Back for another year, the 2016 Canadian Internet Marketing Conference (CIMC) will feature a powerhouse line-up of more than 30 of the world’s top minds and movers of the digital marketing industry. FreshGigs.ca got the awesome opportunity to have a pre-conference brain-picking sesh with each of the keynote speakers and panelists. Today’s Q & A is with Sarah Clark, Project Manager for Jelly Marketing.
What exactly does reporting digital marketing entail? Why should the public be interested in it?
Reporting digital marketing is incredible – it’s broad and measurable, which to me, is what is most exciting. Numbers don’t lie and I think above all, what the attendees at CIMC (and every business owner) should take away from the idea of digital marketing is the fact that unlike other traditional forms of marketing, with the right tools, you’re able to link your marketing dollars to your real time results, and therefore, calculate an accurate ROI.
Gone are the days of the “spray and pray” concept; today, digital marketing is refreshingly accountable. We’re able to track how many people see or engage with an ad, how many downloads a brochure on a website gets, how many calls are made directly from ads and hundreds of other goals – the list is a mile long!
At the end of the day, having thousands of people visit your website is useless unless you know more about their journey. How did they get there? What are they doing when they get there? Where are they getting bored and deciding to look elsewhere? After you understand your customer’s behaviour, you have a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips to refine your strategies.
Reporting digital marketing sounds very mathematical and analytical. What aspects of it would you say are fun and user-friendly?
There’s a number of reporting tools that are user friendly, but lets be real – not everyone finds data and analytics fun. At Jelly, we’re big fans of Google Analytics. As Project Manager, you’ll often find me in the back end of our client’s websites dissecting how their customers are engaging with their websites. It’s very easy to use and has helpful tips and tricks sprinkled throughout the dashboards.
Our friends at Raven Tools and Moz provide interactive reporting tools with fun widgets which our clients love, especially those who aren’t familiar with some of the everyday digital lingo (CTR, bounce rate, etc). We love these reporting tools but we’re finding that more and more of our clients aren’t really interested in elaborate, beautiful reports – they’re all about the numbers, so with them in mind, we’ve changed up our reporting strategy and created simple data driven KPI reports in a classic spreadsheet format.
Our clients trust us with executing the creative campaigns and when it’s all wrapped, they crave a simple, straight forward dashboard that give them a handful of stats that they REALLY care about!
Normally analytics are recorded and reported to clients. What, if any, value is there in sharing this information with customers (members of the general public)?
As an agency, this one is huge. Regardless of how prevalent digital has become, we still have a number of brands come to us that are hesitant of digital and wary of the idea of utilizing some of their traditional marketing budget for the unknown world of digital. To help us with this, we’ve made it a practice of getting permission from our clients to use our digital successes as case studies. We’ve found that it goes a long way in the sales process – it highlights our experience, results and therefore solidifies a trust in digital (and us!)
We’ve put together a few case studies for our clients, including La-Z-Boy’s Venture into Digital Marketing, Splashdown’s Budget Shift from Traditional to Digital, and Run for Water’s Increase in Online Donations. It’s been beneficial to have our case studies reflect our industries of expertise (retail, family entertainment, charitable organizations) to ensure that future clients know what our team is capable of and the industries that we’ve seen the most success in.
Additionally, we’ve created a blog series on our experience in retail highlighting public relations, digital ads and social media, which has proven to be helpful as well.
What’s the best way to use analytics tools to facilitate customer engagement? (How can companies best encourage media-savvy customers to engage with them in the digital realm without appearing to be manipulative?)
Once we understand how our clients’ customers interact with their websites, we love working with the team at Unbounce to create optimized landing pages catered specifically for the goals that we’re trying to fulfill for our clients. The great thing about Unbounce is how easy to use it is – I’m by no means a designer, but I’m able to whip up a pretty wicked landing page in less than an hour. Imagine what a design savvy person could do?! From there, we’re able to analyze how the customer engages with the landing page (again) and do A/B testing based on the results to try to refine the page for even more conversions.
After you understand your customer’s behaviour, you have a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips to refine your strategies.
From there, we like to set up display ads to retarget the visitors with engaging ads that follow them around and keep the brand top of mind. To me, that’s not manipulative – it’s just reminding the public that our clients are pretty fabulous! 😉
What are some of the fun ways in which you can distill and use analytics/data?
In the eyes of a business owner, I’m not sure that there’s anything more fun than walking in their customers shoes. Analytics gives you the opportunity to do just that by seeing how they engage with your website. With tools like Google Analytics, you’re able to track every movement in their journey throughout your site, including the pages that they drop off on, how long they stay on your site and which pages are most engaging.
Taking all of this information to strategy discussions gives you the opportunity to make educated decisions to better tailor your website and overall digital marketing strategies to appeal to your target audience.
As an agency, we use our analytics to showcase our expertise and efforts. Of course, we provide monthly KPI reports but at the end of each year, we put together fun presentations for all of our clients highlighting the successes and future opportunities that we learned over the previous 365 days. It’s like a trip down memory lane! How fun is that?!
Sarah showcases her expertise in all things social, PR and multi-platform integration as the Project Manager at Jelly Digital Marketing and PR. Using a clean and intentional approach, she loves demonstrating to her clients and business owners how the fast moving world of digital marketing can benefit their individual goals and objectives. Sarah is armed with a perpetually positive attitude, a hint of sass and a passion for laughter, wine and life.
The CIMC runs April 14-15, 2016 at the West Coast Railway Heritage Park in Squamish BC, Canada. For more conference and ticket info, click here.