I have to preface this post to avoid misconceptions: We love science. And we practice it. From in-depth Google Analytics for our own and clients’ content marketing efforts to marketing automation, landing page analytics and split and multivariate testing, we do it. And we believe that it’s an important part of any digital marketing practice.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s admit it: There’s lots of crap science floating around in digital marketing.

Marketing directors wrongly attribute an uptick in web traffic to the latest blog post. Product managers A/B test three different elements of a landing page, and draw conclusions about only one of the elements. Bad science is as ubiquitous as good science, or more so.

This post isn’t about how to create good tests, though. It’s about how to navigate, manage and succeed in digital marketing when the foundations we’re operating on are fallible. How do you make the best of science, when some (or much) of it may be bad

First, here’s a few ways that bad science can hurt you and your marketing organization:

1. False positives and false negatives: Bad science leads marketers to draw incorrect conclusions. The false negative is unfortunate (“Oh, that didn’t work, so we won’t do it again.”) The false positive is deadly (“That was great. Let’s pour our money into that.”)

2. Viral ignorance: Bad science trickles down through the marketing organization. Marketing data that the CMO recognizes as somewhat faulty, but good enough for rough guidance, tends to become law the farther down it goes in the organization. In this way, false assumptions can become company gospel.

3. Ossification of marketing: In an environment where people gain power by debunking or supporting ideas with data, managers hurl (questionable) figures at each other to win points. The willingness to experiment and change (the life force of a brand) gets sacrificed on the altar of science.

4. Over-reliance on analytics: A pervasively scientific environment can become paralyzing. Arguments and counterarguments freeze all action. (This is, for B2B companies, not a danger for the foreseeable future).

So, if you can’t prevent bad science from happening, and you want to continue using science to guide your marketing, what can you do?

Some suggestions:

Document and codify findings.
Like any good scientist, marketing analysts need to describe and record in detail how they derived their data. This, along with the findings, should be preserved in a central place for anyone in the organization to see. This at least helps cut down on incorrect anecdotal citations of science, and allows bad science to be identified and discarded.

Encourage experimentation.
Experiments are the lifeblood of science. You need to test out wild hypotheses, retest earlier results, challenge truths, again refute old failures and invite people to build on your science. The degree to which an organization experiments is, in my experience, directly linked to its maturity and health. Sadly, many fail here (marketers are career-minded, risk-averse animals by nature).

Drive education.
The more people around you that understand science and data, the less likely that you’ll trip up over the bad stuff. The first lesson: Doubt science. Yes, you should act based on scientific insights, but you should not take for granted the soundness of your foundations. Also, a few lessons in basic statistics help.

Share your knowledge.
This is related to both the codification and experimentation. Please share your insights with your marketing agency. Agencies are, for obvious reasons, often on the sharp end of experimentation. Why not equip them with your findings before they start experimenting for you? Some of your more data-savvy agencies may even be able to help you improve the quality of your findings (ahem).

That’s my advice on coping with science, good and bad. What’s your experience with analytics?

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: analytics, data, management, metrics, science

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We spend much of our time evangalising the basics of content marketing (and the rest on content marketing’s intrepid edge). The point of the content marketing exercise is to make yourself, your site and your people inherently interesting to the market, by sharing more of yourself, your ideas and your expertise. Much google-love automatically follows.

“You mean we just talk about our stuff, and it will sell itself?,” asks many the wondrous executive. Well, something like that. As long as you’re talking about stuff other people are already interested in (not just your own products), then, yes, that’s basically it.

The main point is this: You can draw people to you and get them to buy your products by providing compelling information on your site. Get them to come. Get them to stay. They’ll become customers in the course of time. That’s the basics anyway.

So how can you find out if your site is serving the content marketing purpose? How do you know if you’re really offering a compelling content marketing experience that will draw in the crowds, keep them around and convert them to paying customers?

For a client, we studied their website analytics to assess just this, and enroute we discovered three pretty core vital signs to see if a website’s content marketing chops are in place. (When I say “we”, I mean me and Neil. And, when I say “me”, I mean mostly Neil – our analytics guru).

Content Marketing Vital Sign #1: The Dead Cat Toss

You’ve heard of the dead cat bounce perhaps. It’s the upward blip of a market after it’s crashed and burned. The corpse bounces up briefly, before falling down again. Well, this is a different trajectory that I playfully call the dead cat toss. Here is one dead cat toss:

Generally, we see a site plugging along with steady traffic (note the typical weekdays to weekend rhythms), then sees a big spike – what I call “the toss”. Usually, this relates to some massive campaign, involving an SEO-keyphrase laden press release fired hither and thither, some guest post blogging and/or a big email blast. Traffic briefly spikes; the cat soars up and then falls back down.

The true measure of a website that is using content marketing well is its performance after the spike/toss. If it quickly drops back down to the normal pattern, then we’re looking at a site that fails to convince visitors to return for compelling content. If it goes back down to a level some degree higher than it started, that’s a content marketing success. The site above is a typical content marketing #fail. If you saw a graph of our site after our B2B Marketing Manifesto or Content Marketing Workbook were published, you’d see typical content marketing #win.

The Dead Cat Toss simply measures whether an effort to increase a company’s effective audience has had any success. Anyone with access to a mailing list or emailing software can create a little traffic spike, but only good content marketers will convert that spike into long-term repeat traffic.

Content Marketing Vital Sign #2: The hourglass figure

This vital sign can only be measured by visiting a dusty, often-neglected little corner of Google Analytics called “visitor loyalty”. Here you’ll see a bar graph that maps out how many times each of your visitors have come to your site. At the top, you have the people who came once and ran away screaming (they never came back). At the very bottom, you have the people who go to your site like pilgrims to a temple (say, your webmaster).

Here’s the same site we looked at above. As you’ll notice, most (almost all) of their traffic sees the site and flees in abject terror. That’s a dramatization meaning they found nothing of use or beauty there. They have very many first-time visitors, then the frequency of repeat visits scales down rapidly, and never rebounds.

It is this rebound of higher-frequency visitors that we expect to see with good content marketing sites. Generally, a site with a good content marketing experience will see high totals at the top of the graph (many people become aware), lower totals in the middle ground (non-following repeat visitors are a true rarity) then a rebound of totals toward the bottom (the followers).

We expect good content marketing sites to display a nice hourglass figure. Note: You usually have to discount the very top bar of one-visit-only visitors to see the hourglass (as the bouncers skew the trend).

Content Marketing Vital Sign #3: The Jesus Pizza

Our last content marketing vital sign plays off of a parable (because there’s nothing our MD likes more than Christian references): specifically, the parable of the feeding of the multitude. The scene is set in Google Analytics’ New vs. Returning visitors statistic.

This is closely related to the two preceding statistics, but puts things in a very black/white perspective. We see a pie, with our one-time visitors in blue and our returning visitors in green.

Content marketers want to increase the green share of the pie. Like the feeding of the multitude, where many people were fed by a constant, limited amount of sustenance, a website should be serving its visitors repeatedly. That little green pie piece should get big and fat.

Our own site has about a one-third/two-thirds ratio between returning and new visitors. Presumably, Google.com has a ratio of 99% returning to 1% new. Marketers shouldn’t be happy with anything less than a figure of returning visitors in the high 20s.

So marketers, do like JC or your own personal multitude-feeding saviour of choice, and feed people again and again from your content marketing pizza (probably the first time that term has ever been used, you think?).

Now, go to your site and see how you perform against the content marketing vital signs!

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Content Marketing, Content Optimization, Google Analytics, metrics, web analytics

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In theory, that’s all changed. With what Eloqua calls revenue management and Marketo revenue mastery, marketing spend can now be remorselessly linked to company revenue. Content actually has to move audiences, and generate cash. Hmmm, brutal.

CMOs in front of this curve gush about it. As any Central Asian despot will tell you, nothing shortens the path to power than control over a pipeline. At least nominally, these CMOs must meet clear targets, and there’s every reason they’ll start expecting their agency partners to live and breathe the new modus operandi.

This is what I call play-for-pay: agencies producing content, ideas and collateral not for an up-front sum and a pile of expectations, but for the promise of later reward for traffic, social shares and revenue generated. Not only would companies rather pay for performance than promises, but play-for-pay would allow them to retool their whole relationship with content partners.

Here are some observations on how that might work:

1. Agencies will resist. Talented professionals, they will say, aren’t going to want to do great work when they’re not certain they’ll be able to feed their kids. This is rubbish, of course. There are countless ways to mitigate performance risk. But a start by splitting up-front and post-campaign rewards makes sense.
2. Companies will need to set up a meaningful performance bar to measure against. Content for demand generation would provide small premiums based on click-throughs from search, social shares, downloads, backlinks, etc. Content for lead nurturing would reward all traffic that redirected to a product information page, or lead to a conversion.
3. Transparent and robust content-specific metrics need to be in place. Google Analytics could demonstrate a specific piece of content’s visibility and impact on site traffic. Marketing automation could link a sales prospects’ viewing of content with eventual revenue. A Klout-type of service could indicate the number and influence of social shares.
4. Affiliate marketing would be a significant influencer. A company might encourage content providers/agencies to develop content on their own platforms or in their own channels. Content that drives business could then be lifted up and incorporated into the company’s own site.
5. An infrastructure would have to be in place, in order for smaller companies to benefit. The big B2B brands could do this themselves. Some probably already are. But others are going to struggle getting attention from speculative content producers. With reliable content metrics and performance bars like those mentioned above, a B2B content e-marketplace for smaller brands would only be one entrepreneur away.
6. Brands rethink their marketing communications role. Eloqua’s Joe Chernov is already talking the publisher talk. Thousands will need to start walking the walk. This means shepherding and channeling the creative energies of formless masses, not agency lackeys. Think 20th century film production company structures.
7. Agencies become organized around home runs (and the sluggers who hit them), not account management chess. In other words, agencies may become talent development and management outfits, helping great creatives spread their performance risk, and nurturing new stars. Publishing houses or sports teams are the easy metaphors here.
8. Still no way to measure lift-off. With all the measurement in the world, there is still a degree to which great work creates countless immeasurable benefits. Content performance rewards should start steep, then taper off, then ramp up again to account for the kinds of indescribable brand benefits great work can create.

Anyone else see obvious ways such a process would work? Simply drop a comment. I see this post as a living document, edited and added to over time as experience grows. And I’ll circle back around later to go deeper into each of these points in separate blog posts.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, Content, Content Marketing, metrics, revenue-driven marketing

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The Big Ten:

1. The key monthly business metrics are CMRR (Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue), Churn, and Cash flow – The “Bookings” metric is for suckers.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost and Customer LifeTime Value are the best indicators of long term value creation.
3. Tune before you scale: it takes at least $300k MRR to climb the sales learning curve. Stop at three sales reps until at least two of them are making $100K MRR quotas.
4. Separate your “hunters” and “farmers” and pay them all on CMRR growth.
5. Focus your business development efforts on business services channels - SaaS is a whole new ecosystem where traditional IT channels don’t work – but you’ll need to sell directly for a long time as these new partners are not easy to ramp-up
6. Savvy online marketing is a core competence (sometimes the only one) of every successful SaaS business – by definition, your sales prospects are online.
7. Stay local – Prove your business in North America first. Only after reaching $1M in CMRR should you consider hiring European sales and services execs behind customer demand. Save Asia for post-IPO.  [Okay, this is clearly Yank-centric but you get the idea].
8. Single instance, multi-tenant, single datacenter – Have only one version of the code in production. Really. “Just say no” to on-premise deployments.
9. The most important part of Software-as-a-Service isn’t “Software” it’s “Service” – Your customers’ data is a core asset. Take care of it.
10. Be prepared to cross the desert – SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front for a multi-year stream of revenue, so it demands enough investment capital to fund 4+ years of runway. Load up for the long trip and pace your consumption of calories.

BONUS LAW: You can ignore one of these, but not more than two. Great companies innovate, but pick your battles.

Check out the Bessemer presentation.

If you like this, I think you’ll also like Kennet on growth equity and bootstrapping. (Disclaimer: Velocity wrote and designed the Kennet website).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: metrics, SaaS, Venture Capital

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We go into it in more depth here, but if you’re in a bit of a rush, here’s the Digital Velocity offer in 8 tweets of no more than 140 characters:

Tweet 1
B2B Web Lead Generation Insight
Where we map your place in the web universe. Your keyword footprint, SEO power & social media presence.

Tweet 2
B2B Web Start
Fast track web design and build, from personas and wireframes through design, content & CMS implementation.

Tweet 3
B2B Content Factory
Core content to drive traffic and incite response; papers, eBooks, videos, webinars – content that moves markets.

Tweet 4
Digital Engagement and B2B Demand Generation
Campaigns to drive downloads, visits and sign-ups – PPC, search arbitrage, outbound, social…

Tweet 5
B2B Lead Nurturing and Scoring
Automated campaigns that score leads by behaviour and demographics; feed hungry sales beast

Tweet 6
B2B Online PR
Buzz campaigns that harness the power of social media, engage key bloggers and create backlink storms.

Tweet 7
Analytics & Reporting
A powerful toolset to show how you’re doing, campaign-by-campaign, hour-by-hour.

Tweet 8
B2B Web Training
Bring the expertise in-house. We’ll show you how to work the web, create campaigns and nurture leads.

Again, you can drill down into each of these right here, but that’s not a bad start: eight tweets worth of Digital Velocity.  To put it to work, all you have to do is click.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: analytics, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing campaigns, B2B technology marketing, CMS, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, metrics, Online PR, reporting, Social Media, web training

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