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AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:27
Well, hey there happy Thursday everyone. If you don’t know, this is our last live stream of 2021. So next Thursday is the day before Christmas Eve. And so we will be off the week after that is the week after Christmas, and we will be off. And so this is our last show until 2022. When we come back, I’ll re energized and full of ideas and all the good stuff that happens when you get to actually take a break. So on today’s episode of SWOT the marketing analytics and insights live show we’re doing a part two of our analytics asked me anything. So unsurprisingly, we had so many questions about analytics that we couldn’t cover them all in one episode. So we’re doing a part two and continuing that into this week. If you have questions that you want to ask, feel free to ask us in the comments. Otherwise, you can definitely pop into our free slack group analytics for marketers. And join us there and ask us questions. John’s pointing to the Banner as as Vanna does.
John Wall 1:32
Yesterday, on reverse, though, it takes a little bit of work to get
Katie Robbert 1:34
it’s I you know, and so I would have initially like, oh, I finally got it. Right. So John, John’s, follow me there. And Chris, Chris is over here.
John Wall 1:45
We got our Brady down. Great.
Katie Robbert 1:48
So Chris, as the only sane one, perhaps? Should we start with questions about analytics today?
Christopher Penn 1:55
Here’s an easy one. We got it from Brian, what are our thoughts? What are your thoughts on Google Analytics four, and guessing on how long we’ll be able to keep using Google Analytics three, since there’s so many major things that can’t be done in GA four yet.
Katie Robbert 2:13
Um, I would like to, I would like to believe and again, this is just speculation, but I would like to believe that we get at least another 18 to 24 months with Google Analytics three, and that Google releases similar academy classes that they did for Google intimacy for Google Analytics for and gives people an opportunity to get scaled up. If the opposite happens, and they just shut off Google Analytics three and say, Hey, here’s four, then, you know, to be not quite so nice. That’s a dick move. John,
John Wall 2:54
that actually is a fantastic question, really, because there’s so many different ways it could go, I think, you know, one thing that comes to mind is that there’s really no incentive for them to shut it off and piss everybody off. You know, there’s no upside there. But what I could see happening, I think the big driver will be at some point, there will be something in Google ads, that they’ll say, Well, if you want this data, you only get it in four, it doesn’t go in three, and then there’ll be a mass exodus at that point, you know, because people need that, you know, want the ad tracking ROI on what their spend. And so that will force the lion’s share people over. And then yeah, I can see I’m just leaving on life support, like only half effective forever, just so that they never have to deal with the complaints of actually shutting it off.
Christopher Penn 3:38
Yeah, we saw the ga js, tracking script. Google announces retirement. And then I think it took seven years for them to actually get around to turning it off. And the the part that’s important to remember is that the analytics.js Script and Google Analytics three is a massive data collection mechanism that powers things like double click, and Google ads and stuff like that. So it’s, it’s not going away anytime soon. Because if Google were to simply turn it off, they would essentially be cutting off millions of websites from the data that the ad systems can calibrate on on the back end. You know, it’s not perfect. But, John, you’ve got it right, though, that they’re already saying the new privacy safe ad controls, and the privacy safe data will only be an Google Analytics for. So if you want to maximize this, you know, it’s not even coming. It’s it is the case today. If you want the best of the best, you got to be using those two systems in concert. And the reason for that is they’ve changed the underlying model of how they measure things. It’s events, top to bottom in both systems. Okay, let’s move on. This is a one from a we covered that one last time. See, this is a good one. Hannah asks, What are the biggest mistakes you see people make when measuring content marketing performance.
Katie Robbert 5:14
So this is just one person’s opinion, the biggest the biggest mistakes that I see is not having a clear purpose to your content marketing. And so a lot of times, you know, and this is more of a broad stroke, a lot of times I see companies get swept up in what everybody else is doing, versus really focusing on why they are doing content marketing in the first place. So for us, it’s an awareness tool. It’s an education tool. It’s sometimes an engagement tool, but and so we need to keep those things in mind as we’re creating that content. And so we would measure on, you know, scroll depth, we had measure on how many times the thing was shared, how many chat was viewed, etc, etc. So I feel like that’s the biggest mistake is not having a clear purpose for why you’re doing content marketing in the first place. And it can be multi layered, you can have different purposes, but you should have metrics, different metrics for each of those purposes.
John Wall 6:16
Yeah, I think you hit that the only mistake people make is not doing any tracking at all, you know, there’s orgs that throw stuff out there and never, and it doesn’t even have to be up front. Like it’s okay, if you just throw it out there and sit around for six months, but at the end of six months, go back and look, and did it get downloaded? Did we get any clicks, you know, at least get yes or no on it? Because yeah, I think the biggest mistake is people that just spray stuff out there and never even look back.
Christopher Penn 6:41
Yep, yeah. When, I mean, there’s so many things you can do with with measurement wrong. But the obvious one is you forgot to set it up, or it’s just not working. i We are not blameless. When you look in our Google Analytics account, and you look at the company’s you know, three year history, there are gaps every so often when tracking script went missing or something. And, you know, that happens to everybody. But it gets bad when you go into like, we’ve been in a couple of clients, Google Analytics accounts. And it just says, you know, it’s June 2021, and flatlines, like, well, and you say, what happened, then? Like, oh, we updated the website, like, ah, yeah. And you only know, notice now six months later, that your analytics not working? So what happened there? I think that’s probably the other thing too. Is you measuring stuff, you’re collecting the data for stuff, and then you just don’t use it. Like, you got all this data, and you never look at Google Analytics. And it takes us six months to realize it stopped working.
Katie Robbert 7:48
I mean, I think whether it’s Google Analytics or any other system, collecting the data, and then not doing anything with it, it’s It’s such a waste of everybody’s time.
Christopher Penn 7:57
Yep, really is. Okay. Next, Kathy asks, How do you choose which digital platforms and channels are best for each piece of content, especially when it comes to atomizing? Content? That’s related to a question Don asked, you know, how do you know where to put the different types of content like blog posts, ebooks, videos, etc? So how do you make those decisions about where to put stuff?
John Wall 8:24
Oh, yeah, that’s, uh, you know, do a lot of work on traction framework, like figuring out where stuff should go. But the short answer is like, why don’t you know, why not put it everywhere? I mean, I don’t see any reason. You know what, nobody’s gonna complain about one more Twitter post or one more LinkedIn post. But it is up to you to know which channels are working best. And you can reach a point where you decide that some channels just aren’t even worth doing. In fact, I’d be interested in you guys too. As far as we’ve been working harder on Twitter for the past couple weeks. And I, this has kind of made me think that I’m wasting my time on that channel entirely. But yeah, you know, go everywhere, and then use your analytics to figure out where it should be.
Katie Robbert 9:07
I feel like I feel like it depends on what the purpose of the content is. And so is it educational is it salesy, is it awareness and so, aligning that with your digital customer journey, of which channels fall into which of those buckets. And so maybe you save your original research for your newsletter, it’s a little bit more exclusive, because you don’t want to use that as an awareness tool. But maybe the blog post that you wrote about what’s coming with GA four is more of an awareness and that can go across all social. So I think, I would say the couple of things are what, what is the purpose of the content? Is it you know, sort of that hero hub help? Is it awareness is it educational, whatever, and then aligning that with how you’re doing Digital Marketing falls into a customer journey.
Christopher Penn 10:04
Yeah, I like I like the approach that that John mentioned, put everything everywhere for 30 days and look at your data. Like if you’ve if you’ve put up all these different stories and images and movies and ebooks and you find out that nobody on LinkedIn clicks on your videos, probably don’t put videos on LinkedIn anymore. I mean, I would assume that would be fairly straightforward. The the challenge there is, you do really should probably write down a testing plan.
Katie Robbert 10:31
Probably. And that’s, that would be good.
Christopher Penn 10:35
That would be good. So a couple questions coming in live. Social, Brian, J. Four has a setting to save historical data for two or 14 months, do you think this is going to force people to learn BigQuery to store all historical data will remain free?
Katie Robbert 10:55
I have I have a lot of thoughts. Trying. I’m just trying to organize them in my head. I think that you people will not learn BigQuery they will panic. They will say Hey, what happened to my data? And I think that’s how it’s gonna go.
Christopher Penn 11:19
Big word, is it free. I mean, that’s, that’s I think the the important thing is that you are billed for usage on it. So it is not free to begin with. And obviously, if you are running a site with millions of visitors a month, the app could get very, very expensive very quickly for us, like the bill we get from Google on a monthly basis. For our big, we’re used to just something like two and a half to three cents a month. So we’re not exactly endangering the company coffers. But it is definitely not free. But it is a good point, I think yeah. And certainly when we set up, GA for for ourselves, we turned on that integration as quickly as we possibly could to make sure that we were capturing all historical data. And we have another one from Brian, who’s I think getting all of his content in for the end of the year here. How do you suggest content creators and entrepreneurs start using the content data to find insights and quote you to blog art? Okay, so you’re on the record now? Say something good?
Katie Robbert 12:16
Dang it. The pressures on Brian, how do you suggest individual content creators on first start using their content data? To find insights? Um, you know, again, I always go back to the same starting place of what was the purpose of the content, you know, from the get go. And so, you know, if you’re using the Chris and John approach of posting it everywhere, as a testing plan, I think that’s a good place to start, especially if you’re, you know, a brand new setting up a brand new content marketing plan, you know, you can use the data from that test to figure out what content is working? How long should the content be, you know, you can look at all of the best practices in the world. But until you do it for yourself, you won’t really know what’s working, because your audience is going to be unique to just you, it’s going to be comprised of people who are not necessarily in Chris’s audience who are not necessarily in John’s audience are my audience. And so we’re each going to have a different experience as reposting our content. So I think the 30 day test plan is a great place to start. And then you can start pulling out insights with that, though, so you definitely need to be creating different kinds of content, long form content, short form content, video content. So that way, you’re sort of testing a variety of things. You’re not just putting out six blog posts for 30 days and saying, Well, that didn’t work.
Christopher Penn 13:49
Yep. John, what do you suggest? Yeah, we’ve
John Wall 13:51
got our most valuable Pages Report is, you know, classic canned data that we run, take a look at what’s actually working on the website, what’s converting, I mean, that’s the quickest and easiest way to get to stuff. And then, you know, we have our digital customer journey reports, too, if you want to take it further beyond just which pages on your site are doing action, but looking across the board at all your programs. So yeah, this section of the program sponsored by Trust Insights, who can provide you with actionable data? Most Valuable pages or attribution? If you have data problems that last more than four hours, contact your physician or Trust Insights, and DM me to learn more.
Christopher Penn 14:31
Wow. Okay, it’s hard. You
Katie Robbert 14:36
know, Brian’s gonna quote you on that now.
John Wall 14:39
We want to make the article that’s all links are good links.
Christopher Penn 14:47
The thing that a lot of people don’t do is take into account what is in the content itself from the format like is it an image? Is it a piece of text? Is that a video? And then the topics that it’s about, you know, is it about analytics? Is it about, you know, machine learning? Is it about organizational change? And then doing some analysis, you know, even just an Excel spreadsheet just with, you know, your basic correlation function inside of Excel to say, do any of these things matter? Right, do any of these things matter specific to the the audience that we’re after. So I’ll give an example this week, in our 12 days of data series. On day four, we looked at Tiktok trending videos, what things what was sort of the characteristics of trending videos, the things that the Tiktok algorithm is selected to show users. And then we looked on day five at marketing videos, so videos with using the marketing and sales hashtags on Tik Tok. And on day four, there was not a single unifying element of content that said, this predicts trending, right, it wasn’t a certain type of music, or a certain theme or a certain hashtag, really, it was, there was no clear thing that said yet this is what’s gonna cause something to trend. But on day five, there was, right so using, you know, the digital marketing hashtag and stuff had a correlation to the video view counts. And so as we look at our data, and as we’re trying to figure out, like, what types of content resonate, we need to be doing that analysis, and you don’t need to use machine learning for that, I mean, you could literally just, again, do it in an Excel spreadsheet, just count things by hand, if necessary, it will take longer, but you can do it. And that will then tell you like, there’s specific types of content that are actually important that that themes that resonate with your audience. And the other thing that, again, we really encourage people to do is talk to your audience. If you’re just getting started out, and you’ve only got like two or three super fans, folks like Brian who show up for a lot of different content. Talk to them, ask them, What do you want more of what resonated? What landed for you? What did I hate was put this blog post? Did anybody like it? And if it was like, it was, okay, you know, they’re trying to be polite. You know, it missed the mark. And you can say, Okay, what, what would have made it better? What could we have done differently? What would be more valuable to you, when you’re just getting started out? This is something that we hear a lot around, you know, entrepreneurs and startups do things that don’t scale, it’s okay to, you know, talk to a customer for half an hour, when you’re the CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation, it’s a lot harder to talk to individual customer. And you won’t ever talk to every customer one by one. But when you’re just starting out, there’s no harm in that, because you may find a whole bunch of things that you didn’t realize were were actually the case. Okay, next question in the pile, Alan asks, How do you tell which keyword searches drove to specific content?
Katie Robbert 18:00
Well, why don’t you kick us off, Chris?
Christopher Penn 18:02
Okay. Let’s do this. Actually, you don’t? Let’s do it Data Studio. That’d be fun. Because Data Studio lets you actually do this. So let’s go to Google Data Studio. And connect to Search Console. So if you have not connected your Search Console account, you should because it’s important. Let’s add in a table. I like tables with heat maps, because colors are fun. And so I was asking which keyword searches drove specific content? Well, what specific content we have? We have landing pages, right? We want to know what page did somebody come in on. And we have keywords, which is the query term. And we have our clicks. And so very quickly looking here, let’s resize this to fit the data. And best practice to slap a date control on here so that we can look over more periods of time. And let’s choose this year to date. Let’s see what happened in 2021. The little year that could this query, the search term, Trust Insights, which maps to this landing page, got 591 clicks. igtv stats got 100 clicks and didn’t land but went to this this post from last October. AI project lifecycle 66 clicks went to this page. So in relatively short order, with a few clicks ins inside of Data Studio and your search console data, you can figure out exactly which keyword searches drove to which page. And if you want to get fancy, you can also add in the click through rate to understand we showed up a lot. Let’s put the impressions in there as well. Let’s just resize this to make it fit nicely again. And so this term Got here. igtv, SaaS 2020. Got 50 50% of the time, when we showed up in search, we got the click for it, right? So we were very, very relevant for that AI Project Life project cycle. We showed up 16,000 times we got 66 clicks. So Google thinks we did the thing. But the customer doesn’t Google customers like, Yeah, I’m not gonna click on this link. So that’s what I would say is the easiest way to to get at this particular information.
Katie Robbert 20:32
I don’t think we have a more solid answer than that.
John Wall 20:36
How about so that all comes through search console, right? Because none of that’s available over on your GA, right? That’s what we’ve lost over the past couple years.
Christopher Penn 20:44
So yeah, you can turn on the Google Analytics, integration. But we have seen cases where what comes into GA is not. It’s not as flexible, right? So and the same is true of the Search Console web interface itself. You can’t put query and page together in the same report. You can look at queries, you don’t get pages, but you can’t put them side by side. And only when you’re using the API, can you do that? Which is why you kind of have to do it in Data Studio. One fun thing that you can do, I like to sort by the different columns to see what we get the most impressions for because impressions are, Google says, You did a good job with this term. Right? Clicks are the user says you did a good job with this term. So I like to see, what does Google think we’re doing a good job with, right. So what is data quality, this data quality here, Google says, Good job. We think that this page is about data quality. And so we’re going to show this page a lot search. Google thinks we did okay with, you know, a project lifecycle, Google postmaster tools, and so on and so forth. So from an SEO perspective, from a technical perspective, we’re doing okay, then when we look at the click perspective is like, Okay, well, not as good here. So obviously, we have some, some work to do. And there’s some things where clearly, there’s a mismatch, like, you know, is minus one elastic or inelastic, which is more computational stuff, and not not related to the marketing. Any other things, you wanna toss it on this?
Katie Robbert 22:14
I mean, I just, I think it’s interesting. You know, it’s, you can answer questions like that so easily using the data that you already have. And then when you see things like, Well, Google thinks we’re doing well. But the people don’t think we’re doing well. Just starting to think through how you bridge that gap of meeting the needs of Google so that your content is shown, and then meeting the needs of the consumer so that they’re getting something on and that’s, you know, the magic of really good content marketing.
Christopher Penn 22:43
It is. But the other thing that, again, a lot of marketers don’t do, if we’ve been running it forever, we just forget to look at the data, because you know, Cobblers, kids have no shoes is running on site surveys saying, you know, there’s the four C’s survey that Google gives you in Google Surveys, Google Webmaster surveys, which is asked questions like, did you find what you were looking for today, we able to complete it? And so on, so forth, basic customer satisfaction stuff, and then it gives you a running score of is your site actually doing the thing that the user asked it wanted to? And if your customer satisfaction scores are zero, then clearly, you’ve got an experience problem there in terms of content. And the other thing is just asking people so when we do our one question surveys every quarter, we do like to ask people like, hey, what could we be doing more of or doing better, and so on and so forth. And it is always revelatory to go, Oh, I didn’t think about that.
Katie Robbert 23:41
But it’s, it takes a lot of confidence and self awareness to ask for that feedback. But not only ask for it, hear it, and then do something about it so that you kind of take your ego out of it to say, okay, just because I think that article that I spent, you know, six days writing and tweaking and editing is amazing. Nobody else does. Well, they’re wrong and my content, right? That’s not how that works. Because unless you’re writing it for you, and nobody else will ever see it. That is not how that works.
Christopher Penn 24:16
That is unfortunately true. And unfortunately, the hippo problem at work the highest individually paid person’s opinion in the room saying no, no, this is this really is what the thing is. Very, very few people can actually do that, like Steve Jobs is probably was probably the only person who’s ever successfully managed to pull that off. Okay. It just as an example, we can show this too. If you’ve not tried Google service, when you deploy it, it cost you a penny per response, and it’s not super bad. This is from my personal website. And, you know, people say are you sad? How satisfied are you? What painting do you find frustrated on peeling? What’s your main your main reason? And did you complete your complete able to complete it? So again, this is stuff that’s the questions are already baked, you don’t have to do anything to make this work. You just install the widget inside of Google Tag Manager, let it do its thing and then you come back and go well, either our sites doing the job besides not doing the job. Okay, next one from Allison. We are legit starting from scratch, what analytics resources would you recommend for someone who’s brand new to learn from just to get up to speed on digital marketing analytics? Huh?
John Wall 25:43
This is where I should have, I should have a page from our website that rattles off my tongue and I don’t That’s a fail for me right here.
Katie Robbert 25:51
You know, I think that’s that’s a tough question. Because, you know, the basics of digital market. And yet it? I mean, you could go on forever, it really depends. Are you trying to just understand the landscape? Are you specializing in one of the channels, but, you know, I think, you know, sort of our tried and true is, you know, the Google Analytics Academy is a great place to start because it gives you the foundation of tracking your website. And so these days, very few companies don’t have a website, and you need to be able to track who’s coming in what they’re doing on the site. And Google Analytics Academy gives you a really good foundation for what to expect, how to set it up, how to think about the data. So I’d say that’s a great place to start. I also really like Hubspot Academy, because it gives you a wide variety of topics that you can cover. And so you kind of pick and choose and you know, the classes, the courses themselves, they’re not long, you know, so you can get through, you know, quite a few of them. They’re there on email marketing, CRM, you know, lead magnets, you’ve sort of they come they’re a really good resource for covering the broad spectrum of digital marketing. So I would say those, if you had nothing else to start with, those would be two really good places to start.
Christopher Penn 27:18
Yeah, I think it’s solid advice. Other thing is read, you know, some of the industry blogs and stuff, there’s, there’s some decent blogs out there that do a good job, cmo Ahavas blog if you want or you want to learn Tag Manager, like he is the guy to follow on all things Tag Manager, his content is fantastic. Sometimes it gets very, very technical. So being be aware of that. There’s usually good marketing and analytics content will just be called Marketing Land of lives now. martec.org Scott Brinker is blog chief Mar tech also has some interesting stuff paratime. And, you know, selfishly, if you’re not part of the discussion sites, analytics for marketers slack group, it’s free, pop on over there. And you can have conversations and ask a lot of these questions to other folks and see what stuff other people hide. But yeah, there are definitely analytics specific content for individual channels. One of the hidden secrets that I think is useful are developer blogs. When you read like Facebook’s Developer blog, or Twitter’s Developer blog, you can get a sense of what the back end folks are working on. If you, you know, if you’re interested in search and how search works. Google’s got a huge amount of content around search. Their search off the record podcast is phenomenal. And so there’s so many, there’s so much good analytics content out there. So more question, can you find the time to consume it all? Okay. Dawn asks, Is there a reason my Facebook analytics tracking is so wildly different than my Google Analytics tracking for the exact same post?
Katie Robbert 29:08
The short answer is yes. The The longer answer is Face Book and Google are in a lot of ways, rival companies. And so if you think about it from that standpoint, Facebook is not necessarily going to share all of its data with Google and vice versa. And so this is actually one of my clients is a roster of ads managers, and they have their own set of clients. And this is a question that comes up a lot. And so to get down to sort of like some of the technical things, depending on how your ads are set up, the tracking might be stripped off of your URLs and not passed to Google correctly. Um, you know, so you know, making sure that you’re shortening, you’re adding your UTM tracking, but then shortening the links so that you can preserve Have the quality of the link and the tracking information? That’s just sort of one thing that I’m aware of. But in general, you know, the not so diplomatic answer is that Facebook and Google don’t get along. So their system, their systems, quite honestly, are incompatible. And so the information, Facebook is always going to make itself look better. And it’s going to say, OK, Google, you can I’ll give you my table scraps of what I think you’re allowed to have. So that way, I can keep people coming back natively to my platform, so that they can only get their data from me and not see not technically answer.
John Wall 30:39
The Have you seen stuff changed, as far as with the clients that you’re working with? The rule of thumb that I’ve always gone with, that we’ve heard echoed is, you know, if you’re within 20%, you’re doing well, like that’s, that’s the most you can expect, because it’s just, yeah, everybody wants themselves to look great. So surprisingly, each platform, you know, looks better in their own analytics, which is the way it is, but
Katie Robbert 31:02
yeah, I mean, it’s, I can understand the frustration, because theoretically, the data should be the data should be the data. And it shouldn’t vary from platform to platform. But because you’re passing data from one platform to another that is just not compatible, then you’re going to lose some of that data. In the transition, it’s going to say, this is the data that I want you to see, I want to give you just enough to feel like you’re doing something but really come back to us, we’re the only ones who can give you the full picture.
Christopher Penn 31:34
Yep. The other thing that is that play, especially on mobile devices, is who’s blocked. So Facebook as of now, one entire iteration of Apple’s iOS operating system, Facebook’s tracking pixels blocked a substantial number of iPhones to the point where you can’t tell whether a conversion happened. And Facebook has tried to build some workarounds. But they’re very tactical workarounds that a lot of people frankly, just are not willing to do. And so your data is probably going to get be way off and get even worse off as time goes by. If you want to spend some time getting trying to resolve this to some degree, you can if it’s called server side tracking, this is a fairly complex thing to do. You could do it in Google Tag Manager, you could also do Facebook, Facebook now calls conversions API. And it can try and unify some of that data. But yeah, the at the end of the day, the only reliable number you have is how much money somebody actually spent like it once it hits your bank account. That’s when you know that that the results are good, because we have seen cases where, you know, Google Analytics has said, Hey, this page had no traffic. And yet, that’s the conversion page. And you know, there’s money in the bank. So it’s like, okay, well take the money. Alright, and let’s do one more here. Drew asks industry one, how do we know if we are attracting the right target audience in the B2B world by looking at our analytics?
Katie Robbert 33:08
Well, I think it depends on what you’re collecting. You know, so if you’re just purely looking at website traffic, you may not be able to tell if it’s the right audience, you’re not, you can look at the sources that they’re coming from. But again, that’s not going to give you a whole lot of information. And so for this one, I would say, definitely, you need the support from your CRM. And your CRM needs to be set up in such a way that you’re collecting demographic information that you care about. So just sort of like a little bit of a, you know, side rant, I used to work for a company that had a four page contact form. And this like it as the person who was not the decision maker at the time, it may be crazy, because the completion rate was so low for this page. And they were not making decisions with every single data point on that contact form. So that’s sort of my little side rant is only collect data that you will be making decisions with. And so I would say that’s really going to be your best bet for understanding. are you attracting the right kind of audience? And so, you know, maybe you care about industry, maybe you care about role and title and level, then make sure you’re collecting that information on your forms, into your CRM so that you can look at that and go, Okay, are ideal customers comprised of this? And these are the types of people that we are attracting, so where’s the gap? Or where’s the, you know, mismatch? So that would be my advice on that particular thing. John,
John Wall 34:47
yeah, you know, CRM is definitely a much better take and yeah, bless you for saying that about contact forms. It’s just if I had $1 for like every CRM field that you know, you go back three years later and they’re empty. It’s just horrifying. But yeah, I did, I definitely want that because there’s really there’s just not enough in web analytics now to know you really have to go further down the chain to conversions or appointments set or something like that, because that’s the only way to get that more detailed info. And it’s so tough for B2B because you tend to be shooting at such a limited universe of contacts. And again, CRM could give you interesting stuff like it well, not as much now that was so much work from home, but it used to be, you could be able to pick out which, you know, companies were banging on the website, because the IP addresses were mapped in the CRM system, stuff like that. And, again, a lot of that stuff is now failed. But yeah, that’s beyond just web analytics.
Christopher Penn 35:42
One of the things I think is a caution there, for Drew is, you assuming that you know what the target audience is, because even for B2B, the buyer may not so be the buyer. I think the classic example is with Account Based Marketing, right? Where you say, we’re targeting CEOs of these companies. Well, the CEO is not the one putting together the vendor list. That’s the intern, right? So even though someone’s title might be, you know, intern, you know, marketing intern, they may be the one who has to put together short list of vendors. And if you influence that person, by default, you have influenced the rest of the process. So, to what Katie was saying, make sure you’re looking at a CRM, but also look at your data and make sure that what you think is your target audience is in fact, actually the target audience of people who buy or at least the people who sales says yes, this is a sales qualified lead, we are happy to receive from you mark, and here’s a cookie.
Katie Robbert 36:36
Well, and so there’s a, there’s a pre a pre equal, if you want to call it to looking in your CRM and collecting data, and that is that market research of talking with people? If I created this thing, would this solve your problem? What problems are you having? So that I can try to, you know, create something that will help you? And then, you know, collecting information from them about like, who are you? What do you do? What is your day look like? So there’s an upfront market research customer research piece that goes ahead of setting up those forms on your website to collect that demographic information. Because this point, if you don’t know who that target audience is, and you’re letting the data just kind of inform you, there may be a mismatch of what we thought we were selling to, you know, B2B in this vertical, but really, we’re a B2C company. What see?
Christopher Penn 37:30
Exactly, those all fit? We’ll close out with a question that’s not on the list here. But I think is a fun one to close out the last show of the year, which is, Katie, what are you looking forward to, in the year to come?
Katie Robbert 37:45
mean that’s such a loaded question. more sleep? Better coffee? No, no, no, what I’m looking forward to in the year to come is really getting an opportunity to focus in on the value propositions of Trust Insights. And so using our existing data, reaching out to our Slack community in our customers to really make sure that we’re not only solving the their existing problems, but trying to get ahead of future problems. And so, you know, when more people are bringing AI into their organization, it opens up a new can of worms and opens up a whole bunch of new problems that we want to be prepared to solve. So that’s, I really like that piece of it. So that’s what I’m looking forward to is really, you know, revising and re energizing our values, our value propositions, I should say, our values were good. We know we know who we are more of our value propositions.
Christopher Penn 38:47
John, what about you? What are you looking forward to in the year to come?
John Wall 38:50
Yeah, march 3, I’ll be at the TD North center with Bell Biv DeVoe New Edition, Bobby Brown, Charlie Wilson and Josey for an evening of old school 80s r&b.
Katie Robbert 39:00
I am not holding my breath for for all of those people to be on stage.
John Wall 39:06
That’s half the fun is will they make it that it’s like that’s like 15 dates into the tour? Yeah, I would be astounded if it’s the original roster within weeks. But yeah, that sadly, that’s the only thing I haven’t list because I’m one of these people, too. I don’t know how many other people can relate to this. But it’s like, I’m giving so much like making it to that last day before year end wrap up and everything. Like I literally have no idea even what I’m going to do next week. Never mind like what I’m looking forward to for next year. I literally will have to take next week and take and set a day aside to like make a map, do the annual plan of like, okay, what do I want to happen next year on the shortlist? I would love it. If we get to a point where live events do come back. You know, it would be great if we could, you know, both on the social side of concerts and things like that, but also on the business side of being able to, you know, meet with some of the folks we haven’t seen in a couple years that we normally have dinner with after events and stuff like that where we can, you know, and especially because that’s where a lot of The real learning comes from in these conferences and trade events, you know, like you really don’t learn. We’ve proven that, you know, Zoom meetings are not the way to, to learn about what’s going on in the industry, in fact that they’re even a challenge to staying awake most of the time. So yeah, but that’s where I’m at. Yeah. And I hope everybody has a great and safe, happy holiday. And yeah, get recharged and ready for 2022. Exactly what are
Katie Robbert 40:24
you looking forward to Chris?
Christopher Penn 40:27
publishing a new work, I’m not sure if it’s going to be a paper or a book yet. That’s about 30,000 words on private social media communities gonna be talking about that actually, at the MarketingProfs B2B forum in the fall of next year in Boston, in person, you know, conditions permitting. One of my goals this year was to get better at Adobe Creative Cloud. And I’m just finishing up you know, going through a lot of the tutorials and stuff on like After Effects and stuff. And so I’m looking forward to putting some of that knowledge to use for the business and for marketing next year of trying new and different ways of making content. We just upgraded machine so we now have this absurd like death star of a laptop to work on. And so I would like to see what interesting stuff kinds of content we can create, with all these new capabilities. The tools are there, the ingredients are there just got to just get the chef skilled up here.
Katie Robbert 41:21
I thought you’re gonna say I have this new machine. So I want to see how long it takes before I can break it.
Christopher Penn 41:28
Now, no, go try and take good care of it. But no, that’s that’s what I’m looking forward to next year is more creative stuff to go along with a lot of the heavier machine learning stuff, and new new new book new stuff to share with folks.
John Wall 41:45
That’s why we buy Apple Care.
Christopher Penn 41:49
Thanks to everyone who has watched and listened and commented and joined our communities and stuff over the past year 2021 would not have been the year it was without you. So we thank you for that. And we hope you do have a great safe, healthy holiday season and we will see you in the first week of January. Take care. 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 podcasts, and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join 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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