and powerful” (i.e., it’s signaling my status).

You could guess at someone’s inner needs through lots of clues (such as appearance, behavior, and purchasing habits). Someone who buys expensive brand name clothing might be giving a clue that they care a lot about looking important. Or, it might be a clue that they care a lot about fitting in, so they buy what all their friends are buying.

Step 5: Call-To-Action Logic

Brainstorm a list of words that come to mind when you assess the results you have. When you have a healthy list of around 10 to 20 words, use Thesaurus.com to expand the set of keywords to a list of action words you feel will have the greatest impact.

Use a thesaurus for alternative keywords to impact assumption trigger words

Select five of your favorite, most evocative keywords to kick-start your initial A/B test batch of calls-to-action. This is a good start for your experiment to learn the most effective call-to-action to use.

The best approach to find a CTA that works is to tap in to the fears and attributes you uncovered in your research. If we use the commonalities I mentioned above for middle-class Australian men aged 18 to 21, we could assume the following five calls-to-action would be a good foundation group. Of course, these should be tailored to the actual product you’re offering, though in these examples, I’m representing the most obvious results based on the research:

1. Be Together, Now (playing on the isolation aspect and the longing for connectedness)
2. Your Thrills Await (a counter to the boredom aspect)
3. Escape Today (a ticket away from the mundane)
4. Make a Difference (a way to satisfy the desire for accomplishment)
5. Take Control (a real power move in a world where sometimes all seems out of control)

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you still need a compelling offer. If your product sucks, no psychological trickery is going to vacuum fat stacks out of someone’s wallet.

Apple never says, “If you use Apple products, you’re smart, creative, and stylish.” It’s just implied.

If you have something people will feel good about using or buying and you can create a compelling action-point for your core target audience to begin the journey and use your product, it’s a much stronger position to be in.

To do that, you need to become intimate with who your target audience really is, how they behave, what makes them feel compelled to take action, and then speak their language to engage their trigger finger. If you can do that enough times and can keep them happy, engaged, and converting repeatedly on specific business objectives, that is a sure-fire recipe for growth.

About the Author: Tomer Garzberg is the CEO and Founder at GRONADE Growth Partnerships. They grow seed- and venture-capital-funded startups and enterprise products. GRONADE is a blend of man and machine on a mission to systematize growth. Say Hi on Twitter @TomerGarzberg.

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Retailer Success Stories: Retailer Uses Localized Marketing And ‘Human Experience’ To Drive Email Subscribers And Sales

Based in Racine, Minnesota, Danny’s Meat and Catering didn’t have the bigger budget to capture his audience on larger channels like TV, print and radio. Even though marketing locally on those channels can be relatively inexpensive, for Danny – a small business – it wasn’t a budget-friendly option.Related Articles

1. The Weekly Wrap: Lord of the Inland Empire
2. The Benchmark Email Community and Social Network Tools
3. The Benchmark Email Community is Great for Social Media Marketing

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Introducing The Digital CMO: Corporate Marketing for Those Who Live in the Future

It was somewhere in the middle of a conversation with Brian Clark at one of Content Marketing World’s parties when it all became clear to me:

While Rainmaker.FM has tremendous educational and inspirational assets for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and most general marketers, there’s no podcast that caters to the corporate marketer.

That’s not just true on Rainmaker.FM. In general, there isn’t a lot of blogging and podcasting in the corporate marketing space — whether that’s because of a gag order from the legal department or the time it takes to wrangle multiple agencies and channels.

But corporate marketers need help too.

Corporate content marketing strategies that work

In my day job, I run Speakeasy, a content marketing, social media, and promotions agency. Every day I talk with corporate marketers whose challenges and opportunities multiply with every new technique and channel available to them.

Whether it’s programmatic advertising; synthesizing content, SEO, and conversion; attribution modeling; or just getting all seven of their specialist agencies marching in the same general direction — today’s corporate marketer needs a lot of information and doesn’t necessarily have time to seek it out or consume it.

The corner office, or even the cube with a little window, can be a lonely place.

Engage with top corporate marketers

On The Digital CMO we’re going to make it a little less lonely by helping you engage with top corporate marketers in a wide variety of B2C and B2B companies.

We’ll celebrate their wins, learn from their struggles, and learn the strategies that are working today.

Each week, we’ll start with a lightning-round review of hot news and topics in brand marketing for the week. Then we’ll settle in for a candid chat with our featured guest, who will be a senior-level corporate marketer.

We’ll be frank, informative, and challenging.

Get your ticket to the boardroom

Whether you’re a CMO or an executive-in-training, you won’t want to miss a single episode of The Digital CMO.

Subscribe to The Digital CMO on iTunes now

P.S. Want to nominate someone to appear as a guest on the show (even if that’s you)? Click here.

The post Introducing The Digital CMO: Corporate Marketing for Those Who Live in the Future appeared first on Copyblogger.

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8 Steps to Guarantee Marketing Automation Success

EmailMonday gathered an impressive list of statistics about marketing automation usage and its relevance for businesses in 2016 and beyond. Some key statistics  from various sources include:

• 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is very important to marketing success across all channels (Ascend2).

• Approximately 11 times more B2B organizations are now using marketing automation compared to those in 2011 (SiriusDecisions).

• Best-in-Class companies are 67% more likely to use marketing automation (Aberdeen Group).

• 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than two years (Gleanster Research).

• 42% of CRM users will increase marketing automation spending in the near future (Software Advice).

• 54% of CMOs have started or finished marketing automation software implementation (MarketingSherpa).

• The most commonly used marketing automation applications include email marketing software, CRM, and marketing automation suites (Software Advice and Research Now).

• In the B2B environment, 69% have used marketing automation for customer acquisition while 50% have used it for customer retention (ACT-ON and Gleanster Research).

As noted by other research, leveraging available automated processes for marketing can add efficiencies, fill in talent gaps, maximize limited budgets, and more effectively target those platforms and channels were customers and prospects are now located. In determining the process for adding marketing automation to your SMB, there are some best practices that you will want to consider before you dive in:

1. Review what you are using now before changing anything. 

Like most companies, you are most likely using a wide range of offline and online tools, having added certain marketing tools as they have been introduced while still keeping old traditional software. You need to know what you have in order to determine what type of marketing automation you can employ that brings it all together and removes any duplication of effort and helps you have more time for other aspects of your business.

2. Research available marketing automation solutions. 

In order to know what you want to automate and what this solution will do for you, it’s important to study the existing solutions. Whether you implement the marketing automation solution or you hire someone to do it, you need to understand why it works for your business. This can help with future strategic decisions related to your marketing effort and other technology investments.

3. Organize existing data to prepare for automation. 

Automating with a mass of unorganized data definitely defeats the purpose, so you need to spring clean your data. This means getting rid of duplicate and inaccurate information before transitioning from multiple systems to just one.

4. Map out your transition to an automated marketing process. 

You may even want to consult with a marketing professional who can suggest a specific way to approach the transition as well as the best automated marketing solutions for your business niche and specific strategy. Typically, you will want to have a centralized marketing database, an engagement engine, and an analytics engine as part of your new automated marketing solution.

5. Align the automated marketing processes with the sales processes. 

It's critical to get your sales team included in the marketing automation process. They will most likely have insights about the type of automated system that would work best for what they are trying to achieve. This alignment can further your ability to qualify leads and turn them into customers.

6. Create a timeline for the marketing automation transition. 

A best practice is to take a stepwise approach to automating your marketing processes. The last thing you want to do is change everything at once. If anything goes wrong along the way, you could end up losing customers and traction. By automating specific aspects of your marketing at one time over the course of six months to a year, you are ensuring everything integrates and is seamless to the customer and prospect.

7. Train your staff to use the new marketing automation solution. 

Ensure that they know how and why this marketing automation solution works for your organization. Even though it is automated, your staff still needs to know what it is doing and what the results mean. After all, overusing the automation can backfire so they need to know the frequency and quality of the messages they are adding to the solution. There are still decisions to be made about marketing content used for the automated processes like email marketing and campaigns plus analytics to analyze and changes to make based on the results from these metrics.

8. Continually review results from the marketing automation effort. 

Your marketing automation processes do not operate in a vacuum. It’s critical that you continue to monitor them and assess the results you get from the investment. The analytics you get from the effort will guide you toward any changes that need to be made and will serve as the benchmark for the type of technology or tools you add in the future.

This is the year for your business to transition to marketing automation to ensure the greatest efficiency and return on your marketing investment. By following these best practices, you can increase the results gained by automating your marketing processes.

This comprehensive guide to Marketing Automation will start your journey down the road of marketing automation success.

Author Bio: John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, online marketing guru and startup enthusiast. He is founder of the online invoicing company Due. He was recently named #3 on Top 50 Online Influencers in the World by Entrepreneur Magazine and has been one of the Top 10 Most Influential PPC Experts in the World for the past three years.

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