Robotic Marketer Blog Posts from November 2020
How To Increase Your ‘Net New Leads’ With The Right Marketing Strategy
With only a little over a month to go, many businesses are buckling down and prepping for the new year. Smart businesses finding that by having a plan in place, they are 313% more likely to achieve their goals.
Marketing is one of the most important things a business can do. Not only does it help build brand awareness, but it is also essential to generate leads, increase sales and engage customers. When competing against big names, strategic marketing enables companies to play the field.
The efficiency of many core business functions is dependent on a good marketing strategy or plan. But, in case you’re one of those businesses that don’t mind sitting on your hands and procrastinating, here are a few reasons why you get up and start moving.
To begin, here some reasons why you need a marketing strategy:
- Provides a blueprint for navigating the current business environment.
- Helps you gain an edge over your competitors, especially if they don’t have a plan in place for the new year.
- Makes you less reliant on key people of your organization or strategic partnerships to supply leads.
- Ensures you allocate the right resources, both internally and externally, to meet marketing requirements.
- Identifies your target audience’s pain points and how you should communicate with them.
- Differentiates your company from the competition by identifying a unique value proposition.
- Provides the business with focus and direction by identifying where the best opportunities lie and what threats need to be avoided.
- Delivers best practices through smart marketing initiatives.
- Formulates your content strategy and highlights which platforms are most appropriate for your business to generate leads and build engagement.
- Sets key performance indicators that keep your team liable – no more ad-hoc work and hoping for the best!
In short, whether you’re targeting B2B leads or B2C, a marketing strategy provides the strategic direction on how to bring in ‘net new leads’.
Lead Generation
At the center of every marketing strategy is its lead generation focus, which has come to be one of the most important elements of growing a healthy business. A well-developed marketing strategy encompasses not only the steps to attract and convert leads but also the process of nurturing them once converted.
For example, you meet a potential lead at a networking event. Once you have made that connection, you then go through the steps for securing that lead after your initial encounter, namely connecting with them on social media and sending them regular EDMs.
Here are some key lead generation tactics that all good marketing strategies must have:
- Social media marketing
Social media has grown to be an essential element of every business’ marketing strategy. And since it isn’t going away anytime soon, it important to understand how you can harness its power for lead generation.
Crucial to the success of this tactic is first determining which platform your target audience is using.
If you’re targeting B2B customers, LinkedIn needs to be the focus. Built specifically for professionals to network, publish content, and connect with people you’d like to do business with, this platform is an excellent way to generate ‘net new leads’.
If you’re a B2C business, Facebook and Instagram are the way to go. Focus on getting more followers and optimize your page and profile to your specific audience. Publish relevant imagery and content that entices them to convert to your brand.
Often giveaways and contests help with boosting engagement. By inviting people to sign up, you are also able to build your database and further enhance your lead nurturing process through drip-feed email marketing campaigns.
- Google AdWords
In an article written by Autogrow , they share an excellent example of the smart use of Google AdWords. While the company in this case only had 1,000 unique visitors per month, they were still able to perform successfully, considering their traffic.
By using highly relevant keywords on website landing pages through Google AdWords, businesses can create a direct link between what customers are looking for and how their solutions are the best option to meet their needs.
High intention keywords often include the term “service” in them. The intention is that the customer is searching for a service so they can schedule a consultation and/or make a purchase decision.
Examples include, “ERP solutions” or “software implementation service”.
Marketing strategy technologies like Robotic Marketer are able to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to developing a lead generation strategy. Identifying both high intention and low intention keywords, the artificial intelligence behind the technology is able to rank search queries based on their competitive relevance and provide you with an in-depth report (that can lead to a commercial transaction) as part of the deliverable.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most trusted sources when it comes to providing relevant information to B2B buyers. Some organizations see email marketing as providing leads that account for 58% of all revenue.
However, with ever-changing technologies and buyer habits, it’s all hard to keep track of. Well-developed marketing strategies provide you with insight into the current trends of the market as well as recommendations to achieve high open rates and qualified leads.
For example, marketing automation software helps you target a much larger audience – in turn generating twice the amount of business leads than a manual campaign. You’re also able to schedule regular campaigns (to help with consistency) well in advance, which will help you stick to crossing out tasks within your strategy. Your marketing strategy should include a list of topics that are most relevant to your target audience and the cadence to achieving them.
While leads may start at a single touchpoint, the lead generation process involves capturing leads, communicating regularly and converting them into customers. Having a marketing strategy is proven to be successful in maximizing your sales effectiveness.
Why You Are Likely To Succeed With A Marketing Strategy
As business owners move forward into 2021, many are considering the changes that need to be made to their marketing strategy for success in the New Year following the countless challenges of 2020.
As the core channel through which businesses communicate their value with potential customers and retain clients in the long-term, marketing should always be a key focus for businesses seeking to expand their operations.
Investing carefully in marketing to grow your business in the digital space is vital to maintain a competitive edge in the face of ever-changing digital marketing services and media platforms.
To facilitate this, a marketing strategy is critical to making sure that your marketing activities are as impactful as possible, acting as a guidebook to allow you to focus on the most powerful actions that you can take as a business.
As specialists in creating tailored, effective marketing strategies for small and medium businesses, here are some key reasons you are more likely to achieve success with a marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy allows you to cover your bases
Marketing strategies outline research-based methods of improving your digital presence and growing your reach. A tailored strategy explicitly outlines actions that will improve customer experience and make your business stand out from the competition.
Whether this be posting regularly on social media channels, having a well-designed website, or creating quality content for your audience, a strategy allows you to cover your bases and ensure that there are no gaps in your marketing efforts.
This means that marketing activities can be focused on tasks that will deliver the highest impact possible and also bring you up to speed with competitors.
A marketing strategy helps you achieve your business goals
A marketing strategy should not be a cookie-cutter approach, but rather a specific approach for your organization me i.e. it is closely aligned with your business goals.
Regardless of the nature of your business and your objectives, a smart marketing strategy will outline key steps to take to achieve them.
Whether you are looking to gain more long-term clients, expand internationally or launch a new product, a marketing strategy will help you to plan and execute marketing activities that will help you achieve your business goals.
A marketing strategy takes the guesswork out of marketing
As a business owner, you want everything that you do to actively contribute to your business whilst avoiding marketing activities that cost more than the benefit they deliver.
A tailored, research-based marketing strategy enables your business to only engage in impactful marketing activities.
By discussing with a marketing consultant and your internal marketing team in developing your strategy, you are being decisive about the activities that will and will not benefit your business, providing clarity in the actions you will take, allowing you to plan and budget more effectively for future periods. For this reason, a strategy takes the guesswork out of your marketing activities.
By clearly outlining what exactly you need to do, you can focus on maximizing the ROI on marketing, ensuring that your marketing activities are cost-effective and aligned with your objectives.
A well-defined strategy allows for better collaboration
When you have a clearly defined marketing strategy, it makes it easy for all members of your organization to familiarise themselves with your key branding, messaging, and image. This enhances the presence of your organization, since having consistent branding is crucial in a digital setting, but also has the added impact of making it easy for multiple team members to collaborate or share tasks with each other.
A strategy establishes a rule book for anyone working on marketing activities and ensures that all marketing efforts are consistent and of high quality. This means that team members do not need to reinvent the wheel when they work on marketing-related activities, but rather have a clear guide to make sure that their work is impactful and in line with the strategy and the goals of the organization.
It helps you with future strategies
Your marketing strategy should not be the same every year. Having a clear marketing strategy allows you to see what worked and what didn’t, allowing future strategies to be adapted around these observations.
If something hasn’t worked in a specific year, you can remove that from your strategy and if you have discovered a new, creative way to engage your target market, you have the freedom to implement this in future strategies.
All of your future marketing strategies will become iterations of past strategies, leveraging the experience and knowledge of your successes. This means that each strategy is more likely to have a significant impact on your business. Therefore, a marketing strategy can be viewed as a valuable asset in the long-term growth of your business.
By putting thought into your strategy now, and revising it in future periods, you can add valuable knowledge and insight into all future strategies, improving the impact of marketing activities and the strength of your brand in the long run.
With so many benefits to your business, a clear marketing strategy is a necessary ingredient to success. With a well-defined strategy, you are likely to gain clarity in the actions you need to take to have a maximum impact on your business and drive engagement and reach.
When planning your business strategy and goals in the new year, ensure that you focus on reviewing your past marketing strategies or implementing a clearer strategy if this is something that has not been done in past.
Investing time into your marketing strategy can lead to immense short- and long-term benefits, allowing you to help your business thrive.
How Robotic Marketer can help
If you need help developing or refining your marketing strategy, the experts at Robotic Marketer are here to help. Contact us today and allow us to help you create an impactful marketing strategy for 2021 that is centered around your unique needs and business goals.
How To Know If Your Marketing And Sales Teams Aren’t Aligned
Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta
Sales enablement is the practice of aligning your sales and marketing efforts to generate leads and convert them to sales. While both departments have similar goals, they each take a different method to accomplish these goals. Companies that experience misalignment of the sales and marketing departments are often dysfunctional, struggling to convert leads and generate revenue. Below, we discuss how you can know when your marketing and sales departments aren’t aligned.
Each department has different objectives
Marketing departments are typically only focused on marketing qualified leads (MQLs), which is how marketers can measure their performance and success. Unfortunately, this isn’t fair to the sales team. The sales team is judged by its ability to convert leads into customers, which means they need a good set of leads to make that conversion.
Lack of communication between departments
When you are trying to align the marketing and sales departments, you need to establish constant communication between both parties. Each department has to have a deep understanding of the goals and strategies, allowing them to set their own expectations for what they need from each other. Any lack in communication will only foster dysfunction and division between the marketing and sales teams.
Lack of engaging content
Marketing teams are responsible for creating engaging content to support and nurture the customer relationship. Because of their responsibility in this relationship, marketers are uniquely positioned to create engaging marketing and sales content meant to educate and inform the audience. Your sales team is responsible for engaging with the customer one on one, but that doesn’t mean they are equipped to build collateral. Without engaging, well-crafted content, your organization is at risk of losing a sale.
About Marketing Eye Atlanta
Marketing Eye Atlanta is a results-driven marketing agency that is dedicated to supporting and elevating the marketing efforts of small to medium-sized businesses. With our consultative approach, we develop a marketing strategy that is specifically designed to help you achieve your business goals and objectives. Our goal is to help your business succeed. Contact Marketing Eye Atlanta today to learn how we can help you.
Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta
3 Tools to Measure Brand Awareness and Why You Should
Source: Jeff Bullas
Every brand wishes to become famous. Well, every entrepreneur, business owner, and marketer wishes for its brand to become famous.
But as you might guess, popularity doesn’t happen overnight. Not for brands. They don’t wake up famous; instead, slowly and steadily, they grow brand awareness.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness defines the extent to which consumers are familiar with the qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.
The goal of marketing, PR, and even customer service is to grow brand awareness – to make sure people know the brand, talk about it, and recall it when the brand’s industry is discussed. These are the primary perks of brand awareness, but there are others, too.
Source: Jeff Bullas
The Advantages of A Marketing Strategy
Source: Marketing Eye Australia
2020 has been an interesting year in marketing, to say the least. Yes, we have all undeniably suffered under the conditions of the pandemic – but where there’s hardship there’s also an opportunity to be found and many of us have been forced into new and exciting places.
When the normal way of doing things isn’t an option anymore, we have to get creative. Marketing in 2020 has seen an increased use of digital mediums more so than ever before. And although we get more digital each and every year, it’s safe to say that no one expected a surge from necessity like this. Remote shopping and digital marketing have become more important to the business and consumer market than ever before.But the more things change, the more they stay the same. While we have found creative new ways to communicate online, the role of the marketing strategy has changed little in its central value. Given this, it’s not surprising that many have come to realize how sorely they’ve underestimated the importance of the document. A marketing strategy is a roadmap, a blueprint that sets out what and how you’ll communicate with your audience over the coming year. Without a marketing strategy, businesses are engaging their customers with one hand tied behind their back. But more specifically than that, where is the value of working with a marketing strategy?
Oversee your business, sales and marketing together
We all like to think we see the big picture, but we’re usually standing too close to know what we’re looking at. The writing of a strategy puts everything into perspective – it’s the perfect opportunity to take a step back and have an objective look at your business, sales and marketing objectives. This is the time to really get into it and think:
- What are our strengths?
- What are our weaknesses?
- What do we do to improve?
A healthy dose of introspection is not the only key to surviving in the business world but thriving.
Strategies your branding
There’s an impressive amount of variety in the ways in which people and businesses market their brands. Even just when taking a few minutes to explore this variety, it becomes quickly apparent that some marketing is organized whilst others take a more ad-hoc approach. Without a documented marketing strategy, it becomes near impossible to manage your branding activities in an organized fashion. The most successful marketing and branding campaigns involve an integrated campaign. Attempting to coordinate multiple channels to deliver branding communications without a strategy is almost certainly going to end up as an expensive waste of time. A strategy is researched and provides clarity around the execution of tactics to achieve the campaign’s ultimate objectives.
Plan the use of your resources
As business owners and employees, we’re all too aware of the limitations to our resources and expenditure. Yes, it would be nice for any small business owner to spend $1,000 a day on sponsored Facebook posts, but it’s just not feasible for most of us. A strategy crucially outlines the budgets for each and every marketing activity. It’s far too often we see small businesses managing their marketing without a strategy overspending on channels that aren’t producing the results they’re after.
A fundamental tenant of strategy is prioritizing and assigning your resources. None of us have unlimited cash reserves; we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. A strategy lays it all out: here’s what I’ve got to work with, here’s where what we want to work on, here’s how much we’re putting into what. In this sense, a strategy is crucial to the organization and administration of your resources. One single document can make every marketing decision and purchase easier for the next year – because you’ve already put the work into making the decision.
Business and marketing are all about planning. Speak to any marketing strategy consultant and they will tell you the same thing. 2020 has proven this to be the case in what can only be called a harsh reality check. As times have gotten tough, many businesses have divested from marketing and other divisions sometimes seen to be less essential. But because times have been tougher, the competition has been heightened. And this has left those companies using a marketing strategy with a clear-cut edge.
Source: Marketing Eye Australia
How To Use Digital Marketing To Win More Deals
In recent years, the number of digital marketing tools available has increased tremendously, making digital marketing an especially powerful tool for businesses to convert leads and connect with clients. As an inherent part of the ever-changing digital marketing landscape, adapting to new digital marketing technologies is more important than ever to allow technology companies to stay ahead of the game, adapt their strategy and extend their reach in the B2B market.
Social media, EDM campaigns and online content have all become more important for enhancing credibility as a quality provider of technology and share stories of success with prospective leads.
In order to communicate the value of technological solutions offered to prospective clients, here are six strategies your company can leverage to win more deals online and accelerate the growth of your business.
1.Use MDFs to invest in digital marketing activities
Market Development Funds (MDFs) are provided by vendors to finance marketing activities conducted by channel partners. Vendors provide MDFs to expand their reach in recognition of the direct contact that their channel partners have with end-users.
Ensuring that you fully take advantage of these funds to get maximum returns is a fantastic way to win more deals and increase the growth of your business. By drawing attention to your service offerings, utilizing MDFs also has the additional benefit of creating opportunities to upsell across other product offerings.
As a win-win for vendors and channel partners, MDFs can be used in a variety of ways to boost sales and growth. They may allow you to partner with an expert or MDF approved marketing platform, such as Robotic Marketer, to develop a marketing strategy that is impactful and delivers returns to your business in the face of an increasingly competitive industry.
2. Leave a good impression with your website
Ensuring that your website is clean, responsive and easy to navigate is imperative to establishing your brand as a trusted solutions provider. Your website is the very home of your digital presence and should communicate the value you offer to clients. It should house important aspects of your business, including content, case studies and information about the services you offer.
Potential clients read a lot into a website in terms of design and content, so you don’t want to give them a reason to click away. Ensuring that your website provides value to prospects is crucial to improving conversion rates.
This can be done by consulting with digital marketing experts who are able to provide guidance in creating a site that responds quickly and communicates information that is relevant to the customer’s journey.
If you already have a great website, it can be a foundation to add new features to, including chatbots or industry insight content – further establishing your company as an expert in the field.
3. Define your target audience
While having a clear marketing strategy is important in all marketing activities, B2B marketing has an especially important need to ensure that you are selecting your audience carefully in order to maximize your ROI from marketing activities. Since B2B relationships with clients are long term, selecting the right individuals to target is especially important.
Moreover, having a clearly defined and segmented target audience is cost-effective; allowing you to streamline marketing activities based on relevance.
To select a target audience, it is important that you carefully define your value proposition and core offering in order to gain a deeper understanding of the specific characteristics of businesses in the target group.
Actively engaging with your target audience is a key aspect of digital marketing. As simple as it sounds, by understanding the needs of your target audience, you will be able to better engage with them, allowing your investment in marketing to be a more powerful tool to win deals that evolve into long term clients.
4. Utilize a suite of digital marketing platforms to drive sales
Once you have narrowed down a key target audience, you can utilize a full suite of digital marketing tools at your disposal. With so many changes occurring in the digital marketing space over the last few years, there are a variety of platforms and technologies to use to enhance your digital presence.
GoogleAds is a favorite, allowing companies to bid to display various paid content to online users, including photos, videos and advertisements. This is a fantastic way of expanding your reach further, assisting you to develop demand for your service and further establish your brand in the competitive online landscape.
In addition to GoogleAds, paid social media advertising through social media platform such as LinkedIn, is another way of targeting users on online platforms. This is important as 95% of B2B target audiences are engaged on these platforms.
Irrespective of which platforms you choose to use, it is imperative that your branding and presence is consistently communicated across channels. You must ensure that all materials enhance the credibility of the business.
5. Leverage LinkedIn to secure more deals
LinkedIn is the premier B2B platform for communicating with potential partners and clients as well as connecting with other professionals within your industry. Ensure you are improving your social media performance with your posts is important for success in the market, especially since LinkedIn can be the starting point for significant deals being signed.
Ensuring you have a good mix of paid and organic LinkedIn activities, to expand your reach whilst fostering a genuine connection with your audience is key to success on the platform. The platform can be used to share posts and achievements that communicate your company’s expertise and positive client experiences using your services.
Another way of growing LinkedIn reach is by joining groups to remain up to date with industry trends and connect with prospective partners.
6. Utilise online publications and blogs to communicate your expertise
Publications allow you to exemplify your expertise in the industry. As a key part of your website, they can be used to improve your company’s SEO and also give further insight into your service offerings, industry knowledge and success stories from clients.
Online publications and blogs can also be linked to through EDMs or social media. By creating new, engaging content for your audience, you are able to increase the number of touchpoints prospective clients have with your business, thereby making your company more memorable.
While online publications are a great way for keeping current clients engaged, it can also extend your reach to new prospects. By utilizing publications, you can position the company as innovative in developing offerings that disrupt the industry.
There is a huge variety of digital marketing tools that are available for businesses to use. In the B2B landscape, it is important to ensure that you are using an adequate number of tools to stand out within the industry and exemplify your value to prospective clients.
By focusing on using the right tools, targeting the right individuals and leaving the right impression with your digital marketing activities, you can facilitate the growth of your business and win more deals.
The Ultimate Marketing Technology Stack for 2021
The incredible growth of marketing technology cannot be understated. We have seen from Gartner’s 2018-2019 study that marketing technology or “martech” is increasingly becoming a focal point of most businesses marketing budgets, accounting for roughly 29 percent of marketing expenditures on average in 2018.
It has been one crazy year for businesses everywhere, but it is finally time to get back on track and make the most out of our marketing budgets, and we are going to show you how by optimizing your marketing tech stack.
What actually is a marketing technology stack?
First, we need to unpack what a martech stack really is before we can build one.
A marketing technology stack is a grouping of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities. The focus of martech is to make difficult processes easier and to measure the impact of marketing activities and drive more efficient spending.
Marketing technologies are used to streamline internal collaboration, analyze the performance of marketing campaigns, and conduct personalized and efficient communication with customers.
With so many different marketing tools available to choose from, it can all get a bit confusing; but with any marketing process, you must start with the strategy.
Defining Your Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is your blueprint for achieving your business goals. Once you have designed one, you can identify which marketing initiatives align most effectively with your business goals, and begin to implement your designs.
Ultimately, martech is about deciding on the technology and tools that will help you execute your marketing strategy, which means you have to first create a strategy that suits your business and your product.
Narrowing Down the Choices [Creating Your Marketing Tech Stack]
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as us giving you a template marketing stack, every business has different needs, different strategies, different products and different customers.
The type of business you have impacts the technologies that will be important to you and how you will incorporate them into your marketing strategy.
The majority of businesses have alternate channel structures and ways of appealing to current and potential customers, meaning the tools each business use will vary.
However, we can help you narrow down the list of options, by showing you ways to entice, engage and maintain your customers using a marketing tech stack.
The Inclusion of Robotic Marketer
Choosing the technology to help you achieve your business goals is the simple part; it is creating a strategy that is the hard part.
Not anymore, the future is here, and it does not disappoint.
Introducing Robotic Marketer, the world’s first marketing strategy software that is based on artificial intelligence (AI). This technology utilizes machine learning and big data, transforming information on your company, business goals and marketing plan into an actionable and detailed marketing strategy.
Created by Robotic Marketer and Marketing Eye consulting agency founder, Mellissah Smith, this incredible tool is utilized by marketing consultants all over the world to produce marketing strategies faster and smarter, with a greater capacity to be more successful as technology improves and has reduced human reliance.
With Robotic Marketer, not only will you be able to define and create your marketing strategy with ease, this innovative, first-of-its-kind tool can be used in correlation with other tools and technology to improve your marketing activities greatly, and make it much easier to achieve business goals.
Enticing Customers
One of the biggest challenges in marketing no matter who your customers are is generating leads and traffic for your business, which is why we recommend analyzing the following tools to see which will enable you to achieve your marketing strategy in the most efficient manner possible.
Google Ads
Probably one of the most commonly used platforms, Google Ads works as a tool where advertisers can bid to display different advertisements, service offerings and videos to web users, acting as a way to utilize tactics such as remarketing and search engine optimization.
With this technology, you will have no trouble advertising your brand effectively, as the tech enables you to target customers with a direct interest in your product.
Hootsuite
Social media management is a must in today’s technology dominant world, and there are multiple tools to choose from such as Sprout Social and Buffer that can offer similar results.
However, Hootsuite allows you to manage all your social media platforms and channels in one spot.
Here you can manage all your insights across your social channels, ensure you schedule and publish content to the right channels at the right time, and have multiple marketers or consultants working on the account at the same time.
With so much information generated for you daily, social media management tools such as this are a necessity for your marketing technology stack, as you will be able to easily optimize your social media strategy and reach your audience in the most efficient manner possible.
Ahrefs
To really attract the right customers, you need the right SEO tools to ensure you are on the right track.
Ahrefs can easily help your business grow your search traffic and identify the keywords and topics your business should try to rank highest for.
Their formula that is used across their multitude of SEO tools will enable your company to promote the right search keys, build links to them and rank them as high as possible.
Microsoft Teams
A technique we have seen become more commonly used this year in light of the worldwide pandemic is online webinars that can be used to push prospective customers to your website.
Whilst there are other applications that have become common use this year such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams can enable you to host webinars and conferences without putting a cap on the number of participants or a time limit.
Engaging Customers
Enticing customers can often at times be the most expensive step for marketers throughout the entire marketing process, meaning not enough time is often devoted to what we can actually offer customers once they have gotten to our website.
Engaging customers is not as hard as it used to be, as there are a number of tools you can adopt for your marketing stack that will keep consumers interested in your brand and products.
HubSpot
Marketing automation has been made simple with well-known businesses like HubSpot, as it is one of the largest and multi-faceted platforms available for use today.
With so many cheap and free tools engaging in SEO, advertising, social media, blogging and many more, it is a must-have for your martech that is suitable for businesses of any size.
Outreach
This tool is a necessity for monitoring and improving your business’ sales engagement, as Outreach recommends future communications and actions you should take to retain customers, based on the data analyzed from interactions with current and past customers.
Marketo
There is a reason Marketo is one of the oldest and most popular marketing automation tools around today, it is tried, tested and proven to be one of the most powerful and reliable parts of marketing stacks.
From acquisition to advocacy, Marketo enables businesses to market to a large audience by automating so many marketing processes, including finding the right customers for your company.
Maintaining and Getting the Right Customers
It is always hard to measure whether you are getting the best results possible from your marketing activities, or whether you could be doing better than you actually realized in the first place.
That’s why we have chosen some tools to add to your marketing tech stack that will show your business your true marketing effectiveness, and what you can do to improve your customer base and generate even more future business.
Google Analytics
Probably the most popular and reliable tool available, there aren’t many businesses today who aren’t utilizing the power of Google Analytics.
One of, if not the most highly used tool available, Google Analytics allows you to know where your website clickthroughs are coming from, what they are viewing, how they got there, and how long they were on your site.
This tool is the most efficient way to understand the character of your typical shopper and provides you with so many opportunities to improve your customer interactions.
Hotjar
Conversion rate optimization is needed if you are to see who your website visitors are and what they are actually doing whilst on your website.
Hotjar can be combined with Google Analytics to give you a more in-depth understanding of what goes on in your website – using analytics features and user feedback tools on a single platform for quick actionable results.
This is just a snippet in regards to the potential of marketing technology stacks. It is up to you to discover which tools are best for your business and it is up to you to define and layout your marketing strategy, which now, thanks to Robotic Marketer, is easier than ever before.
How Google Analytics has changed
Google Analytics is a powerful free and paid web analytics tool for businesses to track their web or app performance. Launched on November 15, 2005, following the acquisition of Urchin Software, Google Analytics has changed significantly in the last 15 years. Google Analytics started with the vision to speed up website tracking results processing, cutting processing time from 24 hours to 15 minutes. This was designed to be an add-on to the web hosting and development tools Google already offered however, it turned out to be a completely new product that outperformed competitors’ products.
Growing from its beginnings in tracking website results, Google Analytics goes well beyond simply analyzing the number of visitors on websites and apps nowadays. Today, nearly 40 million websites use Google Analytics as a part of their business. However, not many businesses understand the importance of Google Analytics and how to gain the maximum value from it. At Robotic Marketer, we monitor and analyze your data and analytics to reveal your secrets to success.
Evolution of Google Analytics
With the age of the internet, online payments, and data collection, companies have an abundance of data but often do not use it optimally. In 2005, Google released V1 of Google Analytics, to help companies improve their online interactivity, recognizing the potential of this data. In the week following the release of the first version, 100,000 new accounts were created on the platform, causing it to be shut down due to high demand. Google Analytics then became available only through an invitation system which enticed other users to use Google analytics. Google also created hype by sharing the stories of customers who experienced 50% growth in web traffic in a year. Since then, Google Analytics transformed from an add-on application to an integral element of Google’s offering.
Growth and development of Google Analytics
In 2007 and 2008 Google made major changes in the V2 platform, where they updated their reporting system, allowing businesses to locate and share data, seeking to promote greater customization and collaboration.
From 2008 to 2012, Google was in a stage of intensive development, launching V3, V4, V5, and creating a new slogan: “Enterprise-class web analytics made smarter, friendlier and free”. During these years, Google enabled users to analyze data and create subdivisions, providing the flexibility to analyze conversions, traffic, customer reports, and build a dashboard. The dashboard was a game-changer as it allowed users to navigate different profiles and simplify data.
In the V4 version, Google took strides with website performance and ROI features, allowing the user to analyze traffic across multiple platforms and implement retention strategies. V5 was a powerful update, allowing users to monitor their data in real-time while the campaign progressed. This version was created with a vision to be developer-friendly and make JavaScript possible for websites and SDK for apps.
Delivering more value
2013 was a huge year with Google introducing 70 new updates to create a better user interface, integrate with different platforms, introduce new APIs, and real-time behavior reports. In 2014, Google introduced a paid version of Google Analytics with additional features like real-time data visualization, SEO campaigns, and a deeper understanding of the data. They added more features to the free version by styling dashboards, creating a better user interface, and rebranding Google Analytics.
In 2016, Google launched Google Analytics 360, replacing Google Analytics Premium with 5 new products targeting SMBs, including audience targeting, increased analysis, and robust reporting. It allowed businesses to combine offline and online data to deliver a personalized experience.
Google Tag was a new product launched in 2017, allowing a user-friendly approach for non-developers to add website tags without any hassle, allowing data to be sent to Google Analytics and Google Ads. The sole purpose of Google Tag was to unify the multiple tags and simplify implementation.
In the following year, Google launched the Google Marketing platform, combining Google Analytics and Double Click Management within a single platform. The platform created an effective marketing suite to buy, measure and enhance the customer experience.
Google Analytics in 2020
2020! The year of data analytics and improved customer experience. From in-store to online purchasing, companies have collected a lot of data and generated more web traffic than ever before.
Google saw this opportunity of massive data collection and launched Google Analytics4 or GA4. The GA4 has machine learning at its core, providing a complete understanding of customers, smarter insights when it comes to the sales funnel, and different touchpoints to improve ROI.
Google Analytics now provides a complete understanding of how customers want to interact with the brand. Online purchasing has provided greater knowledge about consumer insights which showcases the buyer’s journey from acquisition, conversion, and retention.
How has Google Analytics changed the way we do business?
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You can now track how customers find your website.
In 2005, companies didn’t have much information about their customers. They would have several visitors but not a clear understanding of where the customer came from. In 2020, businesses have changed the way they market. Marketers have a better understanding of the user’s journey to the website, for instance, whether it is through EDMs, Instagram ads, Facebook ads or other paid advertisements. Looking to track who visits your website?
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Tracking how much time the user spends on the website (Behaviour Report)
In 2020, the analysis of users is very important as it allows the businesses to understand which page, blog, article or post is generating traffic on their website. The Behaviour Report allows you to make changes to your website or app and showcase the well-performing content to users. Want to understand what your customers think of your website, product, or services?
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Track who is visiting and what they’re browsing (Bounce Rate)
Online shopping means lots of scrolling but less buying. How can you create engagement with your customers? The Bounce Rate is an important metric to determine if the messaging is failing to keep the user engaged with your website.
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Tracking conversions (Acquisition)
Google Analytics has Acquisition reporting as an in-built feature with your marketing plan. This allows you to track conversions and adjust marketing, for instance tracking the successful conversion of a customer with items in their cart and then readjusting marketing efforts to focus on building loyalty with the brand, rather than bombarding them with further promotion. Do you have a lead generation model?
- Report generation (Data visualisation)
Still, going through excel sheets and the data sets? Gone are the days of manually processing complex data. Data visualization with Google analytics has helped businesses make strategic decisions based on market trends and user profiles. Want to know how you can visualize your data?