INBOX INSIGHTS, December 8, 2021: Marketing Funnel, Data Quality Lifecycle, Press Release Impact - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: Marketing Funnel, Data Quality Lifecycle, Press Release Impact (12/8) :: View in browser

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Marketing Funnel

I’ll admit it. In the past year or so I haven’t paid enough attention to the health of our marketing funnel. I’m too focused on the bottom of the funnel, the sales.

I know I’m not alone.

It’s easy to lose sight of the whole picture when you’re hyperfocused on the small details. It’s only when you pop your head up and look around that you realize what parts of your marketing are being ignored and what the impact is.

I look at my marketing funnel in three basic phases: awareness, engagement, and conversion. You can break down your phases more discrete, such as MQL, SQL, etc – but as I’ve stated in other posts, I like to keep it simple.

As a super quick refresher, so we’re all on the same page, awareness is at the top of the funnel. This is when we make people aware of who we are and they visit our website. Engagement is the middle of the funnel. This is when they continue to come back to our website and then also engage with our other digital assets. Conversion is the bottom of the funnel, this is when they decide it’s time to partner and work with us. Why is it called a funnel? Because awareness should have the largest pool of people. Then the numbers taper down as people move through each stage, making the shape of a funnel.

As mentioned, I’ve been so focused on the conversion phase that I didn’t realize that awareness was struggling. The trickle-down of that is that there are fewer people in the conversion phase. You need to feed the awareness phase of the funnel to get conversions. People need to know who you are and what you offer. It’s that simple.

Now that I know what I’m not doing, how am I going to fix it? Well, I’m going to start with the data. My best bet is to look at my Digital Customer Journey. We run this analysis each month for Trust Insights (and our clients) so I have a good handle on the digital channels feeding the awareness phase of our funnel. For us, it’s social media and unbranded search content.

When I look back on the marketing efforts of the past year, those are the two places where we’ve put minimal effort. We’ve focused heavily on email, which for us is the middle of the funnel.

This means that my next step is to put together a plan to improve our presence on social media. I’ll start with determining which platforms our audience hangs out on, rather than trying to master all social channels. This will allow me to keep my efforts focused. After that, I’ll create a plan for more content focused on the topics my audience cares about. Then I’ll publish that content on the website and share it on social. As a third tactic, I may run some branded and unbranded ads as a test to see if that helps bring people to the website.

If I do the awareness phase right my efforts should feed the other phases of the funnel. By focusing on bringing awareness to the right people I should see better metrics through each phase of the funnel. I’ll keep you posted on how that’s going.

How healthy is your marketing funnel? Let us know in our Free Slack Group!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss the evolution of the Trust Insights 6C Data Quality Framework into the Data Quality Lifecycle. Learn what the Data Quality Lifecycle is, why it matters, and how to start applying the concept to your own marketing data.

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Data Diaries - Interesting Data We Found

In this week’s Data Diaries, we follow up on something from a few weeks ago, looking at how Google sees news stories. Google is a major sponsor of, data provider for, and infrastructure host of the GDELT Project, one of the most ambitious projects ever launched to catalog the world’s news.

The project provides four key metrics about every news article – which includes wire services and press release distribution services – to help judge the importance of an article:

Goldstein Score: this is a measure, -10 to +10, of how impactful the news is on the world stage and the stability of a nation when the article is about conflicts.
Number of mentions: for any given news event, how many times was it mentioned in the first 15 minutes the news was released.
Number of articles: for any given news event, how many individual articles was it mentioned in the first 15 minutes the news was released.
Number of sources: for any given news event, how many publications it appeared in during the first 15 minutes the news was released.

When we examine news releases, what do we see?

The median Goldsten score is 3; this makes sense – 3 is basically the middle of the road, saying that press releases don’t really have much impact on the world.
The median number of mentions is 6.25.
The median number of sources is 1.
The median number of articles is 6.

What do we conclude from this? For the most part, when a news release is published, it’s usually on one outlet and doesn’t go much further than a few mentions on that same outlet.

What about over time? Do press releases work better or worse at certain times of the year?

When we look over time, we see no material difference in the time of year for press releases. Their impact remains minimal throughout the year.

Methodology: Trust Insights used Google News’ GDELT data feed and search terms for news release, press release, and the domain names of major newswire services to extract 115,099 press releases in the English language. The timeframe of the dataset is January 1 – December 3, 2021. The date of the study is Deceber 8, 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.

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

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Content Marketing

Data Science and AI

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