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Bridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.
Analytics

How to build a financial case for marketing spend on existing data

Existing data is an intelligence asset for marketers. It houses, your past results and learnings from engaging with customers. It really is a great asset to have, and one that can always be utilized better.  When building a financial case, past analytics data, helps you to see how past spend went. If you haven’t really done this before, it can be useful to backtrack on a couple of initiatives. And outline; What you did.  What you spent. … Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

What is analytics role in scenario planning for marketing?

Scenario planning is a valuable management exercise to help plan for circumstances in an unknown future. It helps to ground all the unknown into multiple scenarios, which should ideally cover off most of which brands will land in. It’s a great process for turning the unknown into the known, then working through that. And then when circumstances arise, to better arm teams on how they can handle it. Analytics plays an important role, it can provide an idea, of what… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

How to create a business case for marketing

A great place to start is, what are we trying to achieve? And what do we need to do to get there? Keeping in mind measurement & analytics to help show the progress. If you can present your business case, with a prediction on how well it will perform, using historical or other data, this will greatly support the business case. It is often best to present some ranges, going, we believe this will deliver between X and Y. With… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

First Party Analytics

The term refers to analytics that uses first party cookies. These cookies are tied to your domain, so they can’t be used elsewhere. The reason this is valuable, as only you can activate and use them. Whereas with a third party cookie, that third party could activate the cookie elsewhere. This was useful in other ways, for example, Google setting a cookie, then being able to serve ads to those folks.  First party analytics is more respectful to your… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

How to reduce advertising waste

To start with, you need to identify where waste is happening. And that is not always clearcut. Waste for each business can be subjective, as media that isn’t driving your objectives is a waste. Where on the surface it may look good or pass muster for other brands. So, Define your advertising objective. Create a scorecard, to see if advertising is meeting that. Remove or optimize any media that isn’t hitting objectives. Another way to put this, is you are… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

What does direct traffic mean?

You may have seen ‘Direct’ traffic in your web analytics and are wondering what that means. How can traffic be direct? Direct traffic originally meant, that someone had typed the URL into their browser. Thus visiting the page ‘directly’. This would also be the same for if someone bookmarked a URL.   However, often direct traffic means that your analytics system has been unable to detect the source of the traffic. So it is classified as direct traffic.  … Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

How to create high impact content

High impact content is targeted and focused on a particular use case or topic to a narrowly defined audience. It is impactful because this focus enables you to speak really clearly to the prospect. Analytics helps to see how impactful it is, be looking at things like scroll, engagement and attention on the content. To create high impact content, you need to: Define what the objective is Define the narrow audience What you want them to learn and to do… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

How to convert traffic from content into leads

The most straightforward way is to ask, ask customers reading content, to take a next step. To subscribe to your newsletter. To download a whitepaper. To explore the products. You need to ask and give them that step to turn them into leads!  That seems so silly, but are you asking them? Or are you asking them enough? Make sure that calls to action are in the flow of the content. As users would use your webpage. Buttons off… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

How to attribute MQLs to content marketing

Use a platform like Nudge. To track your content, and the next steps in the customer journey people take. This will help you find what content is driving MQLs, but also insights like time of day, traffic source, where they come form, on what device. So you can stitch together a customer profile, on how they are driving business value.  This typically involves, adding a piece of code to your content, maybe appending some data to click through URLs,… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022
Analytics

How to generate MQLS from content marketing?

Starting with the customer, and working through, at what stage do they become a marketing qualified lead is the place to start. What things do they need to know? What do they desire to do next? Where do they start? Then use content marketing, from further up in the journey, to support them qualifying themselves. You have to link the content, to that customer journey, and support it. You can’t just throw content at them, and go, yay. It takes… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 21, 2022