by Brian | Mar 1, 2018 | Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing
This is a story about how following our own advice that we preach week in and week out led to some awesome successes for us. It’s a reminder that when we do the things that we tell others to do, we benefit from it as much as they do!
We should know this advice by heart by now. We’ve seen it improve our own results at NorthIQ, and we’ve watched it in action as we started content marketing on Manage Comics and saw our market share grow.
Last week the comic book retailers group ComicsPRO got together and did three days of meetings about comics retailing. During those meetings, Diamond Comics, the main distributor for about 90% of the comics market who has exclusive distribution rights with Marvel, DC Comics, Image Comics, and many others, made an announcement that they would be releasing their own version of a comics pull list application called Pull Box. (more…)
by Brian | Feb 22, 2018 | Building a Business, Content Marketing, Internet Business, Lead Generation
Leads are the currency that all marketing campaigns can be measured on. A campaign that delivers qualified leads who become customers is worth its weight in whatever precious metal you covet. The NorthIQ 3i Formula is all about delivering leads.
In our previous post we wrote about SEO, and how most SEO companies try to sell you the wrong thing. We believe that You Don’t Need an SEO Company, traffic to your website will not change your business by itself, and SEO just delivers you traffic. SEO experts not only don’t do the right things, they don’t even know the right questions to ask!
“All right Mr. Smarty Pants”, we hear you saying, “These Hand Crafted Platypus homes aren’t gonna sell themselves! If you’re saying I don’t need to rank #1 for Artisanal Platyplode Abodes and my other keywords, then just exactly what is it that you think you and your fancy pants marketing agency can do for me?” (more…)
by Craig | Feb 9, 2018 | Building a Business, Lead Generation, Marketing
In our first episode of Hot Buzz we talked a little bit about measuring your web site. It was difficult to get a solid answer out do to the tremendous burning provided by Lethal Dose hot sauce.
If you own a business or are responsible for marketing at an organization it’s likely that you are incredibly busy. Especially as a business owner it’s hard to know what to measure, where to look at it, and which numbers are important and which aren’t. And you have very little time to figure it out.
Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, but it does give the average business owner a lot of information and very little help knowing how to parse it all and turn that into smart decisions.
I’ve put this together to help business owners monitor users behavior on their without spending a lot of time doing it.
It will also help you understand when you spot something good that you can take advantage of.
A few key metrics are the most important
You don’t need to keep an eye on everything, that’s the big secret. You need to know what’s working for you and what’s not but you don’t to understand or follow every piece of data.
Spotting it quickly and easily will help you save a lot of time. You only need to be able to deep dive when something goes right or wrong.
Large Changes, No Changes, Lots of Changes
When I sit down to review one of my client’s Google Analytics the first thing I do is take a quick scan. Generally, there are two things that immediately concern me and cause me to do an initial deep dive.
- Large changes
- No changes
- Large fluctuations
Large changes across a timeline of a report indicates either something really good has occurred, or something really bad.
No changes across a long period of time indicates stagnation which is not ideal for a company looking to grow.
Large fluctuations across a timeline of a report indicates an unpredictable state that is not consistent enough to be useful.
The Reports You Need to Watch
There are several key things you should be watching out for, as a priority.
- Sessions by channel
- Sessions by campaign
- Organic
- Goal completes
- Goal conversion rates
- Bounce Rate
Sessions by channel and sessions by campaign will indicate where traffic comes from at a high level. It’s important to monitor this because an extreme change indicate when we need to do a deep dive to understand what’s going on.
Organic traffic is important to monitor. How effective is the content you’re putting out to generate organic traffic?
Improvements indicate you’ve done something right. It’s time to understand what. Decreases indicate problems, such as google algorithm changes.
Goal completes, and conversion rates are an important metric to follow. Assuming you’ve set up goals correctly (most don’t) any radical shifts in trends are important to follow up on.
Goal conversion rates increasing or decreasing rapidly is an indication that something needs to be reviewed carefully.
Finally, bounce rates across all your campaigns are important to monitor. A high bounce rate indicates there is something seriously wrong with your marketing.
Something has changed, how do I figure out why?
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out why something has occurred, especially if you’ve not made any changes to anything. You’ve seen a consistent nosedive across many months from organic traffic…why!?
Without some context around what the metric is over what time period it’s difficult to give an explanation in this post, but the following are some tips to get you started.
- Did you do anything different? Send out a particularly good newsletter?
- Did google make an algorithm change?
- Did your goal tracking break?
- Did you get a large site referring traffic all of a sudden?
- Have you changed your strategy – for example contracted an SEO firm who use content farms?
- Did you have a particularly successful social post?
- Have you made any changes to your web site? For example did you change your navigation, remove pages, or redesign pages?
A quick map for measuring your site
As a business owner using this map for measuring your site is a good start, but certainly isn’t the complete answer. It will help guide you on which metrics are important and how to judge if you need to look into things further.
I will provide a future post on how I perform a deep dive to understand what’s going on.
Are you tracking any web metrics at all for your business? Are there other metrics you track?
by Craig | Nov 30, 2017 | Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing
We love marketing, and we love helping small businesses out. That’s why we’re starting a brand new feature called “Marketing DIY”. There are a ton of different things that you can do yourself with just a little bit of time. Sometimes those things are confusing, but with our step by step DIY guides, we’ll help you make it happen.
First up, the thing every single business should have – a mailing list. A mailing list is an incredibly valuable tool, and is the cheapest, and most effective way to market to your customers. This is an update to a previous post called “How to Create an Autoresponder That Delivers a Download…for Free“, but this version is revised with some amazing updates that Mailchimp has made sine then. (more…)
by Craig | Oct 17, 2017 | Lead Automation, Lead Generation, Marketing Automation
SSSSSSsssSSSSssss!!!
Hear that? That’s the sound of your nurturing program you just launched about to blow up. And you’re standing waaaayyy too close.
Before you know it that carefully crafted program will be in 100 pieces scattered across the landscape and the cows and chickens will be escaping!
It’s okay. There is probably still time to fix it.
Having worked on many nurturing programs across several automation platforms I can tell you there are three key pieces that often get forgotten or ignored. (more…)
by Craig | Aug 17, 2017 | Lead Generation, Marketing
I’ve been there. Sadly I’ve been there. Wandering around the wreckage of a ruined society, starving, and pursuing the delicious and mouth-watering LEEEAD. They are so easy to catch if you’re persistent…and it’s so easy to brag to the rest of the organization the miraculous successes your efforts have produced.
“We generated 32-billionty leads this quarter!”
But LEEEADS are not a useful metric to share with anybody.
(more…)
