Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Data, data everywhere! But how do businesses extract the insight and innovation to drive growth?

January 28th, 2011

Digital data is the new due diligence (DD) of business planning. A recent Accenture report “Will Marketing Get The Message?” concluded that leading growth companies, recognizing that digital technologies and social media, have taken marketing to a new level of rigour. 60% of the growth companies surveyed by Accenture said that they extract and translate customer and market data into strategic insight.

So how do businesses unlock this growth opportunity? Reform gathers, monitors, interprets and reinvests digital data sets every day for clients, and these are some of the trends that we see, both in terms of effective data-led strategies, but also the pitfalls to realising growth.

Search data – both external and on-site – can help inform businesses on what the universal demand is for products and services, which businesses are stealing market share, which price points are most attractive to customers, among other insights.

Analytics data tells businesses why people aren’t buying their products, which products are more/less appealing, what customers’ average order value is, etc.

Social data tells customer service teams pinpoints customer complaints – and indeed gives them a real-time response channel, where untapped communities, tribes or potential customers can be found, what the media is saying about the business and how this is impacting on share price.

So why isn’t every business tapping into the digital goldmine? Collecting the data is the easy part. However here are some of the pitfalls that we see across client organisations:

  • Data gets silo’d within marketing and left to the devices of the online, direct marketing or CRM teams.
  • Businesses are gathering so much unfiltered data that they find themselves drowning in it. They can’t extract the useful information from the pointless.
  • There is a huge data analytics skills gap. And data interrogation skills – few planners challenge the data in a real-world context. Too many inexperienced online marketers take the data at face value. Data in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing.
  • Data doesn’t get filtered, formatted and interpreted into meaningful management information. It languishes in the world of clicks and ‘likes’ and bounces. This means nothing to C-suites – and why should it?

 

If the first decade of the new Millennium was about gathering and digitising the world’s information, the second will be about filtering and translating it into knowledge, insight and innovation that will bring brands closer to their customers and businesses closer to realising significant revenue growth.

There is gold in them there hills. So let’s grab our spades and get digging.

Blog post by Amanda Davie, managing director of Reform.

Search analytics helps us to know our customers that little bit better

November 19th, 2010

Most businesses are interested in who their customers are and curious about where they come from. However brilliant their product or service, there remains a wonderful undercurrent of insecurity. Why are people buying what I sell?

Traditionally this insecurity has been addressed by market research firms. Research is then passed to business analysts, who review these surveys and other data. These techniques have value, but also fall down in a couple of key areas. Firstly – it may seem obvious – but market researchers can only work with the responses they receive. This may not represent a realistic client base, leaving them to extrapolate results to draw conclusions.

For potential customers, research and internal data is going to be even less representative. A holiday letting business may know that many of its customers come from a cluster of postcodes but does not know where potential customers from the same postcodes go on holiday or why. It would have an even poorer view of the holiday aspirations of people outside of the postcodes where most of its business originates.

With the shift to ecommerce the situation has improved, as more customer data is captured by businesses generally. Online surveys help too, as they mean a business can get a better grasp of customer motivation. But sadly this still does not solve the riddle of the non customer. Well, not unless you step into the world of Search.

Searching with a small ‘s’ has been a fundamental human characteristic since time immemorial. The advent of search engines, however, has dramatically broadened our ability to find even the most esoteric products, services or solutions to our problems. But if you look at search engines from a different perspective, they become a business analytics nirvana.

In the right hands and with the right technology a company can now answer questions like: “What search terms led this customer to buy my service?” They can even see how many people were searching for the same thing – giving their market share for that particular search – and how available their service was compared to competitors, by using systems like AdIntel to measure share of voice.

There is virtually no limit to the quantitative data that is available through effective search analytics. What makes this all the more interesting is a more recent ability to overlay qualitative analysis on the results. Historically a buyer was good, and someone who did not buy was bad. But now we can analyse things like the lifetime value of a client to improve our understanding. And by ‘listening’ to social media traffic, (and other user generated content), positive and negative attitudes can be interwoven with quantitative data that tracks the movement of consumers around the net.

Given that the internet both sells directly and informs consumers for offline purchases, the opportunities for satisfying the curiosity of businesses grow larger every day. Not only can we tell you where your customer came from and why, but we can also suggest why they did not go to your competitor. Tidy?

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-Executive Director of Reform

Analytics & Content Strategy Among Key Topics

January 25th, 2010

As the UK search marketing industry awaits the sound of the Search Engine Strategies 2010 conference wagon wheels rolling into town in February, we took a look at the event’s schedule, to see what some of the key themes and topics will be this year.

Many will be excited to hear the keynote speeches from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s leading Analytics guru and Author, and from Jim Sterne, Author and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association. And indeed the theme of analytics and conversion modeling, conversion attribution and optimisation features frequently throughout the three-day event schedule. Clearly search marketers are no strangers to accountability, but being able to lift search out of its silo and beyond the last click, and to model its success in line with the performance of a brand’s website and of its entire cross-media activity is front of mind for the industry in 2010.   

There are the usual suspects for those new to search marketing such as Introductions to Paid Search and SEO and link building strategies. And it is important that such industry events accommodate the needs of new market entrants as well as stalwarts.

Another theme which has more prominence on the SES conference schedule this year than it has in previous years is the importance of ensuring that search informs and shapes content strategy. On Wednesday 17th February (Day 2) there is a panel called “Developing Great Content” which will explore a range of web content development strategies that are born of the search marketing set (as opposed to the more ‘traditional set’ of journalists, copy writers and designers).

Reform’s Amanda Davie will be speaking in this session, and will be joined by search content and publishing specialists from Site Logic Marketing, SearchEngineWatch, SuccessWorks and SEO-PR.

For more detail about the “Developing Great Content” session or indeed the SES London conference schedule in it entirety, please visit http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/london