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Is marketing analytics moving backwards?

In many online marketing communities, you can judge the relative sophistication of marketers by reading the questions they pose to each other, such as “How do I track display ad performance?” or “How often should I scrub my email list?”. These questions are flashes of insight into the marketing community, and lately the questions have been more basic than usual.

Is this unusual? Not necessarily. At the beginning of each year, people change jobs. New folks enter the workforce, existing folks are promoted or change jobs, and a lot of institutional knowledge is reset.

If you were to look at Google Trends for common topics such as “marketing plan template” which indicate folks starting over or looking for quick starts, you’d see a spike at the beginning of January and July each year (start of calendar and fiscal years) as new people in new roles tackle familiar tasks, but without the guidance of those who came before.

What’s the takeaway? Institutional knowledge is essential in order to keep your marketing growing. Every time you put together a new marketing dashboard, report, presentation, or analysis, be sure to document the common pieces of data someone would need to understand and replicate it, such as:

• What the data means
• Where the data came from
• Who owns the data
• Why the data is important in terms of overall goals
• When the data needs to be extract
• How the data analysis works, including any customizations

This simple, grade-school framework is all you need to get started on making sure you don’t lose institutional knowledge when a person changes roles or leaves your marketing team. Review it frequently – every time a new report comes out, and existing reports once a quarter – to ensure you’re prepared for the unexpected.

This week’s Bright Idea is our latest paper, 2020 Data-Driven Marketing Trends. In it, we recap 2019’s performance data for brands and influencers on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as SEO link decay, content republishing statistics, and much more. Download your copy now for free!

Download your copy of 2020 Data-Driven Marketing Trends.

This week’s Rear View Mirror Data is a look at the influencers around CES. There are many different ways to measure influence; in the process we use, we look at who’s most talked about, rather than who does the most talking or even who gets the most engagement from their fan base. When a population can’t stop talking about someone, that person has influence with the population. For those of you who are over 40, you may remember ads from the 1970s and 1980s about investment banker E.F. Hutton. The tagline for those campaigns was, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” We apply that same idea to influencer identification. Who’s most talked about?

Shows like CES are the best environment for this algorithm because everyone is shouting so loud to be heard, to have their products be in the spotlight, that only by looking at what gets other people talking can you find what’s really resonating with a group of people. There are tons of folks out there who just talking into the ether, ruminating loudly, but unless someone else talks about them, their influence may not reflect the volume of their self-indulgent content.

So, without further ado, enjoy our interactive exploration of CES.

On a mobile device? This PDF version will work better for you.

• How To Build An Entire Year’s Content Marketing Calendar With Predictive Analytics
• 2020 Data-Driven Marketing Trends Report
• {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Reporting and Dashboarding Basics
• Our three words for 2020
• {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Two Must-Have Strategies in 2020

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

Social Media Marketing

• How to Build Facebook Chatbots ( 5 Messenger Bot Examples)
• How to influence retail technology buyers?
• The Best Social Media Conferences to Attend in the US in 2020 via Talkwalker

Media and Content

• 3 reasons why the B2B buying journey is more emotional than B2C via By
• Why Content Marketing Is A Sales Reps Best Friend
• The Content Distribution Playbook via Whiteboard Friday via Moz

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

• Competing in the Age of AI
• 3 Important Questions You Have to Ask About AI
• The Future of B2B Marketing & Sales: Can AI Really Foster Human Connections? via MRP

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

• So You Just Became a Data Science Manager… Now What? via By Damjan
• Data analytics is a culture, not a tool via Information Age via ACS
• Data Science Fails: If It Looks Too Good To Be True

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

• Google Explains How It Uses Machine Learning In Web Search
• At enterprise companies, SEOs cannot ‘do’ most of the SEO (An article to forward to non-SEO teams in your company) via Search Engine Land
• Google handles reconsideration requests in batches via Search Engine Land

Business and Leadership

• Essential Martech Tools for Every B2B Marketing Team

Join the Club

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 800 like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today.

Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

• Winbound, January 2020, Rennes, France
• Social Media Marketing World, March 2020, San Diego, CA
• MarTech West, April 2020, San Jose, CA
• ContentTech Summit, April 2020, San Diega, CA
• HELLO Conference, April 2020, New Jersey
• Women in Analytics, June 2020, Columbus, OH
• MAICON 2020, July 2020, Cleveland, OH

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

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Required FTC Disclosures

Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.

Trust Insights maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Talkwalker, Zignal Labs, Agorapulse, and others. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which we may receive indirect financial benefit.

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