INBOX INSIGHTS: Marketing Checklist, Content Marketing Strategy, Instagram Influencer Engagement (2/2) :: View in browser
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Marketing Checklist
I don’t know about you but I live in New England where we just got slammed with a blizzard and my hands hurt from shoveling, making typing a challenge for the next few days. So I’ll keep it short this week and let you get back to your regular programming.
We’re one month into 2022 and for a lot of us, January acted like a cranky toddler. Knowing that we still have 11 months to go and no real sense of how they will behave, make sure you’ve created a monthly health check for your marketing.
It could look something like this:
- Am I meeting or exceeding my KPIs?
- What tactics are getting results?
- What tactics are not working?
- Do I know how many leads my efforts are generating?
- How do my renewal and new member numbers look?
- Am I seeing weird patterns in my website traffic?
- Have I planned to try a new marketing tactic?
- Are my channels diversified enough?
- Do I know where my audience spends their time online?
It’s easy to lose track of time these days. I do it all day, every day. To counteract that I set myself a monthly calendar appointment with these and other similar questions listed as the agenda.
The goal is to stop, look around, and do a quick assessment. The worst thing we can do is not check-in. The questions listed above apply to me and my marketing. Use this as a template and adapt to cover what your marketing looks like. Maybe you have more questions about social media or email marketing. Make sure you create a list that addressed the marketing that you do.
If you’re spending time every day to work out and eat well, you probably have daily, weekly, or monthly check-ins to make sure you’re on track with your goals. Otherwise, what’s the point? Your marketing shouldn’t be any different.
Are you stuck in a time vortex?
Tell me about it in our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers »
– Katie Robbert, CEO
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Do you have a colleague or friend who needs this newsletter? Send them this link to help them get their own copy:
https://www.trustinsights.ai/newsletter
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In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris dig into the four pillars of content marketing strategy – creation, distribution, amplification, and performance. You’ll also learn about why backlinks are so important to both SEO and content marketing generally. Tune in now!
Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »
Last week on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live show, we looked at business process re-engineering and how it applies to things like SEO. Catch the replay here »
This Thursday at 1 PM Eastern, we’ll be looking at tag management governance in tools like Google Tag Manager.
Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!
Need a reminder?
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Here’s some of our content from recent days that you might have missed. If you read something and enjoy it, please share it with a friend or colleague!
- Instagram Engagement
- Marketing Analytics, Data Science & Leadership – January 31, 2022
- So What? Business Process Re-engineering
- INBOX INSIGHTS, January 26, 2022: Process Documentation, Analytics Amnesty, Instagram Brand Content
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Analytics Amnesty and Change Management
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Get skilled up with an assortment of our free, on-demand classes.
- What, Why, How: Foundations of B2B Marketing Analytics (new!)
- How to Think About Google Analytics 4 (new!)
- Fundamentals of Marketing Analytics (new!)
- How to Deliver Reports and Prove the ROI of your Agency
- Powering Up Your LinkedIn Profile (For Job Hunters)
- Competitive Social Media Analytics Strategy
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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s check in on our Instagram influencer friends. Given that brand performance has suffered in 2022 thus far (unpaid brand content hovers around an average of 0.2% engagement per post), how are influencers doing with their unpaid content on Instagram?
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What we see so far for the year is that performance has hovered around 0.9% engagement, but has dipped in recent days towards 0.8%. Put another way, for influencers, they have about 4x the engagement for unpaid content that brands do.
When we dig into the performance by content type, we see a similar story as brands:
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What’s interesting here is that unlike brands, albums and individual photos are neck and neck; there’s no advantage for influencers in one format versus another.
So What? What we take away from this brief look is that both brands and influencers is that individuals still have greater ability to garner engagement from the platform than brands do. Any unpaid Instagram strategy you build has to be predicated on the use of individual accounts to bolster your distribution strategy. They can be influencers or not, but they need to be individuals rather than brands to ensure more impactful reach and engagement.
Methodology: Trust Insights extracted 109,138 unique Instagram posts from 9,119 brands on Instagram using Meta’s Crowdtangle software. The timeframe of the data is January 1, 2022 – February 1, 2022. The date of study is February 2, 2022. 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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- Case Study: Google Analytics Audit and Attribution
- Case Study: Natural Language Processing
- Case Study: SEO Audit and Competitive Strategy
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This is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.
SEO, Google, and Paid Media
- Messy SEO Part 6: Pillar pages and topic clusters
- Google Search Console logging issue may cause drop in image search performance data
- Google Ads Introduces New Recommendations For Discovery Campaigns
Social Media Marketing
- Social Media – Social Media Hashtags for Every Day of the Week [Infographic]
- Learn How TikTok Advertising Works With This Free Guide
- LikeMeat started the first TikTok scavenger hunt just in time for Super Bowl
Content Marketing
- How Dynamic Content Can Boost Your Email Marketing via MarketingProfs
- Why Video and Podcasting Should Factor Into Your Content Marketing
- AI-driven personalized content grows in importance for marketers
Data Science and AI
- 7 Steps to Mastering Machine Learning with Python in 2022 via KDnuggets
- The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Transforming Video Industry via ReadWrite
- Drive smarter decision-making with explainable machine learning via VentureBeat
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Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 1900+ like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today. Members also receive sneak peeks of upcoming data, credible third-party studies we find and like, and much more. Join today!
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- Are you happy with the answers you’re getting out of Google Analytics today?
- Are you confident in the decisions you’re making from Google Analytics?
- Are you secure in the knowledge that you’re set up properly to benefit from Google Analytics 4?
If you answered no to any of the questions above, let’s take some time to get your analytics in shape. Google Analytics 4 is the analytics software of the future. Google has made no bones about the fact that anything new they develop will be in GA4 only. To take advantage of the new features, you need to get your house in order now.
So we’re offering you a Google Analytics 4 bootcamp. We’ll help you:
- Get your existing Google Analytics account in shape with proper goals, tracking cleanup, and best practices
- Identify key issues that will block your ability to use Google Analytics 4 and help resolve them
- Help set an analytics strategy for this that focuses on answers, decisions, and growth rather than pouring more data in your inbox
- Build a migration plan for Google Analytics 4, including Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio
Click here to order a Google Analytics bootcamp »
Interested in sponsoring INBOX INSIGHTS? Contact us for sponsorship options to reach over 22,000 analytically-minded marketers and business professionals every week.
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Where can you find us in person?
- MarketingProfs B2B Forum, April 2022, virtual
- MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2022, Boston
Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!
Want some private training at your company? Ask us!
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First and most obvious – if you want to talk to us about something specific, especially something we can help with, hit up our contact form.
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?
- Our blog
- Slack
- YouTube
- In-Ear Insights on Apple Podcasts
- In-Ear Insights on Google Podcasts
- In-Ear Insights on all other podcasting software
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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
- Marketmuse Professional SEO software
- Gravity Forms WordPress Website Forms
- Otter AI transcription
- Semrush Search Engine Marketing
- Our recommended media production gear on Amazon
Read our disclosures statement for more details, but we’re also compensated by our partners if you buy something through us.
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Some events and partners have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them. Read our full disclosures statement on our website.
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.