Paracelsus once said, “the dose makes the poison”. When it comes to the difference between medicine and poison, sometimes it doesn’t take much to cross that line. The challenge is, where’s the line?
The same is true when it comes to nearly any marketing strategy or tactic. There’s a point after which you achieve diminishing returns, but there’s also a point where your marketing becomes counterproductive, doing more harm than good. Our audiences can tolerate some things in great quantity, like how often we tweet. Our audiences have much lower tolerance, even for high quality content, when it comes directly to the inbox or over the phone.
The key question we have to ask is, “Where is the line?” At what point do we stop receiving benefit? At what point do we start incurring harm?
Do we know? Do you know?
The answer is, probably not. Why? Our marketing analytics tools are not built to deliver that kind of information. Log into any tool like Google Analytics or your marketing automation system, and you’ll receive accurate, thorough reports about what happened. However, this information won’t tell us whether we’re hitting diminishing returns or causing outright harm until we see substantial changes in traffic.
To find those diminishing returns sooner, we have to do some math. Specifically, we need to look at rate of change.
A car’s speed tells us one thing. Its acceleration or deceleration tells us whether we’re going to go faster or slower. Similarly, if we examine the rate of change of a marketing metric, we can see diminishing returns much faster.
We’ve hit diminishing returns once we see a sustained decrease in the rate of change of a metric.
Let’s look at an example, traffic to our website from email marketing:
The blue line represents the traffic from email. The red line represents a 4-week moving average, to smooth out individual jumps. There’s a pretty clear point after which email stops working, isn’t there? You see it right around week 15. The grey line represents the change, week over week, in the red line. Once that indicator is below 0% for a few weeks in a row, it’s safe to say we’ve hit diminishing returns – and if we don’t change what we’re doing, we could see things get really ugly – like people abandoning our email list en masse.
As shown above, this doesn’t require fancy software or complex coding – it’s simply a measure of the rate of change. But rate of change is something almost never measured in any analytics tool, so you’ll need to do this regularly to ensure your marketing vehicles aren’t slowing unexpectedly.
In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss unnecessary reporting. Why does this happen? What can we do to streamline our reporting processes and make sure we’re focused on the most valuable reporting and analytics first? Listen to this episode to learn about change management, KPI identification, and reporting as a security blanket.
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In this week’s Rear View mirror, we look at content republishing in June 2020.
What we see is a startling trend: as the month wound down, the amount of republished/recycled content skyrocketed. By month’s end, over half of the blog posts, articles, and content on the web in our sample was republished, recycled from a previous date. Why? What caused this, compared to the usual recycling rates of 5-10%?
We don’t have hard data to back up the assertion, but we do know that newspapers and other publications are suffering heavily in the pandemic. As publications cut staff, it’s no surprise that they would recycle content to keep the appearance of fresh content as they operate with significantly reduced staffing.
What does this mean for us? In terms of a strategy of getting others to talk about us, with fewer people creating content at publications, the chances of us getting a media placement are lower than average. In terms of a strategy for guest content contribution, some media outlets may be more amenable to the idea if it means filling the content bucket. And most important, for our overall long-term strategy, we should continue focusing on becoming a media outlet of our own. The pandemic has taken a huge toll on publishers, and the only guaranteed press we can earn is on our own sites.
Methodology: Trust Insights used AHREFS SEO software to extract the number of republished, new, and total stories on the web in the English language with a query using the top 25 English language stopwords. By nature of the query, the data is heavily biased in the English language. The date of the study period is June 1, 2020 – June 30, 2020. The date of extraction is July 15, 2020. 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.
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Freeing Yourself From Reporting Nightmares via Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting
- How can AI improve VOC? Part 1: Introduction via Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting
- How to predict the second half of 2020?
- Data Science 101 for Marketers: An IBM/TrustInsights Event
- 5 Applications of AI For Content Marketers at CMC 2020
AI Academy for Marketers is an online education platform designed to help marketers understand, pilot, and scale artificial intelligence. The AI Academy features deep-dive Certification Courses (3 – 5 hours each), along with dozens of Short Courses (30 – 60 minutes each) taught by leading AI and marketing experts.
Join Katie Robbert, CEO of Trust Insights, and Christopher Penn, Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights, for three separate courses in the academy:
- 5 use cases of AI for content marketing
- Intelligent Attribution Modeling for Marketing
- Detecting and Mitigating BIAS in Marketing AI
The Academy is designed for manager-level and above marketers, and largely caters to non-technical audiences, meaning you do not need a background in analytics, data science or programming to understand and apply what you learn. One registration gives you unlimited access to all the courses, an invitation to a members-only Slack Instance, and access to new courses every quarter.
Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.
Data Science and AI
- Histogram in R: How to Make a GGPlot2 Histogram? via 365 Data Science
- Tips on securing your analytics and marketing data via Acoustic
- IBM Research at ICML 2020 via IBM Research Blog
SEO, Google, and Paid Media
- Content Creation Guide: How to Effectively Think of SEO at Every Stage
- SEO Negotiation: How to Ace the Business Side of SEO Best of Whiteboard Friday via Moz
- Entity Seeking Queries and Semantic Dependency Trees via SEO by the Sea
Social Media Marketing
- Facebook in the age of revolt via Digiday
- How to Find and Target Your Social Media Audience (Free Template)
- How to Analyze Instagram Stories Ads via Social Media Examiner
Content Marketing
- 5 Winning Types of Content Marketing to Grow Your Business
- How Long Should Blog Posts Be?
- 9 Techs to Take Your Content to the Next Level
Get Back To Work
We’ve changed things up in Get Back To Work, and we’re looking at the top 310 metro areas in the United States by population. This will give you a much better sense of what the overall market looks like, and will cover companies hiring in multiple locations. Want the entire, raw list? Join our Slack group!
What do you do with this information?
By looking at this data, you’ll see what the most popular titles are; use any of the major job/career sites to ensure your resume/CV/LinkedIn profile matches keywords and phrases for those titles. For companies, search job sites for those companies specifically to see all the open positions and apply for them.
You can also hit up LinkedIn and see who you know at companies listed, and see if your connections have any inside tips on hiring.
Top Marketing Positions by Count, Manager and Above
- Marketing Manager : 553 open positions
- Account Manager : 296 open positions
- Digital Marketing Manager : 285 open positions
- Project Manager : 232 open positions
- Social Media Manager : 202 open positions
- Product Manager : 177 open positions
- Director of Marketing : 167 open positions
- Marketing Director : 163 open positions
- Product Marketing Manager : 153 open positions
- Program Manager : 99 open positions
Top Marketing Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above
- Amazon.com Services LLC : 137 open positions
- Pearson : 120 open positions
- Amazon Web Services, Inc. : 82 open positions
- American Heart Association : 78 open positions
- Oracle : 57 open positions
- Northrop Grumman : 54 open positions
- T-Mobile : 48 open positions
- Facebook : 45 open positions
- Verizon : 44 open positions
- Google : 40 open positions
Top Locations of Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above
- New York, NY : 778 open positions
- San Francisco, CA : 466 open positions
- Chicago, IL : 402 open positions
- Seattle, WA : 377 open positions
- Austin, TX : 351 open positions
- Los Angeles, CA : 317 open positions
- Boston, MA : 285 open positions
- Atlanta, GA : 280 open positions
- San Diego, CA : 211 open positions
- Philadelphia, PA : 196 open positions
Methodology: Trust Insights uses the Indeed.com API to extract open positions from a geographic area focused on marketing analytics, marketing, social media, data science, machine learning, advertising, and public relations, with a filter to screen out the most junior positions.
Featured Partners
Our Featured Partners are companies we work with and promote because we love their stuff. If you’ve ever wondered how we do what we do behind the scenes, chances are we use the tools and skills of one of our partners to do it.
- Hubspot CRM
- StackAdapt Display Advertising
- Agorapulse Social Media Publishing
- WP Engine WordPress Hosting
- Techsmith Camtasia and Snagit Media Editing
- Talkwalker Media Monitoring
- Our recommended media production gear on Amazon
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?
- Women in Analytics, August 2020, virtual
- ContentTech Summit, August 2020, virtual
- INBOUND 2020, September 2020, virtual
- MarTech East, October 2020, Boston, MA
- HELLO Conference, October 2020, New Jersey
- MadConNYC, December 2020, New York City
Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!
Want some private training at your company? Ask us!
In Your Ears
Would you rather listen to our content? Follow the Trust Insights show, In-Ear Insights in the podcast listening software of your choice:
- In-Ear Insights on Apple Podcasts
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- In-Ear Insights on all other podcasting software
Stay In Touch
Where do you spend your time online? Chances are, we’re there too, and would enjoy sharing with you. Here’s where we are – see you there?
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. All Featured Partners are affiliate links for which we receive financial compensation. 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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