What question are you really trying to answer?

Agile

Digital Transformation
Self-service technology
Faster delivery
<yawn>

Heard it all before? Yes, so have I... numerous times and across many different clients.
Each is craving to "move to become a digital organisation" or "reinvent their online proposition to embrace change" and other similar modern and (to be honest) pretty meaningless statements about themselves.

But I think they are approaching this the wrong way. 

On the basis that each company exists to provide a product or service to another (person or company)... why the heck are they not focusing on asking more questions about what their customers need? Or questioning what stops their valuable users buying/using/engaging more? And more fundamentally... why aren't more people tasked with trying to answer those questions with the creation of better products and services, increasingly delivered as software?

So rather than saying "we need to redevelop our website to improve our KPIs"...
You need to ask "why don't we make it easier for customers to convert?"

And rather than stating "we need to reduce the number of clicks in our online booking process".
You need to ask yourself "why do customers seem to have a problem getting past the 4th page?"

It is only then that you get to the creation of an insight-based hypothesis to change a process or product. 

The 7 myths of Search Engine Optimisation - Part 1

Recently I had to give a presentation on Digital Marketing to a client. One of the key slides we focused was on the topic of “SEO Myths”.

I have therefore decided to write these myths up a post for others to add to and discuss.

Reaching 1st position in Google is the only aim of SEO
This is wrong advice in a couple of key areas:

1. What terms are you actually focusing on? If you’re either striving for a top place ranking on an obscure term or alternatively trying to be top for everything… think again. You should be looking at those terms that meet your KPI’s (e.g. deliver conversions) and have enough search volume to justify the effort of attempting to reach first place
2. Sometimes 2nd (or 3rd, etc.) place is good enough. If you’re targeting a popular search term and have reached the first page in Google, but there are bigger, more reputable and faster sites above you, you might be content with that (especially if it gets you decent & quality traffic)

A single teenager in a bedroom can out-smart Google
You still hear this sort of phrase spoken by people in the marketing industry “I know a genius, they have worked out how to ‘beat’ Google and get my sites to number one”. And each time… I feel myself suppressing a small scream. Why?

1. Just one person (who does not work at Google) who has only amassed knowledge from reading books, blogs and other such material on the subject of SEO knows everything on the subject.
2. Google hires offices full of very (very) clever people… many of whom have PHD’s and such qualifications, to constantly revise their search algorithms and the influence of different ranking factors. And even most of them don’t know everything on the subject.
3. You never ‘beat’ Google. It’s not a fight or a race… SEO is both an art and a science to getting your website legitimately up the rankings of the most popular western search engine.
   (and even if you temporarily manage to boost your rankings via less-than-legitimate means... there's a chance you'll get found out)

You can ignore SEO by just creating good content
OK, yes the creation of well written content helps SEO. But that content must also be:

• Relevant: Or else you’re just producing off-topic copy that serves no optimisation purpose 
• Structured: If you’re not adding layout, headings, bullet points, etc. then you’re not producing content, you’re just typing. 
• Linked: Are you creating lots of ‘orphaned’ pages to drop visitors into from other campaigns such as email PPC, etc.? Please don’t!

Define your Content Strategy

You hear the term banded about a lot these days, from PR companies through to senior managers in businesses... they all want to have and own your organisation's Content Strategy.

But what's your definition of the term Content Strategy?

Here's mine:

"A Content Strategy should aim for the creation of engaging and appropriate content that delivers improvements in the agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)"


Those KPI's most often being:
- Increase online visitors & sessions
- Increase online engagement (most likely reported as a reduction in page bounce rates)
- Convert lookers to bookers (or into whatever your main commercial goal is)

What's yours?

Basic eCommerce Terms revisited

When you work in the digital and eCommerce consulting industry, there's the tendency to assume that the person you are speaking to always has enough experience to be able to understand what your saying and act accordingly. However, this is not always the case (e.g. when the person has just been moved or promoted into a new role) and sometimes it takes time to cover the basics with a client, even though you don't always want to make it too obvious.

I therefore thought I would revisit some of the more common eCommerce terms used. Not just in case a current or potential client was reading this blog, but also to help anyone else who may be venturing in the world of online transactions, etc.

Acquisition

The processes and tools used to get new customers to start using / visiting any digital company touch-point (e.g. website, app, social media presence, etc.). Acquisition rates can be increased by using different marketing techniques (e.g. paid advertising or search engine optimisation).

Example KPI = Website visitors

Conversion

The amount of people who complete a required online goal (e.g. a booking or a purchase) divided by the total number that visit. It is sometimes called the 'look to book' ratio and in some markets / companies it is one of the most protected (e.g. Secret) of figures.

Typical average conversion  rates by industry:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/average-website-conversion-rates-industry

Retention

The number of customers who come back to the digital channels and book/purchase again within a given time period (sometimes set as the entire customer lifetime) .
There are no recognised benchmark figures on digital customer retention that I'm aware of and this depends considerably on industry, product, customer type, etc.

AOV:

Average order value is typically the sum of revenue that has been generated divided by the number of orders taken. Again, there are no standard measures for this, as the range of products and prices vary from company to company.

Oh... We already have a digital strategy

When I talk to organisations about the need for a strategic plan for implementing online tools and services, I get told "Oh... We already have a digital strategy" or something similar.

I hear this phrase quite a lot and it is typically followed by other quotes such as "We created one of those a couple of years back" or "We had one produced in 2011 by a bunch of consultants, but they didn't understand our business".

My take on this is that the process to create a digital strategy should be:

1. The development of a vision
   - Where digital benefits are fully utilised & integrated across the organisation
2. Created
   - By your organisation
   - For your organisation
3. Owned by your organisation
4. Supported by:
   - Clear goals and measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
   - A prioritised portfolio of projects with an achievable delivery road map

But just as importantly for me is that this digital strategy should not be set in stone forever. Yes, it should have board-level approval, but it should not sit in a drawer and gather dust over time, it should be revisited, reviewed and redrafted to accommodate changes in: Technology, People & Processes, your wider Business strategy and any other external factors (e.g. competitors, legislation, etc.).

Retailisation - what it means to be a modern digital retailer

"We want to be more like a retailer"
"We need to think more like a retailer"
"Our business needs to evolve into more of a retail model"

Sound familiar? Well I'm hearing these sorts of quotes more and more often these day, and  not just from the obvious brands you would think. But from established product manufacturers and service providers, who realize that they need to up their game and drive people to consideration and purchase/subscription/take-up.
It seems that despite a recent Global economic melt-down driven by over-spending and an economic reliance on spending... retailisation seems to be the way forward. Everyone apparently now wants to be the next Amazon, Zappos or Play.com

So what does it actually mean to think and be more like a digital retailer these days? (Especially the major online or multi-channel retailers, who seem to epitomize this ethos).

Well here's my thoughts:

1. A good online retailer never stops looking for ways to improve what they have. This constant & iterative approach to goal optimisation means sites need to constantly change to increase their conversion ratio, average order value and other KPI's. eCommerce giants like Amazon, Argos, Tesco, etc. no longer launch major re-developments once in a while, but have a tried & tested process of smaller changes planned based on analytics & insight. These changes are then implemented in an  optimisation road-map as quickly as they can, with the idea of building up a picture of what works and what doesn't.
   This is also not just something that done on the homepage of your site,  where every product/service wants to get visibility, but on every page / template, including: landing pages, product pages, etc.
   
2. Use every opportunity to maximise each individual transaction. From useful up-sell and cross-sell opportunities through to optimised abandoned basket messages or a clever eCRM communication that pulls in dynamic product suggestions based on browsing history... you have the data, use it to persuade and encourage.
   
3. Carry out regular user experience site reviews, but ensure they are done from the perspective of a prospect/customer.
   Examples could include:
1. A new customer looking for product information
2. An soon-to-be customer looking for product validation
3. An existing customer looking for support or returns information
4. A lapsed customer who has forgotten their password.
   
4. A PPC & display budget should focus on those campaigns that deliver conversions and not just visits or other vanity metrics. In other words, deliver a bought media strategy that targets goals using input from you site analytics.
   (And if I hear one more senior exec say "we have X number of hits on our site" - I think I'll scream)

Retailisation isn't for everyone. But as more & more sites move beyond just the basics, I'm sure it is an approach that will continue to increase in use.

Does it matter where anything goes?

I've been meaning to write this post for ages, but never had the chance to pull my collected thoughts together before now. In essence, this article is all about the need to continually optimise your digital presence. But it's also about the bigger concept that change is the only constant in the online world and that anyone not innovating and making mistakes is actually taking a step backwards.

So what do I mean by all this?

Well, as I've mentioned in several posts before, the creation of a website (e.g. an online retailing one) is just the end of the beginning... Not the beginning of the end. Your journey has just started. So if you haven't already begun to use AB tests or Multi Variant Testing tools already, I bet you're at least considering the way you can use them to improve your KPI's.

This does consequently create an interesting debate that you might like to have with your web design / development agency or in-house eCommerce team. Centred around the central premise of "Does it actually matter where you place content and functionality on the web page when you're creating it?"

In other words... if you practice the science of 'user centred optimisation',  then very quickly your iterative process of test & learn will find a better way than you came up with at the beginning of your process.

And yes, if you keep doing it... your site should continue to evolve. Therefore leading to the theory that it might not actually matter how you initially design your website, but that it just matters that you keep evolving it quickly and intelligently.

Retention Marketing : working out the value of your efforts

We are currently working on a project to improve the retention marketing efforts for a client. But before we are able to sit down to finalise the deliverables, the client has asked us for some Key Performance Indicators that they can expect to measure our work against.

 

This is a sort of 'chicken and egg' situation, as until we have worked out what we are specifically trying to achieve and how we are going to do this, we can't decide on our actual goals and what the success criteria are. However, given I've done this sort of thing before I felt I could 'short circuit' the process and pulled together a few examples of some of the metrics I would expect to measure as part of a digital customer retention plan. Based on the assumption that the digital marketing activity is mainly going to be via email, the ones I gave were:

1. Bounce rates (site visitors and emails)

2. Share of overall website traffic
3. Conversion rates
4. Share of total conversions

 

And finally... I suggested measuring ROI (return on investment) from this activity as calculating the cost per site visit and cost per conversion generated.

 

Can anyone else suggest anything else?

7 reasons your content marketing is crap

There, I've said it and it's time to admit it. Basically a lot of the current hype around content marketing is crap and so are a load of blog posts about the subject.

Here's my thoughts on why a lot of efforts into the latest online marketing trend are going to be poor, very poor:

1. You have no content plan
Are you publishing content with no editorial calendar and therefore no schedule for seasonal changes? Good content begins with a good plan of what you're going to write and when you're going to publish it,

2. You have based everything around search engine optimisation
On-page optimisation of your content is one of the key focuses of SEO, however just writing content for the search engines (and not really for your readers) isn't the right way to get engaged readers

3. You're not encouraging sharing
So you're making it harder for your readers to post the URL to different social networks or to share content with their peers. Why exactly?

4. You're not linking off to other parts of your site
Part of your reason for writing content should be that it actually drives people around your site and triggers your other site KPI's. Have you got an eCommerce site and yet you're not linking off to products you feature in your blog?

5. You're not reading what you're writing.
The way to create a sustainable audience of any long term value is with the deployment of quality, original and engaging content. Like a chef who doesn't eat what they make, you need to write stuff that you believe in. which ultimately means you have to be the first consumer of your content.

6. You're not properly measuring what you're doing
How are you going to optimise your content if you don't actually collect data about what is working for you and what isn't? Ensure you have the right goals measured and that you get regular feedback on these.

7. You're not learning
Content marketing optimisation is a slow process of test and learn, where you not only have to spend effort producing content... you have to also gain insight into what is actually working. And then you have to actually tell yourself some home truths about what isn't!.

The great content marketing discussion

An imaginary conversation…

Firstly what do you mean by the term content marketing?

The term has been increasing in its usage for the last year and  especially over the last few months… but content marketing is usually known as the use of content (such as text and imagery) across an organisation’s owned channels (website, social networking page, etc.) to get users to a site and build engagement.

Isn’t this search engine optimisation?

No, SEO is about optimising a site (code, configuration, links AND content) to get a higher placement in search engines. Although content markers do need to consider SEO factors such as keywords, they aren’t really bothered about how sites are set up or algorithms for ranking.

So how do you get traffic via content?

You build up user traffic by being useful and relevant to the reader. This therefore makes your content more sticky (readable) and social (sharable).

So content marketing is a sub-set of SEO?

Well, not really. Content marketing also deals with topics such as internal linking to other content around a site to encourage the user to complete a specific goal. For example: to purchase a product or to sign-up for a service. 

So it’s about writing link bait then!

It’s all about producing quality content, not rubbish articles that pander to the lowest common denominator and get instant traffic based on sensationalistic headlines. The modern web user is very savvy and they tune out things they are not interested in any more, it’s an attention economy out there.

Then it’s about getting eyeballs to look at your page?

Yes, that’s right, you should write good and free content, which then allows it to be shared so it can work harder and reach a bigger audience for your brand.

But isn’t that syndication?

No, however the content that is written can be syndicated out, such as via an RSS feed.

So what Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) should a Content Marketing person measure?

Although usual website metrics, such as visitors, visits and subsequent conversions should obviously be measured, one important measurement of content marketing success is repeat visits from the same visitor. You should be able to find this information in your website analytics package and further segment it by the content areas on your site. As a rough guide, the more users come back, the more they’re engaged.

But doesn’t this affect conversion rate for an eCommerce site?
Yes, repeat visitors could affect your ‘look to book’ ratio, because just increasing the number of ‘looks’ to your site will make your site look like it is less effective. It is therefore just as important to look at how your content pushes users to convert (book).

So how will this area evolve?
Content Marketing Optimisation (CMO) is not a term currently well known, but a lot of people jumping on the content marketing bandwagon right now will quickly be asked to justify their investment of time, 3^rd party copywriting, etc.  So just as SEO took a while to emerge as a longer-term disciple that observes, learns and improves the bottom line; so content marketing optimisation by using insight gleaned from analytics packages will tell website owners what content is working and what is not.

Content Marketing confusion

I think there’s a huge confusion over what Content Marketing is (for example, even the Wikipedia entry defining what it is gets very confused). 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing 

In my opinion, Content Marketing is not just about acquisition of visitors via sharing, search, syndication and so on… it is about engagement. Or in other words, about getting users to come back to your site once they have already visited. Therefore an important success criteria is not just the typical ones such as visitors and subsequent conversions. It is also about returning users and how frequently they come back to your site.

Let's also be clear, content marketing is not search engine optimisation. Although the two are potentially mutually beneficial, SEO deals with the optimisation of the code, configuration and the content of the site. SEO is also typically is seen as a way of acquiring visitors who convert… not a way of retaining them.


Therefore an admission... I need to make an amendment to my recent presentation on content marketing optimisation, where I show the feedback loop from both search rankings and website analytics.


The example KPI's I give as the metrics to use to update content are visits & visitors, bounce rates and conversion. However I didn't give engagement or return frequency as one of these figures... and should have.

7 steps for creating a content marketing strategy

In my previous post, I mentioned that content marketing is easy. Well here's my thoughts on how to create and run a successful content marketing strategy:

1. Have a strategy

Yes, I know this I'd obvious. But if you set-off without knowing what you're doing, you stand a chance of going nowhere quickly (See my posts on agile digital strategy for my approach on doing this)

2. Have a strategy that can be measured

Yes... I've purposely made this a separate point and I think you need to be clear exactly what your KPI's are and what success looks like. These figures should also be stated within your business justification (e.g. for further resource to assist you or to explain why additional effort must be put in).

3. Create an editorial calender

Your content plan should not be a hand-to-mouth process of a weekly meeting to just plan the next few days of content production. Products are seasonal, demand is seasonal, budgets are seasonal and therefore content needs to be seasonal... or at least adapt to the changes needed over time.

4. Build an editorial team

Ok, not every organisation can have a full-time team of one, two or more people doing their content marketing. However this doesn't mean you don;t need to have the input of (offline) Marketing, Comms/PR, Product/Proposition and your own digital marketers (and/or agencies).

5. Don't just create content, share content!

It's simple enough to forget, but you're not just encouraging visitors to enter and read your content, you're hoping they share it via more traditional (email) as well as social channels. Therefore do what you can to encourage this via the use of social sharing functionality (usually via the typical array of social buttons) on your site.

6. Make it usable and beautiful

Ok, maybe not beautiful, but at least consider that your content isn't just for the search engines..... it has to be read by a human too!

You however notice that I've really not focused on Search Engine Optimisation in a post about content marketing. "Surely that was a slip?" you're thinking "SEO is key here, why not cover it?".... Well to tell you the absolute truth, we all should know that content marketing IS about SEO anyway and a lot of the points mentioned above should consider this all the time. I'm also keen not to promote a specific formula for search engine spamming within a content strategy.... or maybe I'm saving that for a later post?

The 5 steps to creating a successful Digital Strategy

Here’s my 5 steps to creating a successful Digital Strategy

1. Understand …

…. not only the commercial goals, but the stakeholders & team involved. Take time to then walk through the current digital requirements (priorities & dependencies) and all the relevant internal processes that you have to work within  (there will be some, even on a ‘green field’ project – or as I recently said to one senior marketer, who said there were no restrictions: “every green field has borders eventually”. 

2. Review …..

all existing projects, including any project interdependencies with the work done by other departments (e.g. IT),  current suppliers of online services (e.g. Digital Agencies) and make sure you know what KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) are reported against across the business. 

Note: You should also take the time to identify the immediate wins (e.g. is there something so obvious and easy that is can be done now?)

3. Document…

Key Deliverables. This means writing up what has to be done and when it is expected. Focus both on commercial optimisation (operational efficiency) and innovation to gain competitive advantage. Consider all digital touch-points, where possible adopting a user-centred approach and cover all lines of business, such as: B2C, B2B, Back office (e.g. purchasing).

4. Plan….

for success by creating a rolling 30 day plan that keeps delivering wins and fixes over the short and medium term. From this build up a longer-term roadmap that integrates functionality with marketing activity (content, campaigns, etc.). Where necessary develop robust justifications (business cases) for large pieces of work.

5. Future-proofing…

means considering all changes likely to occur over the roadmap timescales. I use the “STEP” acronym as a handy way to classify the different innovation drivers:

a.       Social (what will individuals and groups do differently?)

b.      Technological (what new software or devices are expected?)

c.       Economic (how will and increase/decrease in household income affect you plans?)

d.      Political (why legislation is due that could cause an impact to the organisation?)