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chapter 2

1st Principle of Momentum:

Agility Through Analytics

Agility means the ability to pivot and change direction quickly, based on data gained from in-depth analytics, in order to take advantage of opportunities to grow your business. Your business’ marketing momentum depends heavily on its ability to embrace agility and continuously revamp its strategies based on analytics.

HOW MANY TIMES have you heard the business mantra “Adapt or die”? It’s a common enough saying that you’d think this first principle of momentum, agility, was nothing new. The imperative to change according to market conditions has always been a major part of business.

But what hasn’t always been a part of business is the incredible amount of data now available, from supply-chain tracking information to e-commerce website analytics.

Due to this constant influx of data, adapting is no longer something that can take place only every once in a while—every few years, say, or even every quarter. Today agile businesses can, and should, adapt to changing conditions and new information almost instantly.

The sheer volume of data available in real time about every aspect of consumers’ interactions with your emails, social media posts, blog posts, website, and paid ads means that shaping and refining strategies and campaigns based on that information is a never-ending process.

And that process is the single most essential element in capitalizing on and building momentum from your marketing successes.

In the world of digital marketing, things happen at the speed of light. A well-timed tweet can go viral in seconds, spreading brand awareness in no time flat—think Oreo’s famous tweet when the lights went out at the Super Bowl in 2013: “Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.” It’s that kind of swift move to take advantage of a trending topic or a new insight into audience behavior that creates the momentum you need to be successful in today’s marketing ecosystem—and it’s the constant tweaks and course adjustments, based on data about your audience’s responses to your marketing, that continue to build that momentum.

Agility in marketing leads directly to marketing momentum.

So how can your company go about becoming more agile?

» Agility in Action

Let’s take another look at that sports drink company we mentioned in chapter 1—we’ll call them Marketade. How did Marketade come up with the idea to promote its drinks through mobile and Facebook offers? Did Stan in Marketing just come up with the brilliant idea during a meeting one day, all fleshed out and ready to implement?

Yeah, probably not.

The idea probably began as a much simpler version of the promotion, maybe just an offer for a free drink popping up once a jogger reached the end of their route.

Now, Marketade is an agile company, so it tracks its analytics carefully, and then puts its insights to good use.

In looking at the data here, Stan probably noticed that their initial offer was successful, and that customers weren’t waiting to redeem it, but instead were going to the nearest store to immediately get their free drink. But even more exciting than that, they were then sharing the fact that they had gotten a free drink with friends on social media!

Had anyone asked them to share this information? Nope. Did they get any benefit from telling friends? No. And yet there they were, letting their friends know about the promotion. What gives?

People love to spread the word about deals among friends— especially when associating themselves with a certain product or service makes them look good. And what could possibly make you look better than sharing a deal on a healthy drink, thus subtly letting friends know how fit and health-conscious you are?

Stan realized that Marketade was really on to something here. How could they tweak the campaign to capitalize on the momentum that was already building through these voluntary shares?

First, Stan decided to make immediate offer redemption part of the deal. So many people were already doing it on their own that making it mandatory might just inspire the rest to do so, too. The offer was then linked to stores near the ends of the joggers’ routes to make it an easy yes. This first tweak strengthened the momentum already building.

Next, Stan added a step that customers were already taking on their own—but made it even more attractive, so that more of them would participate by offering another discount for friends when a jogger posted a selfie on Facebook with their free drink. In the process, Marketade capitalized on our love affair with selfies as well as our desire to associate ourselves with products that make us look good and our excitement about sharing great deals with friends.

The result? Marketing gold. Stan’s tweaks to the campaign really only took what customers were already doing and made it a standard part of the deal, but by tapping into what people were willing to do anyway and attaching a reward to it, he increased the momentum of the campaign dramatically.

If Stan hadn’t been checking his analytics religiously, he wouldn’t have known about the customer response until it was too late to take advantage of it. But by listening and observing and tracking, he was able to make his campaign into something much more effective than it ever could have been in its original form.

That is agility.

That is marketing momentum.

» Growth Hacking: Agility on Steroids

You may have heard the term growth hacking being thrown around the internet in recent years. What is it, exactly?

Growth hacking is an extreme version of agility tactics. It is a method used by many tech startups that burst onto the scene with a vengeance, disrupting their industry by growing from literally nothing to a thriving business in as little time as possible.

Unlike established companies, these growth hackers don’t feel bound by conventional marketing methods, and they don’t try to meet a long list of marketing goals—instead, they look for uniquely creative ways to get as much as possible out of their marketing efforts, and obsess over one thing and one thing only: growth. They scrutinize analytics constantly, and make major changes instantly based on trends and insights gleaned from those analytics, to amp up results. Focus is key in growth hacking—every single move is based on data and aimed at growth. It’s the perfect marriage of left-brain and right-brain, creativity and science. And this uber-emphasis on agility means that growth-hacking companies can sometimes go from 0 to 60 in just a few weeks—the momentum produced can be almost unbelievable.

New businesses in other industries can use these tactics, too, as can established companies, with just a little tweaking to accommodate needs other than growth alone.

Here’s a real-world example:

A Fortune 500 client of ours was launching a new educational app for kids. It enabled kids to practice math and English skills they needed more help on, as well as work ahead of their grade level for enrichment. It displayed results to parents, so they could keep track of their children’s progress, and could even be synced up with input from teachers and used by school systems. All in all, it was a really exciting new tool for kids, parents, and educators alike.

The client wanted to make a big splash, so the Marketing Zen team decided to use growth-hacking techniques to reach the client’s ambitious goals for explosive growth.

First, we set up a killer landing page, designed with one simple conversion in mind—capturing people’s email addresses. We kept it focused, with minimal text, a strong call to action, a design centered around the sign-up field, and a short demo video. This landing page was our cornerstone, our growth-hacking focus. We wanted email addresses so that we would have a huge audience of excited potential users to contact as soon as the app launched.

Next, we set up social media accounts for the brand, and started an intensive campaign to spread brand awareness among our target audiences. We ran paid ads on Facebook targeting moms, in order to gain fans for the Facebook page, get our name in front of them, and drive them to the landing page. We researched influential mommy bloggers and educational gurus, and followed them on Twitter, in order to encourage them to follow us in return, to make them aware of our existence, and to drive them to the landing page.

Then, we started an influencer outreach campaign, building strategic relationships with some of those mommy bloggers and influencers in the field of education, and offering to write guest blogs on their sites. Posts we wrote for them reached their audiences and others, as we also shared them on Stumbleupon via paid ads. In fact, one post went viral on Stumbleupon, getting reblogged over and over again. In every guest post was a link to the landing page.

But that’s only where the campaign started. Every step of the way, we kept one eye glued to the analytics. When we saw that traffic was hitting the landing page, but not converting at the rates we wanted, we tweaked the text and design and even added special offers in return for signing up, until we had created a veritable conversion machine. When we realized how effective our outreach strategy was in generating new traffic to the landing page, we sweetened the deal for influencers in order to get more of them on board, offering them exclusive deals and early access.

Nothing was sacred. Everything was susceptible to change if the analytics so dictated. And thanks to our growth-hacking tactics, our pre-launch campaign built up a sizeable email subscriber list and kept them excited through regular email updates, continued activity on social media, and outreach, so that even before the app launched, its momentum was already substantial—and it’s still growing.

The radical agility practiced by growth hackers clearly demonstrates the link between analytics, agility, and marketing momentum.

» Your Turn

So how can your company make the switch to an agile marketing mindset?

As we saw above, it’s all about the analytics.

But before you can start using analytics to inform your marketing strategies, you first need to assess your current situation, define targets and goals, and create an overall plan. Otherwise, you won’t know what you’re aiming for or whether your efforts are having the effect you want them to.

With that in mind, here is how to lay the necessary groundwork for agility in your business:

1. Start with a clean slate, assessing absolutely everything in your current marketing strategy with a critical eye.

If you truly want to embrace agility, you’ll need to let go of some things you’ve grown used to—or even attached to— in your current marketing strategy. Assume the mindset of a complete stranger, a consultant coming in and seeing your marketing strategy for the very first time. What does your overall strategy look like currently? What are all the moving parts? What have your results been like, both for individual campaigns and channels, and overall? Why do you do the things you currently do?

» Business X (let’s say they’re an IT solutions provider) has used the same basic strategy for years. They put their website in place, optimized it for search, and have pretty much left it alone since they built it. They do have a blog, updated regularly and enthusiastically by an employee who treats it a lot more like a personal blog than a company blog, rambling about his views on various topics rather than creating actual marketing content. They send out email newsletters to their customers and prospects every so often—not really on a regular basis, but as often as they can get to it. And they have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, since they heard that every business worth its salt these days had to have social media accounts—but rarely have the time to post.

The results of their digital marketing efforts have been lackluster. Their site gets some traffic, but most deals are still made via the same old outbound techniques their salespeople have been using for years, cold calling chief among them. Their newsletters don’t seem to have much of an effect, unless they announce a sale or deal, and their social media accounts sit mostly idle. Their blog is popular with its writer’s friends and family, but doesn’t seem to attract many other visitors—or more importantly, any leads.

Basically, they are online because you have to be in order to be taken seriously. And with a pretty much nonexistent ROI from their inbound marketing, they felt they couldn’t really justify the amount of resources it would take to keep up with everything on a regular basis.

When Business X took a good look at their current strategy, they realized that they didn’t really have a solid “why” behind most of the things they did. They also admitted to themselves that they had been checking analytics only sporadically, and certainly not taking any action based on the data, other than growing frustrated with the few resources they were putting towards marketing.

A COMPANY GETTING IT RIGHT

Business operations and customer relations software company SAP is a multinational behemoth that’s been known and respected the world over for more than forty years—and is a great example of a large enterprise fully embracing the concept of agility and establishing a robust testing and optimization program.

In 2009 SAP VP Shawn Burns set about creating enterprise web analytics at the company to replace a disparate set of analytics tools then in use in various divisions of the very large organization. Six months into the process of getting all of SAP’s business data and analytics “under one roof,” so to speak, Burns had a realization—he understood that just having all that data in one place wasn’t maximizing its value. What SAP needed was to, as Burns put it, get “a process and dedicated team” that would focus on the data “to squeeze the value out of it.”

The result of Burns’s epiphany was the creation of SAP’s Test Lab, a dedicated testing and optimization team that, since its creation, has run tests and optimized elements across SAP’s marketing efforts in different channels and even different global marketplaces.

SAP’s Test Lab keeps an organized queue of tests to be performed that are ranked by value to the company, knowing that the Test Lab is a finite corporate resource. The team also keeps documentation to preserve institutional knowledge gained from every test. Now the team runs around twenty-five tests each quarter.

Why such a limited number of tests? The Test Lab’s goal is continual improvement and optimization, and their team is willing to run multiple iterations on specific testing areas, such as visual imagery in marketing material, to fully optimize results for each element in a given test.

2. Identify your business goals.

Of course you’re already aware of your company’s overall goals. But listing them out on paper puts them in the forefront of your mind, and will allow you to refer back to them easily while working on your marketing plan. Every aspect of your marketing strategy should be directly traceable back to your overall goals as a business—otherwise, you’re wasting resources.

» Business X’s list of overall goals: To increase sales by a specific percentage each year. To reach more prospects, create brand awareness, and establish themselves as industry leaders. To boost the number of clients who enter into long-term consultative contracts, rather just buying a solution in a one-time transaction.

3. Identify your conversion goals.

What exactly does “conversion” mean to you—in the context of your overall marketing strategy, as well as in the context of each channel and campaign you plan to use? Maybe you want sales—okay, good. But maybe you’re after email addresses instead (or also!), or likes on Facebook, or something entirely different. That’s fine, too—the important thing is that you define what you want up front and make sure these goals are measurable and trackable. Email addresses and Facebook likes can be counted; “brand awareness” is a more nebulous goal.

» Business X’s old marketing strategy had a vague focus on brand awareness and attracting leads, but nothing really quantifiable. Instead of actively targeting specific conversions, they had simply been going through the motions—doing the blog, doing social media—without any concrete purpose in mind.

They set a new conversion goal: gathering email addresses to market to. Now, all digital marketing efforts would be aimed at reaching a wider audience through thought leadership, and then gathering as many email addresses from that new audience as possible, in order to add prospects to their email subscriber list. That way, they could begin moving them through the sales funnel, directing them towards the specific relationship Business X wanted to have with them.

4. Quick Check: Do your conversion goals correspond with the stated goals of your business?

Take a look at what you’re striving for online and whether it matches up with your real-world goals for your company. Getting Facebook likes is all well and good, but if it’s not leading to more sales of your gadgets, and that’s your goal, then you need to rethink what you consider a conversion online. If your real-world goal is building a larger audience of warm leads to market to, then collecting email addresses should be first and foremost.

» For Business X, email marketing was the digital marketing channel that they felt would be most effective at helping them reach their overall business goal of lead nurturing. Therefore, all other efforts would now ultimately be geared towards persuading people to share their email addresses.

5. Define your target profiles.

Next, you want to figure out who it is you’re targeting with your online marketing efforts. Get specific—not just “women,” but “married women with kids, between the ages of thirty and forty-five, who make more than $50,000 a year and like animals.” Come up with at least three different customer personas for your ideal customers, focusing on demographics, interests, and pain points, then research where those people hang out online and what speaks to them there.

» Business X already had a very in-depth understanding of the kinds of business customers it wanted to target. What it didn’t know, however, was how to reach those people online. So the marketing department did some research into which social media platforms their customers used most heavily—Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Instagram? Pinterest?—and what sort of content they engaged with while there. They looked at what sorts of blog posts and email newsletters truly interested their target audience, and what kind of resources they wanted to see on an IT solutions provider’s website. They polled their current customers, asked prospects, searched for industry conversations happening on social media, and drew up complete profiles that detailed where and how to reach the exact people they wanted to reach online.

They found that their target audience mostly hung out on LinkedIn and Twitter, and appreciated industry-related information—tips for choosing an IT solution, for example, or explanations of how various solutions could help with different issues.

6. Create an overall digital marketing strategy.

Based on the above goals and information, develop your new strategy. It may be similar to your existing one, or it may be completely different. The key is that you now have specific goals to work toward, the results of which are measurable and based on concrete data. You’ll determine which channels you’ll use and what type of content you’ll create based on your target audience’s preferences. You’ll decide which conversion goals to pursue, based on your overall business goals.

» Since Business X’s overarching marketing goal was to gain email addresses for email marketing, all other marketing activities had to be geared towards that end. So social media campaigns needed to entice people to click through to a landing page that collected their email address. The website needed to give visitors the chance to share their email on every page. And even the email newsletter going out to current subscribers needed to ask them to forward it to a friend who might find it useful, in the hopes that they might subscribe, too.

7. Develop individual marketing campaigns and initiatives.

Within your new strategy, you can now finally begin to create individual campaigns. Again, these should all be geared towards driving the specific, quantifiable conversions you’ve decided on, which should all contribute clearly to your larger business goals.

» Business X decided they would post educational blog posts filled with useful industry information on LinkedIn on a regular basis, as well as taking an active part in the conversations in relevant LinkedIn Groups. They also planned to create a free e-book containing valuable information for their target audience, promote it on Twitter, and give it away to anyone who subscribed to their emails. And they decided to start updating their website with new, search-friendly content, in order to attract more prospects via Google.

8. Realize that the marketing strategy and campaigns you just spent so much time on will need to change—many times.

You already know this, but knowing something and really being ready and willing to do it are two different things. In order to become an agile marketer, you’ve got to be truly willing to make changes—sometimes tiny, sometimes drastic— based on what you see in your analytics. And not just once, but over and over again—every single time you see something that needs to be acted on. Creating a strategy is not a one-and-done–type thing. Your strategy and campaigns will need constant tweaking.

» Business X committed to thinking of each change they would make as the next step in an ongoing process, not as revisiting something that had been finished.

9. Don’t expect instant results.

Unless you’re a growth hacker looking for instant results from an intensive marketing push, it’s not just okay but necessary to give your strategy some time to work. Don’t get worried if orders don’t start pouring in immediately once you publish that blog post, or if no one has signed up for your webinar yet, even though you sent the email yesterday. Look at what’s happening week by week, and often even month by month, to see where trends are emerging and where changes need to be made. As a general rule of thumb, the newer your online marketing strategy is, the more time it will need to work. A company that’s brand new to blogging or to social media might not see results for ninety days or even longer, while a company simply making tweaks to an existing strategy might start seeing results within a week.

» Business X decided to look at their analytics on a daily basis in order to see what was taking off and what was not so successful, but determined that they would hold back for at least ninety days and give their campaigns a chance to work rather than get frustrated and change things too soon.

10. Put things in motion, and then fan the flames.

Take action on your campaigns, and start watching your analytics. Now that the groundwork has been laid for agile, analytics-driven marketing, the real work begins. This is where you monitor, analyze, and then tweak, over and over again, until you have optimized and fine-tuned your campaigns and your strategy to achieve their highest possible levels of success. This is where you find out where the momentum is slowly beginning to build in your marketing efforts, and then fan the flames by adding more and more fuel to those successful areas.

» Business X launched its campaigns, and then saw that their conversations in LinkedIn Groups were having a real effect on quality traffic coming to their site, so they decided to ramp up their efforts in that area. They also noticed that traffic from search was still not as high as they wanted it to be, so they decided to try paid ads on Google as well. They discovered that Twitter posts that included an image were significantly more effective at driving traffic to the site to subscribe than those without, so they created images to attract more attention. The constant tweaks paid off in more conversions—more email addresses—which in turn meant that overall business goals were being reached.

» Analytics Tools

Tracking all this data sounds complicated, but there are plenty of tools you can use to keep tabs on it all. When it comes to analytics, however, there’s no one-size-fits-all tool that tracks every piece of data on every platform. So it’s important to understand what types of tools are available, and how to combine them to get the best insight into your audience’s behavior.

The analytics tool that should have the most direct and noticeable impact on your day-to-day marketing activities and campaigns is marketing automation software. This branch of business software covers a very wide range of capabilities, although the term typically is used to define software that helps marketers to:

 collect and track data, often across multiple channels

 organize and sort that data to make database segmentation much easier when creating targeted campaigns

 actually help execute marketing campaigns, while tracking the progress and results of those efforts

Here’s a (very) limited list of marketing automation technology vendors, ranging from email-specific tools to full marketing automation suites that cover everything from email statistics to social media analytics to lead-generation tools. Some are better suited for smaller businesses, some are highly scalable and appeal to both SMB (small- and medium-size businesses) and enterprise companies, and others probably are best described as enterprise-class. But all are established in the marketing industry.