Digital marketing today

"There is one difference between winners and losers when it comes to web analytics. Winners, well before they think data or tool, have a well structured Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. Losers don't." - Avinash Kaushik in his blog post.

If you have read any blog post here you will notice that it’s related to digital analytics or web analytics. And, all of which tie up with digital marketing, which is where the sum of efforts you put into digital analytics (DA) is headed, in making your digital marketing better.

But, what is digital marketing anyway?

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Digital marketing is selling things to people via anything that is electronic, has a pretty screen and will let people click on it. Here's a definition from Wikipedia that leaves no doubts:

"Digital marketing is marketing that makes use of electronic devices (computers) such as personal computers, smartphones, cellphones, tablets and game consoles to engage with stakeholders. Digital marketing applies technologies or platforms such as websites, e-mail, apps (classic and mobile) and social networks. Many organisations cross traditional and digital marketing channels."

Today, when you talk about digital marketing you will hear words like Analytics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Visitors, Views, Engagement and what not. Digital Marketing is not what it once was in the 1990’s. Looking back, it has come a long way since.

Digital marketing centers around creating an experience for your customer, be it via Online, mobile or within social networks. It involves listening to how your customers interact with your digital content. Then, monitoring, predicting, experimenting and adapting what you deliver to what your customers want.

At this point, it's worth musing what Seth once said about connections in the digital age:

"There is no market for humming, for example, because everyone has unlimited humming at their disposal at all times. So, in the abundant digital world, what's scarce? Where is the economy?

It's in connection.

Who trusts you? Who wants to hear from you? Who will collaborate and support and engage with you? 

These are things that don't scale to infinity. These are precious resources."

By knowing who your customer is, what he does and a whole lot of other details that have sparked off the privacy debate, you can make your marketing more relevant and experience more personalized. (You've surely read this one, I presume.)

Almost everything digital that touches your customer, can be used to make his or her experience wholesome. Like, altering your landing page based on feedback from your digital metrics. And, with the state to which social media has evolved to what it is today, and data driven decisions it is possible to reach out to your customers at a personal level than ever before. It possible to connect with your customer than ever before.

Previously, what was once traditional marketing, today works in tandem alongside digital. Here’s an example of how that could be done:

“Each year companies spend millions of dollars for a 30-second Super Bowl ad to reach a wide and captive audience. By adding a digital call to action--like an invitation to like the brand’s Facebook page to be entered in a giveaway--brands can extend the value of that advertisement and get a broader return on their (very significant) investment. Once that consumer engages online, marketers can provide additional details about the product in the ad, invite them to opt-in for future communication, or offer a digital coupon or promotion in order to encourage the type of active engagement that digital channels have to offer.”

Here are few relevant numbers that show the state of things these days:

• Internet users: More than 36% of the global population today, compared to 21.7% in 2008.

• Mobile phone users: 60.7% of the population this year, compared to 40.0% in 2008.

• Smartphone users: Just under one-third of mobile users and about 20% of the global population, compared to 3.7% of mobile users and 1.5% of the population in 2008.

• Social network users: About a quarter of the global population, compared to 8.3% in 2008.

• Facebook users: More than 15% of the global population, compared to 3.1% in 2008.

• Total ad spending: $517.10 billion in 2013, up 2.8% from last year, compared to $484.30 billion in 2008.
  
• Digital ad spending: More than 22% of total ad spending in 2013, compared to 12% in 2008.

• Mobile ad spending: Just 2.6% of total ad spending and 11.9% of digital ad spending, compared to 2.1% in 2008.

And to close, here's an infographic from Mobile marketing watch relating analytics and digital marketing:

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References:

1. Digital Marketing and measurement model 

2. Digital Marketing

3. The end of the expert - why no one in marketing knows what they're doing

4. Making digital and traditional marketing work together

5. Worldwide Ad Growth Buoyed by Digital, Mobile Adoption

6. Seth's Blog: Scarcity and abundance in the digital age

7. Infographic: Analytics Driving Digital Marketing

What Women Want: Web Analytics

What is it that women want!?! Let's face it, one of the greatest mysteries in this life is figuring out what women want. Men sure don’t know and I would dare say that many women don’t either. Some might say that marketers have figured it out, these guys know what sale and what do not sale. But I think marketers have missed the mark. In this post I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that web analytics may actually be a tool to help all business persons male and female, understand what women want in online ecommerce or emergent mobile markets

Before you exit this page, press delete, thumbs down, or label me as some “crazy” feminist, allow me to explain myself. Every day, men and women and boys and girls are exposed to the ideas that are valued by those who control the purse. Unfortunately, it’s not the women who control the purse in the media and business world. Allow me to illustrate this example by sharing one of Colin Stokes’ observations he shared in a Ted video. He points out that seldom will you ever watch a movie where there are two women characters who actually have meaningful roles or even when two women converse about things other than their mutual crush. He adds that in "Argo," the critically acclaimed blockbuster, the major line said by a woman in the movie is "Are you coming to bed Honey?" Need I say more? The dearth of missing dialogue between women to women and men to women is a testament that men and some women don’t know what is important to women or that what is important to women is undervalued. Now where does web analytics fit in all this?

Web analytics, if used properly, can be a powerful tool. It enables website designers, marketers, and managers to have immediate feedback as to what “works” and what does not on a website. Web designers, marketers, and managers can implement A/B and multivariate testing to see what web pages have lower bounce rates, who seem to encourage conversion, and are the most popular among users. Web analytics can even have customer specific information that can be aggregated to show trends among clusters of users. Web analytics presents a great opportunity for designers, marketers, and managers to capitalize on the ability to experiment on their websites to actually understand better what it is that women want in a website. I will now elaborate on this idea by focusing on mobile fitness apps.

In my emergent technologies class the other night we were discussing what makes a fitness app successful. Words and phrases like “tough competition” “intensity” “muscle mass accumulation” echoed throughout the discussion (I think I even heard a few grunts of approval). But I couldn’t help but wonder if these are programmatic attributes that women want in a fitness app. The men in the class also suggested monitoring heart rate and calories burned. These are important to women of course too. But not a single classmate suggested a successful app might allow the user to track other weight-loss indicators such as the following:

- Emotional stability
- Frequency of emotional eating
- Frequency and potency of chocolate cravings caused by unbalanced hormones
- Level of pain caused by menstrual cramps

For women, these issues are inseparable from weight loss. Of course my classmates did not come up with these suggestions. They are men! It is not likely that they would come up with these suggestions...ever...Because men and women experience the world differently. Now, don’t get me wrong. Women are VERY competitive. We just compete in different ways and we are different from men physiologically. These differences need to be taken into account when designing websites.

If competition between participants is magic formula for male fitness app users, what is the female counterpart magic formula? Now is an ideal time to launch emerging market online and mobile apps that experiment and seek for the “magic” formulas that empower women.

We do need to be cautious, however, in our attempt to understand what women want by analyzing web analytics. The website needs to be designed strategically or we may take home the wrong message and find ourselves just as clueless as we were before. Avinash Kaushik explains in his book Web Analytics 2.0 that when taken out of context, the data pulled from your website can be meaningless or completely understood (2010). He also suggests adding context into your analysis by asking your viewers questions. I would dare say that he is asking us to couple quantitative analysis with qualitative research. For example, a manager might choose to A/B test two web pages that look like they came out of Cosmo and airbrushed photos of sixteen-year old girls that look like sex goddesses (Russel 2012). The manager will be able to see which page was more effective at getting conversion rates. However, the manager will be no closer at understanding what women really want then they were before. However, if a manager were to decide to implement a web pages that had more uplifting and empowering messages, followed up by a three to five question survey asking them about their experience, then the manager might have a better understanding.

Now is the time. More women have a college education then men in the United States. More women then men have taken management roles. The wage gap between men and women is decreasing. More men are taking on the role of care-givers. The world as “we” know it is changing (Rosin 2010). Why not design our websites and the tools that we use to evaluate them more strategically. Why design our websites and the KBRs and KPIs we use to judge the websites around what women really want?




Citations:

Kaushik, Avinash (2009). Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity (p. 148). John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

Rosen, Hannah (2010). The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. Penguin Press. NYNY.

Russel, Cameron (2012). Looks Arent’ Everything, Believe Me, I am a Model. http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_model.html

Smith, Dorothy (1987) The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Northeastern University Press

Stokes, Colin (2012) How movies teach manhood. Ted: Ideas Worth Spreading.http://www.ted.com/talks/colin_stokes_how_movies_teach_manhood.html. .

Data Visualization and Web Analytics, a Comparison

What is data visualization and what does it have to do with web analytics? According to Matthew Ward of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, data visualization is “the graphical presentation of information, with the goal of providing the viewer with a qualitative understanding of the information contents.”[1] In other words, data visualization is infographic design. [2] For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is a special form of graphic design that is focused on the visual representation of information. I bring this up, because one of the most important things about digital analytics is understanding, or analyzing, the data. For that reason, these two topics have a lot in common.

Good infographics depict information in a quick and organized way. A lot of the time, a designer is dealing with a lot of information and is faced with the dilemma of how to show that data in a single page or in a single design. The infographic poster to the left depicts the average data consumption in the U.S. in one day. [3] That is a topic that definitely has a large amount of data connected to it. Somehow, the designer sifted through it, organized it and came up with the poster you see now.

Web analytics is similar. Web analytics is defined by Evan LaPointe, author of the blog Atlanta Analytics, as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.” [4] The key words here are “understanding” and “optimizing.” If all you have is data, it isn’t going to be much use to your business. It is the understanding and optimization of that data that companies look for. It is how that data can be used rather than just ­collected. You and your client must be able to see the data. In a way, it is much like seeing the data in the data usage poster as discussed above.

            The objectives of data visualization and web analytics differ. In the first, the idea is to help others visualize data in such a way as to inform the viewer. In the latter, the goal is to take a large amount of data and understand it in order to make strategic decisions for a company. Regardless, they are both ways of informing others. Thomson Dawson of Pull Brand Innovation states that, “Marketers (and those who cling to big data) are prone to view brand design more narrowly than they should.”[5] The point Dawson makes in his article is that those who are in charge of business strategies often get stuck on a piece of data or an idea, and sometimes it takes someone from the outside with a new and broader view on the subject to make the changes needed to thrive. There will come a time when one of your clients, or the business you work for, will put you in a similar situation. When that happens, just remember, there is always a way to show that person or persons why the data lead you to that decision. It is just a matter of visualizing the data and presenting it in such a way as to persuade.

           

Footnotes

[1] Matthew Ward, “Overview of Data Visualization.” URL: http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/datavis.html accessed: Jan. 30, 2013.

[2] Amy Balliett, “The Do’s And Don’s Of Infographic Design.” Last modified: Oct. 14, 2011. URL: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/14/the-dos-and-donts-of-infographic-design/ Accessed: Jan. 30,2013.

[3] Bima Arafah, “Huge Infographics Design Resources: Overview, Principles, Tips and Examples.” Last modified: May 12, 2010. URL: http://www.onextrapixel.com/2010/05/21/huge-infographics-design-resources-overview-principles-tips-and-examples/. Accessed: Jan. 30, 2013.

[4] Evan LaPointe, “A Better Definition of Web Analytics.” Last modified: April 22, 2010. URL: http://www.atlantaanalytics.com/practicing-web-analytics/a-better-definition-of-web-analytics/ Accessed: Jan 30, 2013.

[5] Thomson Dawson, “Why Designers Make the Best Brand Strategies.” URL: http://www.pullinc.com/why-designers-make-the-best-brand-strategists/ Accessed: Jan. 30, 2013.­­­­