How unsure are you of your digital channel performance?

In a recent article in the Think with Google series, Casey Carey,  Director, Platforms & Publisher Marketing at Google, makes a telling point: just 17% of advertisers surveyed said they are looking at the performance of all their digital channels.

Which leaves the following questions unanswered: What about the missing 83%? And why is it so difficult for them to know what’s actually working across their various digital platforms?

It gets worse. The same article also carried another insight: 25% of markets cite organizational and structural challenges as reasons for not adopting data-driven attribution – what the real causes for a purchase by a consumer actually is.

It seems that many organizations, even big ones with budgets and resources , struggle to make sense of what they spend.

And all of this gets worse for smaller and medium sized businesses, who have most to gain from using digital, and perhaps most to lose from missing an opportunity or deploying precious budget in the wrong channels or on the wrong content.

The problem has been that knowing the performance of your digital campaigns across multiple platforms has previously been too hard, too late, too inaccurate and too expensive.

Part of the challenge is that to make this a reality is difficult. For example, IBM says we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day. That’s a lot of zeros.

Breaking that down to what matters to your customer, where they are and what they will engage with becomes critical to get right and of great concern to those wanting to get the most of their budget.

To do so, data has to be normalized across multiple platforms for it to become useful in a comparative sense, with even something as trivial as the start of the day being different for each platform, but also to see the same measures of engagement or click throughs to be consistent and to make true price and conversion rate comparisons.

Data is the lifeblood of marketing, customer satisfaction and selling, yet it seems data solutions tend to either be priced out of the hands of most businesses – either in licensing costs or in the time and complexity required to get this up and running.

This is the core thing that Digivizer has worked on solving for businesses of all sizes.

We’ve taken eight years of product development and six years of using our own technology with some of the biggest brands and companies in Australia and overseas, and made both available to companies of any size.

You can now see how your investment across all the main digital platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Google Ads – is working.

You can choose any number of paid media measurements for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google – total spend, impressions, CPM, engagement and engagement rate, CPE, video views,  Link Clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and cost-per-click (CPC) for campaigns and adsets.

You can track who’s talking about you and to you.

You can use hashtags to create and follow conversations important to your brand.

You can track your in-channel performance.

We have removed  complexity and obstacles to understanding in detail what’s working about your digital marketing – making it easy to see where to continue to invest.

All for US$89 per month on our starter package – about the price of a daily cup of great coffee.

If you have the authority in your accounts to see your social channels data and paid, you can be up and running in minutes and finally see everything at once. You can create an account (with 30 days free)  at digivizer.com.

This article is also published on LinkedIn.

Taking your business through growth

I was recently invited to speak at a tech entrepreneurs’ lunch.

In the audience were entrepreneurs just starting out sitting alongside those a number of years in who had successfully navigated the stages of early growth to something more sustainable. We were also lucky enough to hear research presented by Cameron Research Group on key growth inflection points for SMBs.

There were a number of insights gained through the research and the discussions that followed:

1) Focus and commitment to success

Many had chosen to do their own thing not just because they were driven to harness an opportunity and to create a new future, but also because they liked the control it offered. Entrepreneurs felt they could live the life they wanted, and the more time spent on forging their own way, the less likely they could ever work for anyone else again. The result? Total focus on making their venture successful.

2) Managing growth through key inflection points

The way someone was able to run their business in the early days could only get them so far. That point seemed to be at 20-30 employees, at which point entrepreneurs needed to think about switching from a control model to an empowerment model, from an authoritative leadership style to more democratic style of leadership. This meant hiring differently, bringing in new systems, enhancing leadership capability, and formalizing HR and marketing resources and programs.

The next growth inflection point was at 70 employees, where the audience again recognized that what had been built to get them to that size would need to be revisited again, particularly in terms of systems, leadership and culture. The main concern each entrepreneur had was on how to keep and protect their company’s culture and the way they wanted their business to run when they could no longer be personally involved with, or connected to, every decision.  An emphasis on investing in building a strong culture based on values, trust and empowerment was key to those who were successful.

3) Four main growth pain points

This seemed to be universally agreed upon. To grow their businesses from startup to success, entrepreneurs needed to:

  • focus on cash flow,
  • scale recruitment and performance management
  • scale sales and marketing,
  • control costs.

Everyone agreed that all of these were challenging, especially when gearing up for sustainable and often accelerated growth. This has certainly been our experience at Digivizer and we have put much investment in each of these areas.

What was particularly insightful for me was the number of businesses that had realized they had to switch their marketing models from doing it themselves to recognizing they needed external solutions.

And it was especially interesting to hear that once businesses grew to that 20 employee point, they needed to save time and become better at seeing and understanding what was working for them. In particular, it was time for them to invest in solutions as it was important for them to easily and quickly know the ROI of marketing expenditure. They needed to be able to easily measure what was working for them, and to focus resources there ie do more of what works and fix or stop doing what was not working. Data matters and tools could help over manual options.

This resonated with us, given that at Digivizer our focus is on helping businesses create better experiences for their customers by knowing more about them and what they care about in order to help them generate leads and sales from digital.

All of which makes me even more focused and committed to rolling out our technology and solutions in an affordable way for every business.

This article is also published on LinkedIn.