So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on 2022 planning for your marketing. We walk through setting goals, looking at macro data, and focusing in on specific tactics.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- how to use your data for “what happened”
- how to use your data to forecast the next year
- how to turn your insights into a plan
Upcoming Episodes:
- Processing unstructured data – 11/11/2021
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:20
Happy Thursday. Welcome to so at the marketing analytics and insights live show, you can tell that it is now turned a little bit colder in New England as the three of us are all wearing, like our jackets and sweatshirts. And so definitely that time of year. It’s also the time of year to talk about planning. So on today’s episode of so what we’re talking about 2022 planning, which, first of all, it’s just bizarre to say, the fact that we are planning for 2022. But in this episode, I’m going to talk about how you can use your data for understanding what happened, how to use your data to forecast into next year, and how to turn your insights into a plan. And to do this, we’re actually going to use our own data. So what we’re using this as an opportunity to plan for ourselves, as we’re demonstrating to you what you can do with your own data. So everything we’re putting together will likely go into the 2022 planning for Trust Insights. Whoo, that is a mouthful. Chris, where do you want to start?
Christopher Penn 1:25
No, no, actually, I’m gonna put it right back on you. Any kind of planning has to start with your goals? Right? Yeah, the purpose is the the first P of the five P process. So Katie, as the CEO, what are our goal, and then how does that map to the marketing that we want to do?
Katie Robbert 1:43
So there’s a couple of goals. I mean, the largest overarching goal is always revenue. But then in order to figure out what that looks like, you have to start to break it down into smaller, more bite sized goals, those milestones, those KPIs, if you will, that roll up into the goal. And so the way that I’m thinking about our goals moving into next year, are three major buckets, awareness, engagement, and conversions. And so I’ve been taking a look at our funnel. And what we know about our customer base is that once they are raising their hands and saying, I want to work with Trust Insights, the close rate on those deals is really, really high. What we need to focus on as a company to grow and get more people into that conversion, to therefore grow the revenue is we need to build awareness, and then we need to strengthen our engagement, and teach people more about what it is that we do. So that the conversion from awareness to engagement, engagement to goal completion, which the sale gets stronger, gets tighter.
Christopher Penn 2:54
Okay, so you’re saying we don’t really have? Well, I guess we do definitely have an engagement issue, right? We don’t have a conversion issue. How about an awareness issue?
Katie Robbert 3:03
We have a bit of an awareness issue. You know, we typically rely on social media, word of mouth, historically, we had been relying on events, a lot of the shows, Chris, that you and I tend to do, John, you pop in and out of the Boston, you know, local scene, and those just for the past year and a half haven’t been happening, and virtual events, unfortunately for us, like we’ve done a lot of them, but don’t bring in the same kind of traffic, probably because people are fatigued and tired of sitting on calls. And so we, we’ve seen the numbers of our awareness, people visiting our website, people going to our services pages, those have dropped not drastically, but we’re seeing the decline in terms of going up. I wonder who these guys are? What can they do?
Christopher Penn 3:55
Okay, I think that’s probably a decent place to start. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of different data we could take a look at. And maybe, maybe we should start, like the very biggest picture, then start to zoom in what do you think?
Katie Robbert 4:07
I think that that makes the most sense, because we need to understand everything holistically, and then start to break it apart. And I think that that, you know, we were talking with one of our clients about that earlier, is we tend to talk to one team at a time about one particular context. But then they try to switch context and almost kind of have to start the conversation all over again. And we have the luxury of being a small company. We’re looking at all three members of the team right now. And so for us to look at the company as a whole is actually not that big of a deal is if we set things up correctly, it should be pretty straightforward.
Christopher Penn 4:45
Gotcha. Okay. So let’s look at the very, very biggest picture that I’m going to bring up here. So this is from let’s go ahead and close this. This is what’s happening in the United States. So This is the sort of everything since the beginning of this year, we can see that people are, on average, they’re still not going back to work as much as they used to be right, they were 14% off of baseline baseline being zero. But since really the the early part of you, you know, that’s when February 14 is when you start to see the vaccines really start to roll out. And then ever since then, you know, travel in general has been picking up when we look at passenger counts through the TSA, the TSA checkpoints, this is the last two years, obviously, there was, you know, the very start of everything. And here’s where we are today. It’s not back to 2019 levels, yet, it’s still probably about 20 ish percent off the 2019 levels, but it’s also not 2020. So from a a perspective of things like events, and just people getting out and about 2022 probably looks like if you were in the travel industry, like it looks like a bad year, but not like a pandemic year, just like a regular bad year. For our business. It looks kind of like, you know, closer to normal, I guess is the or close to pre pandemic conditions is the way I would I would characterize it, what do you think?
Katie Robbert 6:14
It’s definitely getting there for sure. And I think that’s, you know, it’s interesting that you’re looking at this data, and I think it’d be helpful if you would explain, you know, to the people watching why you’re looking at travel data, when we are a data analytics company, how does that? How do those two things relate to each other?
Christopher Penn 6:37
The travel data is a benchmark for uncertainty, right? The more uncertain conditions are, the more people aren’t sure what’s happening, the less likely they are to go on things like business trips and stuff. And also, that means you’re going to have known issues with stuff like supply and demand and stuff. So the closer things are to pre pandemic levels, that means all the business activities, all the consumer activities that drive our customers customers will be, it will be closer to normal. To look at our industry a little more specifically, I think this would be some interesting findings that let’s take a look at consulting. Right. So management consulting services, which is what we do. This is the 15 year perspective, let’s go last five years here. This is from Fred, the St. Louis Federal Reserve economic database published by the United States government. January 2021, in terms of prices that consulting firms can charge, clearly took a big step up, right, so this has this has been and continues to be a really, really good time for management consulting firms to command really much whatever they want, or pricing. Because what’s happening is that a lot of companies in the space are at a point where they’re saying we need help figuring out what to do. We need help with our people, our processes, our technology. Somebody come in, please help us.
Katie Robbert 8:06
Do you think that it’s also due to staffing issues? I know that I don’t remember what it’s called. It’s like the great, everybody quits the great resignation. Thank you the great resignation, I can never remember that for some reason. I’m wondering also, if, you know, this is spiking, because companies are like, well, we just need to bring someone in to do the work because half our team just quit. So we got to bring in this outside company.
Christopher Penn 8:36
There is some of that. But if we look actually in professional services, stuff, the number of job openings, let’s bring this down to five years to make it easier to see is also at nearly all time highs. So you’re it’s a double edged sword consulting firms are having a difficult time getting people to so it’s not this shortage is everywhere in terms of labor, and talent. And those are definitely things that have an impact on our industry and have an impact on the kinds of demand that we’re facing, and that our customers are facing. So as we go into 2022. What it looks like right now is that within reason, Katie, you could set our pricing to be whatever you want it to be, right. Now, like a billion dollars,
Katie Robbert 9:23
right? But it looks like that if we were ever to really focus in on awareness, this would be the time we want people to know where here we can help.
Christopher Penn 9:33
Exactly. So that’s the big picture. Now, if we, if we zoom into us, I was looking at our Google Analytics day, let’s look at just our website users. So we’re going to keep only the gray line there is today right? So everything to the left of the line is what’s happened this year to date so far, and everything. The right hand side line is our forecast what’s likely to happen next year in general It looks like 2022. From our forecasts, it looks to be a modest improvement over 2021. We see that, in fact, let’s slap a trendline on this. So there’s a trendline, not as up and to the right as obviously, you would hope for, you know, just for sheer marketing fun. But it’s going in the right direction. And it looks like at least in the first quarter, January, December, January, it looks like it should be a month where we should expect to see a lot of traffic also means that from a campaign perspective, it’s probably a time where we want to have a lot of campaigns ready to go ready to do that, as you’re saying, let people know, hey, we’re here. We’re here to help.
Katie Robbert 10:44
And so I think that’s where I mean, so timing wise, that’s great. The challenge, then that I would pose back to both of you to help me figure out is, where do we go to let people know who we are and what we do.
Christopher Penn 11:01
So this is where we start get to get into, let’s exclude users start looking at our channels. Right? So when we start looking at our channels, but shadow has, has driven us this year really is email, it is it is foreign, and will continue to be so social media, we’re seeing, you know, after a low in July, it looks like we’re certainly going to be seeing some improved results. The one that I’m concerned about is this orange line organic search, right, it goes in definitely the wrong direction, it has been going in the wrong direction for a while. And the referral traffic. I mean, we don’t do a whole lot with that to begin with. So there’s there’s not anything like super, super revelatory there. But this is the one that I think we need to figure out and fix.
Katie Robbert 11:52
I agree with that. And that’s, you know, one of the things that we do that we know and we’ve been talking about is, our rate of creating original content is lower than it should be. Some of that is due to just the sheer size of the company. I mean, actually, no, all of it is due to the sheer size of the company, you know, and that’s something that we need to solve for. And so myself and John, and you all need to be contributing more content than we are. Right now. What we’re doing is we are repurposing the content that we create for the newsletter knowing that email is our strongest channel, and then reposting that as blog posts. And so that is giving us the same content into places, which is great. But it doesn’t cover all of the different things that we should be talking about.
Christopher Penn 12:48
Yeah, I would agree. I think the other thing is that the content we create hasn’t been fully aligned to what the market is looking for. So if we were to take, you know, we’ve been working on our keyword lists now for like four or five episodes, and if we just slap them in a keyword landscape in terms of the things that there’s opportunities around, which is this quadrant here, like this annotation goes, That’s annoying. This is difficulty zero to 100 100 is very difficult. Zero is super easy. This is logarithmic clicks, no traffic to lots of traffic, things like, you know, marketing, consulting, Facebook, analytics, business analytics, Google Trends are all stuff that are in sort of the Easy win category of stuff. Whereas a lot of the other things we’ve been talking about recently, some of them are really good and important strategic planning, change management frameworks and stuff. But in terms of easiness, but they don’t have this see the traffic behind them. And then obviously, the stuff that is very difficult things like search and content marketing stuff, there’s a lot of competition in those spaces. So one of the things we need to figure out is in our content marketing, are we going after the right things that will get traffic to us that will build that awareness on the unbranded side? Because if you look at our search console data, which is this here, in terms of the terms and phrases that get us search, traffic gets us our brand name. Right. So that’s good, because it means people are searching for us. Right? But that’s bad, because it then means that our search strategy is highly dependent on brand awareness,
Katie Robbert 14:35
which goes back to the original challenge of general awareness. And so if you go back to the previous analysis with the quadrant, you know, I’m thinking about it. You know, it’s funny, because we’ve done this on the episodes, but now I’m thinking about it as the user, the person who actually needs to do something. And I look at this and John, I would love to get your take on this as well. But I look at this and I’m like this is really over whelming I don’t even know where to start, you’re showing me this thing. You know, obviously, I know it’s possible. But could you send me just the keywords that fall into that upper right hand quadrant so that I could focus only on that, because I think what happens is we do this, and we’re like, this is where you should focus, we take everything and put it into a predictive forecast, but then it’s still everything. And I think what we need to do is again, you know, it’s partially because of the size of the company, but I think this is true for all marketers, we ourselves just need some focus. And so taking a shorter list of keywords at a time, so let me focus on these five. Great, did that give me five new ones? Great, give me five new ones. I think that’s going to help us, you know, be like, Okay, now I know what I need to create for the next two weeks. John, when you look at this, what are you thinking?
John Wall 15:56
Well, the easy app from you know, pipeline side is just to match these up against existing products, you know, so like, GTM, I put that right up at the top of the list, because Tag Manager and Google audits are the most popular thing that that people come to the front door for. It is tough, though, you know, I don’t see attribution in there, or incrementality, or anything like that, because that’s another deep dive topic that we’d like to do more stuff with. And then yeah, it’s just a kind of a matter of matching stuff that we have to what we can already put in the pipeline to the other one is customer experience, you know, because like we have our digital customer journey, but I’ve seen customer experience actually being a term that’s kind of ramping up faster, and getting more bites. So that’s another thing. I’d like to think about content, you know, can we grab a couple of these content topics, but also we’ve in customer experience, and so we can feature that product? So, but again, you know, it’s all pretty much I’m thinking from the product side, there’s, there are a few, you know, like Facebook analytics, that stuff that we would just cross right off the list. You know, and a couple other misses that you can filter out, but yeah, I think it’d be pretty much just has to be a triage, you know, go through this and boil it down to okay, what are the four we’re gonna hit? You know, for the first couple months?
Katie Robbert 17:14
Right? We do have a couple of questions. So the first question, which I think is a solid one, especially as we do talk a lot about AI are? What are your thoughts on AI tools like first draft for increasing the amount of content small teams can create?
Christopher Penn 17:31
Ah, how do I say this up pissing off a whole bunch of our friends?
Katie Robbert 17:36
Don’t name anybody.
Christopher Penn 17:41
I think AI tools for content generation are they put up mediocre content? Right. So if your content is bad, like, just flat out bad, they’re an improvement, right? So you can definitely use them to create content that if you know, the dog is typing on the keyboard, no offense, then that would be an improvement. But one of the things that we’ve seen, and we saw this in Google’s most recent search quality rating guidelines, is increased emphasis on quality, right, and these, these AI tools are not generating the quality of content that a good content marketer can create, they can definitely create a lot of content that a mediocre content marketing will create, but they’re not. They’re not good enough to sell by themselves, you still need a lot of human intervention. And you know, to your point, Katie earlier about, you know, think about repurposing and stuff. The volume of content we can create in multimedia is exponentially larger than the volume of content we can create. Just in writing alone, I’ve been participating in the National Novel Writing Month, and working on a new book and the amount of just sheer number of coherent words, not regard. But the quicker words I can crank out in 45 minutes of talking is like 10 acts what I would write in the same period of time. So I think in terms of scaling content, we may want to instead be looking at having us creating content, kind of like what we’re doing with the live streams and things but then having a human editor sort of distill it down rather than AI based tools. They’re just not there yet. Well,
Katie Robbert 19:26
I’m sorry, go ahead, John.
John Wall 19:29
Well, I was just gonna say how about the forbidden see stuff where you know, you have 20,000 products and you need to you know, just come up with some basic copy on that stuff can at least handle that lift?
Christopher Penn 19:39
Oh, yeah, I can definitely handle that. But again, that’s not going to be great. It’s gonna be great copy. It’s not gonna be stuff that someone will pick up and spread. It’ll be stuff that you know, the search engine will say, Okay, you check the box. One of the most damning things in the Search Quality Rating guidelines, is it says For moderate quality content, the phrase, nothing wrong, but nothing special. that puts you in the middle of bucket, which means that you do not go to the top line for quality of content or needs met the two factors that Google looks at.
Katie Robbert 20:09
You know, it’s interesting the way that you’re describing it, because I sort of see AI tools, creating content, and then a human editor going through like a transcript, as sort of the same thing. Either way, someone still has to go in and edit it, it’s never going to be the final product that you put out. So I is my opinion on it is whether you, if you choose an AI tool, know that it’s not a one and done, you still have to go in and edit it. But it might be good enough to get you started. And maybe that’s the problem. Like I know, for me, just getting started sometimes is what takes the longest. But once I get the idea, but if the AI tools can give me the idea and get me started, it might go faster, you still need to edit it, I would say the same is true for the transcripts, because the transcripts while good. Sometimes they don’t flow the same way that like a blog post or a piece of content would. So they still need to be worked around. So I really sort of see those as kind of one in the same because you still need the same amount of editing. To note, Brian, we will get to your other question at the end of the episode will save that. But we will get to it. And then the other question came from John blue. It says the keyword chart this one, have you done an episode on this approach to keyword analysis and review? The answer is yes. The leading up to this episode, we’ve done quite a few. Our John John Wall can send you the links to those episodes, you can also find them on our YouTube channel.
Christopher Penn 21:41
Exactly. So that is where we are in terms of sort of the keyword search topics and things. And where my channel perspective, you know marketing, very organic I like I said I’m concerned about I think there’s there’s issues there that we need to address. With social one of the things that we do that is conflated in here that you’d have to break out obviously into the individual source meaning combinations. A lot of what we classify as social includes stuff like Slack, the different slack groups we participate in. So this is not just you know, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, this is anything we do that, because we consider slack social media, we consider YouTube a form of social media as well. And so that’s what’s reflected in there as well.
Katie Robbert 22:30
One of the easy wins, that we just don’t do it, um, is when we have blog content that goes up, it doesn’t get shared out on social media. And so that would be part of the awareness tactics is to be sharing that content, because we do have two, two posts a week that, yes, they’re from the newsletter, but they’re still original content. One is data focused, and what is more, what we do services focused how we solve problems, that content doesn’t get reshared on social media and not something that from a process standpoint, we would need to figure out how to operationalize that, but that could and should be an easy win for us because the content already exists. It’s just a matter of sharing it.
Christopher Penn 23:19
Yep, agreed. And then the other question I would have is what do we what are we measuring on? What are the the metrics that we want to have in say, like our Google Analytics account to indicate we’re being successful right now? We have a basket of I think about six different measures when we pull up our Google Analytics account here that’s a part of our strategic planning process has to be are these things that we actually care about so we have literally anytime gets any time any one gets to a thank you page is a question newsletter signups people clicking on the links to go subscribe to a podcast, people clicking on an actual podcast, mp3 link itself, a purchase of a course and then our contact form. Do those reflect the reality that that you would want to see as someone making decisions about our marketing what’s missing?
Katie Robbert 24:18
The any thank you is has been problematic since we set up the company and it’s not something we’ve revisited. Um, because when we do our attribution reporting, our newsletter signup, our contact form any of those all get a thank you. So those actually roll up into that any Thank you goal. Um, but I mean, the big thing is the couple of things that I care about in terms of metrics, our newsletter signup, because that’s our engagement metric, that’s our middle of the funnel, the Contact Us, um, you know, it depends on what the person’s contacting us for it kind of falls in between engagement. And you know, the bottom of the funnel though A qualified person. So I would need to really sort of sit back and think like, which of these fill awareness which of these fill engagement and which of these, you know, the purchase, of course, is, obviously, that’s the bottom of the funnel. And so that’s the way that I need to rethink this. So I guess the short answer, even though it’s long winded is we need to reevaluate these goals and reset some of them because obviously, there’s ones that we aren’t even using, or ones that aren’t getting filled out. The other metric that I look at is just numbers of people that come to the website. But that doesn’t need to be a goal. That’s just something that I can track in Google Analytics very easily. Because that, for me is the measure of awareness. People know who you are. So they go to your website, or people want to know more about you. They go your website. From there, I’d want to dig into specific pages, like different services pages, or the about us page, things that tell people what it is we do and who we are.
Christopher Penn 26:04
I will disagree with you on whether those needing to be goals. And here’s why. I didn’t say they
Katie Robbert 26:09
needed to be goals. I said those are metrics that I look at in Google Analytics, right. But I’m saying they should be goals. You think those those should be goals?
Christopher Penn 26:19
Here’s why the attribution analysis engines underneath the hood, can’t perform that analysis unless it’s a goal. So if you set up new users to the website, or new users from organic search or returning users, then all the attribution engines have them as goals and can do things like you know, source, medium computations, etc. And that goal completion, like even in our own, you know, multi touch attribution model, if we set up users from organic search as a goal in Google Analytics, then we could see what things contribute to that from a multi touch perspective. It lots you would think, okay, it’s just gonna be all Google again, right? Because that’s coming. But we know that other channels play a role in in this thing, it’s not, you can’t just take organic search and put it on its own little island to say it doesn’t impact it, anything else and nothing else impacts it. That’s we know that’s not true. I would be willing to wager a very small pastry, like maybe like a vignette, that email is actually a strong indirect driver of organic search. Because again, you get an if, if you are aware of us for any reason, you may go Google us.
Katie Robbert 27:36
I don’t disagree with you, I think that it would be an interesting exercise to set up new users to the website as a goal. But I don’t want to think about it in terms of organic search, I want to think about it in terms of where are people getting their information that brings them to our website in the first place? Maybe it is organic search, maybe it is email, but they would have to have some awareness of us in order to sign up for the email. So I feel like, you know, that’s the kind of question I would want to answer. So, you know, it’s interesting, I never thought of putting the funnels themselves as the the metrics that contribute to the sales funnel, as goals so that we can then see what’s working for each of those pieces.
Christopher Penn 28:24
Yep, it’s like, you know, earlier on this week’s podcast, if you haven’t watched the episode, go to TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash TF podcast, we’re talking about the process of baking bread, and how each stage you know, mixing and resting and rising and stuff, there are actually metrics for each of those, right? And you can tell like, if you if you have not let the bread rise for long enough, or it’s like five degrees in your house, and then you need to do something else. You know, even though the recipes, they say like rest until it’s doubled in volume, well, how do you know you’ve got to measure it. And those metrics, this is kind of what we talked about when we’re talking about KPI mapping, those metrics are not the business goal. But those are the KPIs for that stage. And we don’t have that in here. Right now we have sort of the that marketing qualified lead stage here where we could you can say to somebody who’s now a marketing qualified lead, but that’s really about it. So we don’t have anything prior to that it might be worth doing that.
Katie Robbert 29:23
Yeah, I think that that makes sense. If I wasn’t on the live stream right now, I would update my agenda for our inservice day that we’re having in a week. So I’ll just have to remember to do that.
Christopher Penn 29:36
Yep. The other thing is, and with that predictive forecast, we can now sit down and say, Okay, what are the weeks that we each of these terms are going to be prominent, and again, to your point, Katie, it’s not something it’s as like John always says, you know, the cobblers kids have no shoes. We actually hold this information clearly delineated. For the next you know, 26 weeks about what topic we should be focusing on. on that week, so it may be one of those things where we have to just dust it off and actually use the stuff for ourselves.
Katie Robbert 30:06
You know, it’s funny though, because I look at this, and to me, this is, for me, personally, I can’t speak for anyone else. But this is still too much information, I would say just give me five terms to focus on for the next month. And that’s all I want. Because that’s all I can create. Um, you know, and so that would be the way that I would want to consume some of this information is literal, tiny little bite sizes, the old like, because what, what I do, what happens is I look at this, and I’m like, Oh, look at all these other things. And I want to think ahead, and you know, plan out, but it prevents me from focusing in on the thing that I need to do today, I know that this data exists, and we can plan forward. But when I’m the person who then has to execute the thing, I need blinders put on me.
Christopher Penn 30:54
Gotcha. So if we took our our keyword forecast, condense it down to months instead of weeks, which is what we normally do, and said, these are the top five, these five words, do these five words in January, and then come February, no, do these five words in February that’s like the level you need to be at.
Katie Robbert 31:12
That’s exactly the kind of thing that I as the end user would be looking for. It’s great to know it, the whole entire list. But then when I actually sit down to do it, I’m like, I was right. I was talking about this. It might have been in one of the previous newsletters like, yeah, just because that’s the term I want to write about doesn’t mean I feel like writing about so I’m going to start poking around in the rest of the list. And like what else sounds interesting. That doesn’t help us. Because we need to meet our audience where they are and what they’re searching for. So I need to rein it in and stay focused on just the things that are in front of me not start playing around, like, oh, well, I could think about this. And this will eventually be exciting, and people will eventually be looking for this. Cool. What about today?
Christopher Penn 32:01
Yep, looks like Oh, Brian has a interesting question here. Do we see a correlation between organic traffic consulting work speaking opportunities is organic, a top converting source, organic is not a top converting source email is by about a four to one margin. email represents close to 70% of our conversions, which is a topic for another time. But we also know that other businesses that are similar to ours, because we work with a lot of other agencies, not they don’t do exactly what we do, they’re all They’re much more focused on execution stuff, whereas we’re focused on measurement. Their top driver for conversion is organic search, by far and away, you know, 5060 70% organic search. So we know that we’re not doing a great job for ourselves.
Katie Robbert 32:51
But to that, to, you know, his question as well, are speaking opportunities, much like everybody else have looked very different. Over the past 18 months, when we first founded the company, speaking was one of the top reasons someone came to us and converted, and said, I want to buy something from you, I want to work with you. Because they would have the opportunity to sit and see one of us talk about a topic, talk about a problem that they were having. And yes, we still do that in a virtual setting. But what we’ve seen, at least for us, is it’s just not the same experience for people. And so once that starts to come back, I would like to track and see, do those speaking opportunities, you know, boosts the awareness and conversion numbers.
Christopher Penn 33:41
And speaking opportunities to are much more closely linked to interpersonal relationships, you know, events, we’ve spoken out in the past people who are running events, people we know, as opposed to organic search. I mean, I would say 95% of the bookings that we get as speakers are from people we already know, or people we’ve worked with in the past, it’s very rare that we get more than a handful of people. We’re like, I’ve never heard of you heard of your event before you get the spammy ones. But in terms of like legitimate speaking opportunities, there’s there’s not that many come into organic search for us. Okay, so where are we, Katie, where, what is our plan? What are we going to do?
Katie Robbert 34:22
So our plan, John, write this down, because you’re gonna have to do all of it. So our plan, you know, at least to start for to drive more awareness, there’s a couple of things we’re going to do. One is, first and foremost, we’re going to revise our goals and Google Analytics to align better with our sales funnel, at least in three buckets of awareness, engagement and conversion. So we’re going to do that that’s something we won’t do right now. But then we’re also going to take a look at the massive keyword research that we’ve done that predictive forecasts. and break it out into smaller chunks, and try to figure out how each of us can contribute. Even if it’s one or more original piece of content per week per month on one of those topics to align with the timing. So we need to do that. The other thing we need to do is we have the content that we’ve created, we then need to do a better job of disseminating it, that should theoretically be the easy part. And so whether that’s updating our social scanner to include blog posts, or someone literally just we build a process, someone has to go in and share the blog post for that day on across all the social channels. That’s a piece that’s missing. So I would say those are the three things in the immediate that we need to do in order to boost our awareness.
Unknown Speaker 35:53
Okay, now,
John Wall 35:57
what else are you thinking about as far as you know, campaign? So obviously, email is a cornerstone for us. So we need to make sure that that’s lit up. As far as organic or other paid stuff. I mean, I just we’re getting into clear brainstorming territory here. But, you know, what do you think off the top of your head?
Christopher Penn 36:15
Well, we know from our attribution modeling, go ahead and actually dish that out here, because I think it’s useful. We know from attribution modeling the kinds of content that people pay attention to, for us sewers, conversion efficiency, there is a BP
Katie Robbert 36:34
Well, yeah, we haven’t even gone down the road of talking about lead magnets and original research. So far, we’ve been talking just purely about organic search, and people examining aware of us. But then when we start talking about, you know, original research, gated content, lead magnets, that, to me is a different part of the conversation.
Christopher Penn 36:58
It is, but I think, really good lead magnets and really good, you know, gated pieces of content, you know, and even on gating some of the older stuff is part of that awareness. Because it’s, it’s how people get refer you to other friends. Okay, I got this really cool thing. You know, in our analytics for marketers, Slack, we’re copying and pasting research from Pew Research Center, we update ungated. But it’s like, Hey, this is actually use these useful charts to tell us things. When we look at the pages here that are the most impactful for driving conversions. It’s entirely all speaking stuff, speaking and papers. So we have webinars, events, webinars, events. This is for last month, but it really is all over those events. And then you get to one of the reports down here. And one of the things that we’ve not had time for, or good reason a, you know, paying customers is generating a lot of that new stuff. And I think there’s from a, in a bigger picture marketing strategy, I feel like that’s something that we don’t really have a good roadmap for yet.
Katie Robbert 38:08
In terms of creating the new,
Christopher Penn 38:12
the new, the next thing that will make people go hmm, I probably need to read this. And I probably need to give this to a friend.
Katie Robbert 38:19
Well, without giving anything away, because it’s still sort of in its infancy, we actually have been talking about that. And we’re working on putting some of those ideas together. Honestly, I think one of the things that’s missing for us, and again, it goes back to having a process for it is dissemination. And so we obviously have the content, we have the masterclasses and the webinars and speaking engagements that have already been created. We don’t do a great job of disseminating, that, once it’s up on our website, it then just tends to live on the website. And so how do we then take all of that content and get it back out to people on those other channels. And so you know, we can go through and re optimize some of the content for SEO, but we still have slack and email and all of the social channels, we can do paid campaigns. And those are the things that we’re just not doing with this content. And so I think it’s sort of it’s that twofold. We need to have a plan for creating more original content, but then we need to have a plan for disseminating what we already have, because we already have a lot.
Christopher Penn 39:27
Yep, that’s true.
Alright, so where does that leave us for our 2022 plan?
Katie Robbert 39:40
For our 2022 plan, the big thing is, you know, our focus is going to be more focused content. Um, you know, and so, you know, John, you were starting to get into this a little bit when we were looking at the keyword analysis and you were sort of like mentally, okay, strike that one, where’s this one. And so really focusing in on, here’s what we offer a services. And here’s the content around those things that introduces the idea to people that talks about the problems that we solve. And so our focus for next year is more focused content following that hero hub help framework of, you know, answering the general questions, and then occasionally, sort of like the thought leadership piece, and then the original research around the thing. But making sure it all aligns back to if this is what people are finding us for. They can also hire us to do the thing. And this is, you know, one of the conversations we have, because for some reason, IG TV, Instagram TV is one of the top search terms that people find us for. But we don’t do a whole lot with Instagram. And that’s always been, you know, something I’ve been like struggling with because we don’t really do. Yeah, we can analyze the data. But we don’t post we don’t care. Like we don’t curate content for it. We don’t do influencer stuff. And so making sure we really focus in our efforts, especially since we’re again, we’re a small team, we have to stay focused.
Christopher Penn 41:19
Yep, that was just not enough hours in the day.
Katie Robbert 41:23
Well, we have the same amount of hours in the day as Beyonce has.
Christopher Penn 41:27
Yes, but we don’t have quite her stuff.
Katie Robbert 41:30
No, which goes back to We’re a small team, we got to stay focused.
Christopher Penn 41:34
Exactly. I mean, it’s the same thing that people say about you know, folks like Gary Vaynerchuk. Like, yes, he can put out like content, because he literally has a personal staff of 27 people creating content for you. So it’s is not a apples to apples comparison.
Katie Robbert 41:48
What do you think, John? What have we missed? What have we not talked about? What are you? What are your thoughts?
John Wall 41:54
Yeah, you know, I think a big part of is just, we’ve reached a point now, where we are doing so much analysis and client work that, you know, kind of finding leads and chasing down prospects is not the top priority for us, you know, we have a book of customers, and we have a lot of folks that have business that needs to get done. So we’re starting to reach an inflection point, you know, a lot of the sales processes codified but there’s still a lot of, you know, a lot of the work we do is bespoke, we go in for clients and solve their problems and give them the reporting they want. But it’s not cookie cutter stuff. But yeah, I think over this next year, we do have to start looking at other ways to get content out the door, like we can’t write everything, you know, and I think a big thing for us is, we can come up with the seeds of things. And Chris can figure out, you know, original research and where things want to go. But then getting, whether it’s copywriting help or Turks to gather data, or whatever the thing is, you know, getting some additional help, there’s now cheaper, faster, less expensive ways to generate some of the content we need. And so I think that’ll be a big part of 2022 for us.
Christopher Penn 43:02
Yep. Well, sounds like we’ve got our work cut out for us. If you got questions and stuff, obviously, you know, hop on over to the slack group things. We’ll have a link up for that in a second. But any final thoughts before we head out?
Katie Robbert 43:13
Oh, yeah, I promised Brian that we would get to the end of the episode. And so we’re here now. So now now you are allowed to talk about what is on the shelf behind you, Chris.
Christopher Penn 43:24
So this is laboratory grade ethanol 200 Proof aka 100% pure ethanol is it it is essentially what vodka should be in theory if it was free of any form of impurities. Now this stuff is great for hand sanitizers makes it down to about 62% add in enough peroxide to make it a 1% peroxide solution you can spray your hands with it it doesn’t leave that gummy residue that like hand sanitizer gels do I don’t like and also for making cooking with you can do some interesting stuff and do not drink it 560 milliliters of it is the lethal dose for a good chunk of the population. So you please please do not drink it straight. It was just a bad idea. needs to be watered down and beverages? Yes, yes. watered down by two by almost two thirds because 80 proof which is what normal vodka is, is about 40% alcohol so it’s that’s that’s 100% so do don’t drink
Katie Robbert 44:19
it. Bottom line don’t drink it don’t adjust it. If you use it to sanitize with do not also ingest it.
John Wall 44:25
Keep away from open flame.
Christopher Penn 44:29
Yep, it is it is actually explosive. So I think I think we’re done.
Katie Robbert 44:35
I think we’re done.
Christopher Penn 44:40
Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. In our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers See you next time
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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