on 29-Jan-2019 (Tue)

Online, a brand has the ability – nay, the obligation – to know enough about their customer’s history that they can automatically create segmented, personalized experiences for them. If, for example, a customer bought three fly fishing rods from a sporting goods website, that should inform the types content you provide, which pages and products you show them, and which special offers you email them.

This is why it’s so important, when creating an inbound marketing campaign, to make sure that your site provides: 1) lots of content, and 2) targeted content.

Providing content on a wide variety of different niche topics that apply to your industry gives you greater opportunity to figure out what their potential customers are interested in, based on the content that they express interest in.

When developing your content strategy, ask yourself:

• Is this topic interesting to the target persona?
• Does this piece address their pain points?
• Is this the format in which they like to consume their content?
• Do they trust the way you’re presenting or are they unsure whether they should click?
• Is this tone appropriate for the subject matter and reader?
• Does this content have a purpose?

You should be answering “Yes” to all of those questions before you publish something.

Things like striking the right balance between casual and serious, helpful and intrusive, or educational or haranguing, will determine whether people find a brand appealing or abrasive.

So how will you know when you’ve struck the right balance? Start with the buyer persona, and mix their expectations with your "special sauce." Then, adjust over time based on feedback and results, just like any recipe from your kitchen.

Awareness is not enough. You may be aware of the Rolls Royce brand, but chances are you haven’t bought one. So how valuable is that brand awareness to Rolls Royce or its marketers? Zero. Zip. Nada.

Awareness, unless followed at some point by consideration, intention, and purchase (the typical sales funnel model), is worthless.

Unless you can correlate the awareness you create to purchases people make, you will never understand the ROI of your branding initiatives.

And if you don’t understand the ROI of your own branding initiatives, you’ll never be able to demonstrate their value to executives and other teams at your company

Understanding last-touch attributions is especially useful in optimizing landing pages, fine-tuning email campaigns, or any other content source that helped put the ball over the goal line to convert a prospect into a customer. It’s great bottom-of-the-funnel information.

In contrast, understanding first-touch attribution is extremely useful in improving your top-of-the-funnel marketing efforts. Knowing whether a lead came to your website as the result of an organic search (and for what term) or because they were tipped off to one of your Facebook posts by a colleague will help you concentrate your marketing and it's messaging where it will resonate best.

HubSpot’s Analytics tool is excellent for measuring the overall impact of branding campaigns.

The Attribution Report tool lets you analyze:

• How the lead first found you
• What the critical touch points were that led to conversions
• Which marketing campaigns generated the most sales
• What actions generated the highest quality leads
• What to Measure and Analyze

Here are some specific metrics you can use to measure individual aspects of your branding efforts.

• Determine which keywords, short and/or long-tail, result in the most clickthroughs to your landing pages. If you’re running paid campaigns, these are excellent venues to experiment with new brand elements, such as a new tagline, or a new value proposition, to see if it resonates and drives revenue.
• See which blog content drives the most comments, social shares, and inbound links. While leads are great, the content that is commented on and shared the most is often an indicator of success.
• Find out which email content drives the most forwards and reconversions, and to what segment of your list that content goes, so you can better align future email campaigns with other content that elevates your brand.
• Learn which landing pages result in the highest purchase volumes, and most lucrative average sales per customer.
• Test which links get the highest click-through rates on different platforms and make sure they’re up to date, regardless of what campaign you’re currently running.
• Determine the correlation between the number of Likes you generate for your Facebook Page during a given campaign and their sales results for the same time period—or subsequent months, in the case of businesses with long sales cycles.
• Find the type of social media content which results in the most engagement, and track whether that engagement ever leads to revenue-driving behavior in the future, and at what rate.