INBOX INSIGHTS, April 14, 2021: Marketing Tech Stack Woes, Change Management, Sales Funnels - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

Marketing Tech Stack Woes, Change Management, Sales Funnels

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Finding the Needle in the Tech Stack

I had a chat with a friend earlier this week who said they had a client that needed more leads. Leads were down. Sounded like a line right out of Glengarry Glen Ross almost. I said, “okay, where do they get their leads from?” The answer was pretty straightforward: organic search, email, a little bit of social, and Google Ads.

By education, I’m actually an IT person first. Despite working in marketing for the last 15 years, my formal education and first love was technology, and one of the first things I do when someone comes with a marketing problem is to check the marketing technology infrastructure. Why?

Infrastructure problems generally have concrete solutions. Broke a piece of code? Fix it. Server down? Fix it. Email blacklisted? Fix it. Infrastructure problems generally aren’t reliant on the whims of customers or the changing tides of societal and cultural trends.

Infrastructure problems have multiplier effects. A broken form on your website that stops people from submitting their contact information correctly breaks everything after that point in the marketing operations funnel. Fix that broken part and, like removing a dam from a river, the flood of business flows downstream.

Infrastructure problems are most forgotten. The average marketer isn’t a technologist. Marketers in general don’t remember to check all the internals of their marketing technology in the same way that most of us who aren’t auto mechanics don’t routinely check out the internals of our car engines. We only look – and then not particularly skillfully – when something’s broken.

With my friend’s client, I took a very quick look. Their website’s a hot mess, from a technical SEO perspective. It’s got multiple domain names with the weirdest redirection scheme. Their tracking is totally hosed; someone seems to have put Google Tag Manager’s container on the page twice for no good reason (yay double counting your traffic!)

And then I looked at their email. Holy can of worms, Batman. None of their deliverability protocols are set up; it looks like someone made an attempt at setting one up but did it wrong and in doing so, basically managed to tell email providers like Gmail that the domain is probably spamming. In short, they managed to sabotage their email marketing and ensure it DOESN’T get delivered – even interpersonal, 1-1 emails end up in spam folders, never mind things like email newsletters.

Of course leads are down. Of course business is slowly declining. When most of the technical architecture that digital marketing relies on isn’t working correctly (or at all), business will inevitably decline.

And almost all of it is preventable. I’m sure there are other macro problems as well that technology can’t fix – hello, pandemic still in progress. But these marketing technology problems are preventable problems that would eliminate some obstacles to success for this particular business.

The key takeaway here is to eliminate marketing technology problems from your top marketing challenges. Get the straightforward stuff out of the way so that your problems become more clear, so you don’t waste time trying to solve for the wrong problem. Imagine doubling your ad spend because leads seemed to be down when you really could have just fixed your email deliverability and recovered your lead volume that way. Marketing technology shouldn’t be the thing that prevents your success – so like your car, make sure to get it checked out from time to time.

In week’s episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris talk shop on change management. Why is it so hard to create lasting change in an organization? From fad diets to the 7 deadly sins, we cover a ton of ground on motivating people to make changes for the better. Tune in!

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last week on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show, we explored how to improve your overall sales and marketing funnel.

Watch/listen to this episode of So What? here »

This Thursday at 1 PM Eastern, we’re going to tackle how to analyze and improve your sales and marketing funnel, from setting it up to finding out where it’s most in need of help. Join us on our YouTube channel!

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Data Diaries - Interesting Data We Found

It’s time to see how Instagram did for influencers in the first quarter of 2021. How have things changed since we last peeked in?

We see a similar slide for influencers that we did for brands last week, save for the fact that brands have had it much worse. Still, a drop from 1.6% engaegment to 1.3% engagement is an 18.75% decline for the first four months of 2021. In recent weeks, the pace of decline seems to have picked up a little. However, for whatever reason, Instagram influencer engagement has a seasonality to it; a year ago, it was more or less the same.

What do we take away from this? Unlike brands, influencer engagement levels seem to fluctuate seasonally but generally stay around the 1.0 – 1.5% mark. Why do they do this? I speculate that influencers are more agile than brands and leverage new features like Reels and Stories more capably than brands, allowing them to maintain their levels of engagement. Combine that with the appeal of a personal brand and human connection compared to the sterile, faceless interaction with brands, and it’s no surprise that influencers would maintain their engagement levels. Additionally, Facebook has made no secret of the fact that they want brands to pay more and more.

Thus, if Instagram is in your marketing mix as a strategic component, betting on the continued impact of influencers seems to be a reasonably stable strategy (as stable as anything is in social media marketing) to stick with.

Methodology: Trust Insights used Facebook’s Crowdtangle software to export 400,868 posts from 9,398 influencer Instagram accounts. Influencer accounts were identified by Facebook and appended by Trust Insights. Engagement is defined as (likes + comments) / size of following at time of posting. The timeframe of the data is January 1, 2021 – March 31, 2021. The date of study is April 14, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

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