Cult of Analytics

Data analytics for marketing

Steve Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138837980
• eBook ISBN: 9781317561880
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Cult of Analytics enables professionals to build an analytics driven culture into their business or organization. Marketers will learn how to turn tried and tested tactics into an actionable plan to change their culture to one that uses web analytics on a day to day basis.

Through use of the fictitious ACME PLC case, Steve Jackson provides working examples based on real life situations from the various companies he has worked with, such as Nokia, KONE, Rovio, Amazon, Expert, IKEA, Vodafone, and EMC. These examples will give the reader practical techniques for their own business regardless of size or situation making Cult of Analytics a must have for any would-be digital marketer.

This new edition has been thoroughly updated, now including examples out of how to get the best from Google analytics, as well as ways to use social media data, big data, tag management and advanced persona segmentation to drive real value in your organisation. It's also been expanded to include exercises and new cases for students and tutors using the book as a text.

1 The hub and spoke method

DOI: 10.4324/9781315734743-2

We must become the change we want to see.

Mahatma Gandhi

1.1 How the Internet has changed our world

Unless you live in a cave or somewhere completely untouched by technology, the way you do business has changed enormously since the arrival of the Internet as a practical business tool.

Consumer empowerment

Anyone can use the Internet to find out about products and services. This has huge implications for your business. First, your competition is out there. Search engines like Google have empowered people with the ability to find out anything written that has appeared on the public domain. This includes the products and services your competition are talking about. Now, unlike any other time in history, there is the ability to compare all this information quickly and easily. I can look at your product or service in Europe as well as a similar offering from the USA or Australia in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee. The consumer is now more likely to ignore traditional push marketing methods in favour of doing online research when it suits them, not when it suits you.

Communication

No aspect of the Internet has changed our lives or the way we live and work more than Email. It has enabled 24-hour global business to become a reality. It has also revolutionised internal communication within companies. Mobile access to email and other forms of communication has also helped to make the world a smaller place. There are also public forums in which customers or competitors can openly talk about the products and services you offer in a positive and a negative way. Think for example how influential Trip Advisor (www.tripadvisor.com) has become when planning a holiday. The first thing a lot of people do is look for customer reviews via services like Trip Advisor before they make their bookings. In addition to being able to read peer reviews about your products and services your customers can also publish any information they want quickly and easily via services like Wordpress (blogs and articles)You Tube (videos) and a wide range of social media applications like Facebook. In this environment it can be easy for you to lose the control of your brand but again this is double edged, you can also use this to great advantage.

Data abundance

Businesses have begun to understand the abundance of data, which can be easily gathered by analytics tools for all kinds of business purposes. It is now easier than it has ever been to track the effectiveness of a newspaper advert because of the Internet. Online you can measure clicks, visits and visitors, pages viewed, where people come from, keywords, paths, track campaigns and a whole lot more. All vital data that can help you improve your business.

Big Data is a term which first came to light in the 1940s but became very popular in 2011–12¹ when the growth in processing power and integration meant all kinds of data could be queried, stored and used. You can get real time data about the weather and change business communication on a website to suit.

In fact the amount of information you can get is often overwhelming and this is the paradox. Never before have we had so much data about the behaviour of our customers and prospects. Part of the problem now is that the people who know the data is there don’t know how to capitalise on it. The opportunity here is obvious, with this much data you should be able to take real advantage of it. The threat is that you can’t figure it out and your competitors do.

1.2 How the information revolution changed your business

Your business has now got all the communication tools, at least (email, Internet access, global networks, website), and perhaps you’re even shifting the focus of your marketing to make it more and more customer-centric to take advantage of the information revolution.

There are reasons that you have embraced the technology so prolifically and come to terms with it in the way that you have at the speed you have. These reasons are more to do with culture than with the actual technology.

1. Urgency. The mid 1990s was the Internet’s “wild west” period when everyone was rushing to be online. If you weren’t online you were missing out on the “information superhighway”. Companies were appearing that didn’t exist before, everything from consultancies to help you get online, online marketing companies to help you get “traffic” and “hits” meant everything. You were missing out if you weren’t online, thousands of people from all over the world had money to buy your goods and services so you needed to get online and quick or miss out on the gold rush. This sense of urgency was slightly misplaced but the effect was the same, people sat up, took notice and took action.
2. Lead top down. The charge wasn’t led by a geek in glasses. The charge was led by people with titles like CEO, founder, chairman of the board of directors. These folks understood the sense of urgency and had built up enthusiastic executive teams to make the changes happen.
3. Vision. The vision was there that the Internet could cut costs, open up new markets for a lot of businesses and there were some extremely big successes to look at as proof (for instance Amazon in 1996/7). The vision of the success you might or could achieve existed in the mind of every leader of every business and that was enough to get them excited enough to invest and use the technology.
4. Internal communication. The practical communication aspect of the Internet cannot be overstated. The fact that you could communicate easily over large distances via email and get the message in seconds meant the vision of the Internet was a very easy sell. A CEO could now email everyone in his business the same message, essentially for free. This was probably the biggest catalyst for change, the fact that the communication medium was so strong. The vision was easy for the management to communicate because everyone could easily understand the benefit.
5. Actionable. Many of the Internet’s tools actually fitted in nicely with the way most businesses worked. For instance, communication was made easier by email, chat rooms, bulletin boards and later things like video satellite links, Skype and other Voice over IP technology. Marketing had the potential to improve – but it took longer to work like it does now because people had to learn a new way to do things. Cost cutting happened very quickly, admin procedures which required routine and expensive faxes were quickly replaced by email, telephone bills were considerably lower, why speak to the guy at the other side of the world when you could drop him a line? The Internet was very quickly actionable and effective in a business sense and therefore very quickly adopted.
6. Quick wins. Most businesses could quickly produce short-term wins based around the communication power of the Internet. Cost cutting could quickly be produced as proof that the people leading the charge were right. Every time a new deal was signed from somewhere abroad it was hailed as a “victory for the online strategy”. Because of the new communication ability these quick wins were often communicated by email to all staff and so the march toward a cultural change continued.
7. Continuous organisational improvement. Because the Internet worked so well all the changes were built upon. Systems got better, suppliers got slicker, employees who learned quickly and were positive got moved up the ladder often to new positions created by the management leading the charge. Roles like web designer, digital marketing manager, online marketing manager, search engine marketing specialist, VP online sales, director of online research, chief information officer and many more appeared as the new roles were required. These new roles meant that even more culture was built around the Internet tools being used in the business.
8. Routinely used. When was the last day you can remember where you were offline all day? When was the last time you sent an email or at least thought about checking your email?Yesterday? Last week? Or an hour ago? It is simply a part of your daily life, accepted and normal. Actually the thought of not being able to access this routine is now worrying to us. Unless you live in a remote part of the world that is not yet developed and has no Internet access the thought of a few days without net access is at the very least an inconvenience.

Looking at these powerful cultural drivers it’s easy to see why the Internet has been so successfully integrated into most businesses in the developed world today. Without the cultural drivers behind the adoption of the Internet as a business tool we might still have a small network that existed for the use of governments and military.

In order to fully benefit from analytics tools you need to change the culture in your company to that of a data driven culture. In order to do that you should follow the 8 steps that you’ve just seen demonstrated that worked for the Internet.

1.3 The cultural factors present from my introduction to this book

According to John P. Kotter, a leading consultant in the change management field, there is an eight-step process in change management. For more information on change processes within your company I recommend you read Kotter’s book, titled Leading Change.² He goes into a lot more depth about an overall change process.

I’ve believe his eight-step process works well with building an analytics culture. Hopefully I will demonstrate how this method combined with a lot of best practices developed over the past 15 years at more than 60 companies can help you to build a data guided organisation yourself.

I have combined many approaches and used a fictitious company ACME plc as the case study throughout the book to tie it altogether. There are simply too many non-disclosure agreements I’ve signed over the years to do this any other way.

To begin, if you haven’t already, please read the first example I described in the introduction. I didn’t recognise it at the time but as you can see every part of John Kotter’s process was followed. I believe the, urgency, vision and the leadership were the biggest factors in helping the analytics culture develop roots in the organisation.

1. Urgency. Newspaper sales were going down because web readership was going up. This was – and still is – a huge threat and had blasted away the complacency in the publishing industry. Later when I discussed the “test” I made to my boss I talked about how much it was costing us and how much we could benefit by testing take up from ex-pats. He passed this onto senior management that meant point two (below) was initiated.
2. Lead top down. The managers and senior guys after seeing my results made the decision to test and spend resources seeing if they could improve their business results. They understood the urgency and had the vision already.
3. Vision. The vision was to get the online channel working for the business so that losses from sales of newspapers to the online channel could be re-claimed. Because my findings fit with that vision it was an easy decision to continue with the testing. The vision was not about analytics it was about the bottom line.
4. Internal communication. I was right at the heart of the business in a central role. I took advantage of this by communicating with everyone involved. I knew for instance that one website was ready to drop the coupon idea and knew that others were saying they could get more money from the advert space in the publication. I also knew that one site was vastly out-performing the others in subscription sales from overseas. There is important. A central unit functioning for the business as a whole but independent of the business units can be very useful in breaking down information silos.
5. Actionable. One of the most important things I did was go to the management team with an actionable plan. It was very easy for them to say yes to a phased roll out of dropping the coupon fields on each website. I was playing every positive I had to get them to agree. I knew that some parts of the business were dissatisfied so we could start roll outs with them. I didn’t communicate it with technical jargon, I communicated it by saying “Because of the figures I’m seeing, I think we can bring x amount of extra revenue through each site and return to our original advertising revenues in the print publication.” They liked that because my plan was simple and easy to understand.
6. Quick win. The whole thing would be proved as a quick win in 1 month or else we would scrap the idea. I had given them a timeframe ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Jim Sterne
• Introduction: The day that changed my life
• 1 The hub and spoke method
• 2 Reach, engage, activate and nurture
• 3 Key performance indicators
• 4 Planning analytics business cases and wins you can share
• 5 Tools of the trade
• 6 Segmentation and personas
• 7 Testing personas to improve conversion
• 8 Using data and telling stories
• 9 The starting point
• Index