What is digital analytics?

At the heart of it, digital marketing analytics is the utilisation of data to inform and evaluate your marketing strategies. By analysing your customer’s reactions and subsequent actions to your content, you can better understand what is working and what isn’t, as well as where you may have information gaps.

Overall, the goal of digital marketing analytics is to have a better sense of your client’s behaviours, motivations and purpose so you can make better, more personalised content.

Benefits for financial marketers

It goes without saying that understanding your clients better will always improve your financial marketing content strategy. When you have implemented strong analytics into your marketing strategy, you will always beat out the finance brands that haven’t.

When you begin producing better content that not only attracts an audience but also retains them and pushes them through the acquisition tunnel, you have a winning marketing strategy. Digital analytics can help you achieve this.

Here are some benefits to understanding your digital analytics:

• Remove the guesswork from your content creation
• Reduce risks
• Personalise and improve the customer experience
• Understand your clients better
• Identify information gaps
• Predict customer behaviour

How to use your digital marketing analytics effectively

To gain a better understanding of how financial marketers can utilise their digital marketing analytics more effectively, we spoke to The Dubs’ Social Media Director, Andrew Frith.

“Analysing how specific content is performing relies on the ability to identify specific content in the analytics platforms,” Andrew explains.

“A common technique is to add a UTM tag at the end of clickable URLs that attach categorisation information for the content clicked. This allows campaign, distribution platform and content identification to be captured in the analytics platform and then analysis on specific content can be applied.”

“Once a target audience has landed on a finance brand’s website, it is their website behaviour that determines whether your content is working or not,” Andrew says.

“First, the desired actions of the audience on the website content needs to be defined. For a website article, that may be having the audience read the article in full. Analytics platforms allow a finance brand to see how long a user spends on a page, or ‘scroll rate’, which will give a good indication as to whether visitors are actually reading the article or not.”

Alternatively, a finance brand may want the target audience to read a series of articles to understand a topic in depth. In this instance, analytics platforms allow a finance brand to see the ‘multi-page’ journeys, as well as user-journey path visualisations, that will give insight into whether visitors are clicking through to more content after their initial entry onto the website.

Bear in mind that website UX will play a part here such as strong CTA’s and intuitive navigation systems.

In addition, video content can also be measured via digital marketing analytics.

“The effectiveness of video content on the website can be measured by capturing video completion rates whilst also looking at partial completion times,” Andrew says.

Finally, Andrew explains events such as button clicks on the website can also be tracked to determine if more bottom-of-the-funnel activity such as signups to newsletters, downloads of reports, request form submissions are making a desired impact.

There is a myriad of information available at financial marketers’ fingertips that can be used to make informed decisions. “The key to successfully interpreting data is establishing what website behaviours are desired and then configuring the analytics platform to capture that information,” Andrew says.

What is A/B testing and how can finance brands make use of it?

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is an important tool in a financial marketer’s arsenal. A/B testing is simply a randomised experimentation process, that involves two or more variables being shown to different website visitors. This is used to identify what variable works best and enables your finance brand to optimise accordingly.

Andrew says a range of tests can be used such as testing the length of written content, short vs long; testing the visual component of the content e.g. photos vs illustrations; or testing the actual content format e.g. video vs static images.

“The most important thing is to test only one component at a time so that clear conclusions on the A/B test can be made. Changing two elements at the same time will defeat any analytical conclusions on content effectiveness.”

Final thoughts

Ultimately, if your finance brand is not utilising digital marketing analytics to the best of your abilities you’re making a mistake. Analytics is designed to provide you with real client data that can inform your marketing and content decisions. Not using it is a waste of your finance brand’s potential.

The post How to use analytics to supercharge content marketing appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Given this intent, website page session times for organic search traffic are generally longer than other sources of traffic (including advertising, social traffic, email traffic and referral traffic), making them the exact type of website visitor brands are hoping to attract – one that’s interested in and engaged with their content and therefore their brand.

However, ranking well on search engines is no easy task. It requires strategic planning and research, creative content execution as well as a vigilant approach to maintaining high technical website standards. This all takes time, money and expertise.

When you’ve done all that hard work and finally managed to get good and consistent page one search results, it’s heartbreaking to see that traffic suddenly drop off or even slowly decline over time.

Here’s what to do when your organic search traffic takes a hit.

Triaging spikes and trends in organic search traffic

When analysing any data there are really just two things we’re looking for – ‘spikes’ and ‘trends’ – and a drop in organic search traffic can be either.

Firstly, to diagnose a drop we need tools to actually see what’s happening. Google Analytics and Google Search Console (which used to be called Google Webmaster tools) allow us to see in a myriad of ways how traffic is arriving, behaving and exiting a website. Another very powerful tool is the SEMRush platform which can slice and dice website traffic data in a number of ways and provides deep insights into the technical health of a website as well as content performance (there are other platforms similar to SEMRush as well such as Ahrefs, Moz and Alexa). 

If a sudden drop in traffic occurs it’s not necessary to go into full panic mode quite yet. Small or moderate spikes in organic search traffic are quite common and will in most cases return to normal in a short period of time. There are many factors determining SEO rankings which makes it difficult to pin down the exact cause of a temporary drop. The recommended action when a sharp decline is first detected is to wait a few days or even a week or so to see if it corrects itself. At this stage there’s no point in pulling everything apart and putting resources into action unnecessarily.

However, when the traffic graph looks like this there’s certainly cause for concern.

Barring some major technical problem on the server itself (e.g the website is down), a major traffic drop like this means either a Google penalty has happened for a number of reasons or there’s been a Google algorithm update the website has ended up on the wrong side of.

This is why having it’s important to have Google Search console set up as this is where Google will send a notification if the website has incurred a penalty. 

How to avoid Google penalties

Google penalties come in a range of guises and some of these include:

• Cloaking redirects
• Cloaking images
• Hidden text 
• Keyword stuffing
• Spammy structured markup
• Unnatural links to and from your site 
• Hacked site

Most of these penalties will only apply if the website has been employing some dubious if not outright nefarious means to rig the website for attracting traffic. For most brands this shouldn’t be an issue, but if you’re employing 3rd parties who claim they can dramatically increase your website traffic make sure they’re a reputable business so you don’t fall afoul of one of these penalties. If you do, Google will require you to explain the cause of the problem, resolve it and put in a request for reconsideration – for a business that relies on organic search traffic this is a disaster.

The impact of Google algorithm updates

Google frequently updates the search algorithms that determine how websites and content are ranked. While some of these updates are incremental and go unnoticed, some are major updates that can have serious impacts on your organic search traffic. It’s important to keep up to date with upcoming major updates and be prepared in advance of major changes so you can take action with your website content BEFORE not AFTER the major algorithm changes have taken place. 

A good example of this was in July 2019 when ‘mobile-first indexing’ was introduced as a Google algorithm update. This was a major change and caught a lot of brands napping as most websites up until this point were SEO optimised for desktop and may not have even had a mobile-responsive version of the website in place. Those that weren’t prepared saw massive drops in search traffic as a result. And be forewarned now, there’s a big algorithm change coming in May 2021 that will be focused on ‘user experience’.

SEMRush allows you to see when Google updates have happened and understand how organic traffic spikes may be related to them. Knowing which Google algorithm update may have caused a drop in search traffic allows you to then take actions to correct it.

The slow trend down

Even if you adhere to all the best technical Google practices and abide by all the rules you can still find your organic search traffic slowly trending down over time.

Getting great organic search engine rankings isn’t a one-time set-and-forget practice. It needs to be part of everyday business practice and there needs to be a robust content strategy and program in place to support it. If organic search traffic is slowly declining over time this usually means the competition has caught up and is outperforming your website and content.

If you’re confident your technical practices are in place and up to date then the cause of the decline is the website content itself.

This is where a platform such as SEMRush can help by allowing you to deep dive into how your content is performing in terms of its ranking, keywords/phrases being indexed, traffic being driven to the website and how all of that compares to your competitors as well. 

This research provides invaluable insight into the gaps and opportunities that when targeted with quality, relevant content will see the reverse of your traffic decline. 

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

At The Dubs we employ SEO best-practice to ensure your content gets found. Get in touch.

The post How to diagnose a drop in organic search traffic appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What they don’t have is endless time or endless resources.

Digital tools are vital to remaining competitive in the finance content marketing game, but there’s an art (and science) to knowing which ones to use and when—and for what purpose.

Digital tools are vital to remaining competitive in the finance content marketing game, but there’s an art (and science) to knowing which ones to use and when—and for what purpose.

The good news is, you don’t have to figure that out from scratch. The world’s high-performing marketers have done the hard work for you—and the results of their efforts are in the sixth edition of Salesforce’s handy State of Marketing Report.

Here, we take a look at which tools are on the rise in marketing, and how finance brands are using them to their advantage.

Artificial intelligence leads the way

Of all the tools available, artificial intelligence (AI) is the one to watch. 84% of marketers reported using AI in their work in 2019—up from 29% in 2018. What’s more, 56% of high-performing marketers are planning on using AI more in the next year.

The big question is how?

Well, the top five uses of AI so far are to:

1. provide personalised experiences in individual channels;
2. improve customer segmentation;
3. surface insights from data;
4. drive next best actions (such as offers); and
5. automate customer interactions.

In finance content marketing, industry leaders include London-based fintech start-up Cleo, a Siri-style voice recognition platform integrated with Facebook, Alexa and Google Home, which allows users to track spending, set budgets and receive alerts, as well as San Francisco’s Olivia, a virtual financial assistant that uses AI to learn users’ spending patterns, predict purchases and recommend ways to increase value for money spent—among many others.

[dianomi]

Social marketing comes in runner up (just)

A close second to AI is social media marketing, with 53% of high-performing marketers planning on using it more in the coming year.

Essentially, high-tech social marketing tools help you keep up with the busy pace of social media, by automating a lot of the work for you and providing AI-powered insights.

Such tools range from content managers, which take care of publishing, posting and commenting; to chatbots, which provide users with personalised responses to their questions; to tools that collect and analyse data on everything from audience behaviour to conversational trends.

One finance brand that’s embraced the power of social marketing tools is US-based bank Wells Fargo, whose Facebook chatbot answers questions about everything from how much the user spent on food in the previous week to the location of the nearest ATM.

Bronze goes to marketing analytics and measurement tools

Marketing analytics and measurement tools are key to financial services content marketing success. They give you the truth about which of your finance content is working and why, so you can create a data-driven content strategy focused on more of what customers like and less of what they don’t.

High-performing marketers keep track of a wide range of analytics, including revenue, sales effectiveness, web and mobile analytics, customer satisfaction, customer retention rates, digital engagement rates, social analytics, marketing leads, customer acquisition costs, customer referral costs and lifetime customer value.

And smart finance brands are doubling the value of data by transforming it into popular finance content. A cheeky bit of humble bragging, to see boring data made beautiful, check out The Little Book of Data we created for Aviva Investors.

The rest …

The other four tools that high-performing marketers expect to rely on in the coming year are video marketing tools, with 50% looking to use them more; customer data platforms, which are on the mind of 48% of marketers; marketing automation tools, which have the attention of 47%; and voice recognition tech, which is on the radar of 43% of marketers.

Wondering how you’ll bring tools into your finance content marketing strategy? Get in touch.

The post The digital tools favoured by high-performing marketers appeared first on Financial Marketer.

As a finance marketer, you create content to communicate with your audience and provide value in an effort to achieve conversion and content ROI. However, with so much content available, it can be difficult to differentiate what your financial company produces from the pack. When 48% of consumers say content is too long and boring, you have to find a way to stand out, because if your content isn’t consumed, there’s no conversion. Certainly not a case of steering clear of long-form content, content ROI comes down to whether you’re creating content that is relevant and relatable to our audience’s interests and needs.

You have to find a way to stand out, because if your content isn’t consumed, there’s no conversion.

We look at three tactics finance marketers should be using to make sure their content stands out and gets consumed.

Create Video Content

This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last time you hear about the power of creating video content in your financial content marketing efforts. It tops other content types in terms of what consumers prefer and will continue to rise in popularity. A study found that 87% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.

WealthSimple is an investment technology company with offices in Canada, the United States, and London. They create video content for their Youtube channel that has garnered almost 27 million total views. Not just a case of capturing attention, a strong content marketing strategy needs to map out how each piece of content leads customers down the funnel and ultimately to conversion and content ROI.

Collaborate With Micro-Influencers for content ROI

Another way to make your financial content marketing stand out is to use micro-influencers. Large companies do it all the time when they hire celebrities to promote their products on social media and star in their commercials. As a financial services company, you can do the same. Who are the influencers that relate to your audience? Are there popular financial bloggers or thought leaders you can collaborate with to create content your audience will find interesting?

American Express did a great job with this by collaborating with Instagram travel influencer @MyEpiphany. With over 64,000 Instagram followers, she created sponsored posts to share her experiences with the company. This collaboration connected the brand with tens of thousands of people who might not have previously considered using them. Not convinced that travel and finance go hand-in-hand, we spoke to Taryn Williams, founder and CEO of TheRight.fit about how to use influencers in finance marketing.

Incorporate Breaking Financial News

You want to be the first port of call for your customers which means you need to stay abreast of what’s new in the financial markets and the industry more broadly. While you don’t want to chase down stories like a reporter, you can find ways to incorporate financial news that’s relevant to your audience.

Visa created a X account specifically for reporting financial news. They regularly tweet information that their audience will find useful. You don’t have to create a separate social media account to incorporate news. Just add it to the platforms you’re already using.

Achieve content ROI

Countless financial content marketing strategies are dull and fail to hit the mark. But if you stray from the pack and discover how to stand out, yours doesn’t have to.

If you need support in developing a financial content strategy that will captivate and convert, that’s our specialty. Learn more about our financial content marketing services and how we can help.

Related articles

• 3 financial content marketing trends to master by 2020
• ROI and the case for content marketing
• How much video content is needed to make a splash on YouTube?

The post Finance marketer’s guide to achieving content ROI appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Google Analytics out of the box

Let’s start at the very beginning, with the installation of the Google Analytics tracking code. There are two ways to do this:

1. Install the tracking script provided directly onto your site or
2. Install it using Google Tag Manager.

We recommend using a tag manager if possible. This is a ‘container’ that is placed onto your site which the analytics tracking code is then added into. That container then allows you to quickly and easily add other potential tags (e.g. Facebook pixel, AdWords tracking) onto your site without the need for additional development work. The Tag Manager also allows you to set up quick, customised Google Analytics tracking such as listening for specific button clicks – again with minimal development required.

Know your metrics

Different platforms use slightly different terminology for key metrics, so it’s important to be clear on what the numbers actually mean. Here’s a breakdown of the most important metrics, as defined by Google Analytics:

• Users
  A user is an individual person on your site, based on a unique browser cookie. A user can visit the site multiple times and look at multiple pages but will only count as a single user. As the user is based on a cookie, if they visit on two different devices, they will count as two different users. Google Analytics also has a more advanced User ID feature that will allow you to track across devices based on Chrome logins.
• Sessions
  A session is a single visit to your site, which times out as default after 30 minutes of inactivity. If a person is inactive on your site for more than 30 minutes and then performs another action, this will count as a new session. A session can include multiple pageviews or interactions with the site.
• Pageviews
  A pageview – as defined by Google – is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well. This metric is often used to review the most popular content on your site.
• Unique pageviews
  A unique pageview – also defined by Google – aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.
• Bounce rate
  In Google Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, e.g. when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.
• Make it custom
  A simple but often overlooked part of the Google Analytics toolbox is its reporting. The reports as seen in the Google Analytics dashboard are only the tip of the iceberg, and often only provide a glimpse of what you would like to see. The Custom Reports section may seem intimidating to begin with, but once you’ve mastered the basic building blocks there’s no limit to the useful insights you can uncover. Custom reports allow you to compare and measure metrics in any way you choose, rather than limiting you to the pre-made dashboards automatically provided.

The Custom Reports section may seem intimidating to begin with, but once you’ve mastered the basic building blocks there’s no limit to the useful insights you can uncover.

To make the most of your custom reports ensure you’re tagging any traffic sources that aren’t automatically recognised by Google Analytics or that you wish to provide more details for, such as your email marketing or any paid advertising activity. The Campaign URL Builder is a useful tool to ensure you create correct campaign parameters for this purpose.

Don’t get tripped up

Google Analytics is only as useful as the data it collects, and the way it collects some of this data is defined by you. A couple of areas that often trip up analytics users are:

• Filters
  Don’t forget to filter out your own IP address(es) in order to ensure you don’t count your own visits when reviewing your traffic stats.
• Naming conformity
  Google Analytics will see two pages/campaigns/tags that are labelled even slightly differently as two entirely different entities. For example, if you use both lowercase and Title Case when naming your campaigns in the campaign builder. Pick a single naming convention and stick to that across the site to avoid getting tripped up.

The power that comes from understanding how your audience is interacting with your website content is immeasurable. Start with the basics, learn vital information from your data and optimise from there.

Related articles

• 5 ways finance brands should re-think Google advertising
• How Adobe Experience Manager can help finance brands
• Wikipedia for finance brands make your page an asset

The post A finance marketer’s cheat sheet to Google Analytics appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Here we interview Elissa to find out more about the experiments, how/when we might be using Facebook Messenger in the (near) future, and what financial brands stand to gain.

Why did you decide to use Facebook Messenger for your Grow With HubSpot event instead of email – can you share some of your strategy and thinking with us?

One of the biggest opportunities for improving the ROI of our events was developing a more efficient way for attendees to connect with our sales reps. The Facebook Messenger bot we built for Grow with HubSpot enables attendees to do just that – they can scroll through photos of our reps, find the person they’ve been chatting to, and book time in their calendar using the HubSpot Meetings tool.

Another feature we’re currently experimenting with is live chat, enabling attendees to live chat in Facebook Messenger with our reps whilst at the event. This is particularly effective at large events where it’s difficult to find someone to meet for an in-person conversation – in Messenger, you can start the conversation, and then agree to meet somewhere specific if needed.

Beyond event ROI, the bot works so well at events because it enriches the attendee experience. They have a direct line to ask us questions and get help throughout the day, and even have the opportunity to contribute to what’s going on stage by submitting questions for interviews and panels in real time.

How did you measure the success of using Messenger at Grow with HubSpot?

We split our metrics into two categories: engagement metrics, and funnel metrics. For engagement metrics, we looked at:

• Number of attendees enrolled in the bot as a % of total attendees
• Open rate of messages sent throughout the day

And for funnel metrics we look at:

• Number of meetings booked with sales reps
• Number of live chats initiated

[NB. For the actual numbers, see Elissa’s original article.]

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Might there be an element of novelty in this, i.e. your audience is yet to be inundated with Messaging resulting in better response rates than email?

There’s absolutely an element of novelty in this. As with any new channel, the early adopters see the most value because they’re riding the wave before anybody else jumps on and spoils it!

As with any new channel, the early adopters see the most value because they’re riding the wave before anybody else jumps on and spoils it!

We’ll be continuing to optimise to increase the number of meetings booked, and live chat has huge potential for additional tweaks (the first time we tested this was in Sydney!).

Currently, we’re offering Facebook Messenger as an alternative content delivery channel in all our regular, content-based email sends (i.e. when we send out ebooks etc.) This is live in North America and APAC, and will be rolling out in other regions soon.

We’re also in the process of rolling out Facebook Messenger as an alternative download option across all our gated content. Where the existing option is form + email, the new option will be a conversational form in Messenger, and we’ll deliver the content there too.

Soon, we’ll be trialling trigger-based nurturing in Messenger – when a high-value prospect views a high-intent page, we can send them a message in Messenger vs. email in order to connect with them (and help them) faster.

What should financial brands take away in relation to how they might be using Facebook Messenger for events, and potentially other purposes?

It depends what a business’s goals are, what’s going to help them achieve those goals, and figuring out how Facebook Messenger (like any other channel) might contribute to that.

If Messenger is looking like it could have impact on your business, then my advice would be to start now. If you can build out a solid infrastructure and get the channel cranking before your competitors do, you’ll have an outsized share of voice (and an outsized share of results) on that channel until they catch up.

Are you aware of any finance brands, or the equivalent, using Messenger, and if so, how?

Absolutely! This article lists a ton of them that were launched at F8.

How could you see a bank or other financial business in Australia using Messenger?

I think it’ll become commonplace to manage your finances via Messenger using your bank’s bot, much like you might use their app to do this today. The difference is banks will be able to use a conversational interface to serve their customers in Facebook Messenger.

Instead of navigating an app to check your balance or make a payment, I can absolutely see a world where you simply tell the bot to do that for you as part of a conversation with it.

If the sky’s the limit and money’s no object, how do you see HubSpot using Facebook Messenger?

Ultimately, we want to connect with our audience where they are, and for a lot of people, that’s on Messenger. We want to enable our audience to choose how they interact with us – to the point where they can do pretty much anything in Facebook Messenger that they’d normally be able to do on our website without ever leaving the app they’re currently in.

Related Article: Why Chatbots Will Rule Everyday Banking

Related Article: The Future Of Artificial Intelligence In Banking

Related Article: How Voice Recognition Is Changing The Game For Content

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The post Facebook Messenger poised to overtake email marketing appeared first on Financial Marketer.