Gravity Global recently received a series of prestigious accolades at this season’s TITAN Business Awards. These awards attracted over a 1,000 entries from 56 countries. It was therefore an honour to be named Marketing Agency of the Year 2023, a long with a host of Platinum and Gold Awards – 13 categories in total, including Financial Services marketing, Banking and Best Integrated Marketing campaign.
While Marketing Agency of the Year is a phenomenal result for us, we also celebrate the category awards as it honors not only the clients who trust in us, but also our talented teams who create and deliver the award-winning work.
We strongly believe in sharing our work and putting it forward to be judged against our peers because it contributes to elevating creative standards, and it independently proves the effectiveness of the work we do with our clients.
To find out about how we could help you and your brand, get in touch.
The rallying cry of marketing briefs invariably include calls for low cost and high impact but when searching for this state of high performance with your marketing activities, how truly convinced are you from the outset that you will achieve the business ambition? How sure are you that you have the most efficient marketing plan that will deliver the business case? Do you have the complete data to support or are there gaps? Are you completely sure the marketing activity will return a positive ROI?
Below are some common phrases used to justify the billions of dollars that the marketing industry spends:
“It should work but we will certainly test and learn”
“It’s really disruptive so will work well”
“Amazingly creative and customers will love it”
“This is so much better than the last campaign”
“It’s really very strong and connects right across the customer journey.”
What other function in your business evaluates activity so subjectively and with such little evidence?
This lack of certainty is because the formula for achieving sustainable success is constantly subject to opinion and debate.
Time for all this to change.
At Gravity we have developed an approach that aims to remove the debate by studying what marketing levers brands can pull to achieve growth.
This strategic development process has been developed from extensive research into identifying what makes some companies grow faster than others.
And it simplifies the complex:
The findings show that there are three main levers brands can manipulate to achieve sustainable success. We named them Fame, Admiration and Belief. FAB for short.
FAME is a measure of how well people know your brand and understand what you do.
ADMIRATION is the strength of how emotionally predisposed people feel towards your brand.
BELIEF measures the strength of people willing to engage and commit to your brand and recommend you to others.
No single attribute can deliver success on its own, and all three need to be in balance for a business to maximise success from Brand to Demand.
Each lever has twelve critical success measures that provide hard data for better decision making and provide a blueprint for which levers need to be pulled to achieve the desired outcome.
Applying FAB enables us to benchmark our clients’ current brand and market performance, define their future go-to-market programmes and measure, track and enhance the marketing activities across all the critical factors for success.
We have seen how, by using FAB, we are able to deliver a Share of Attention disproportionate to market share and marketing investment that accelerates market growth, delivers sustainable success and provides a return on every £, $ or € greater than the industry benchmark.
FAB is the methodology we used to develop the Profit Hunter Brand to Demand programme for Embraer, now famously described as the world’s most successful B2B programme with over 50 awards for excellence across all marketing activities and delivering $15.3 billion in orders.
Want to hear more, or find out how we can help accelerate your brand? Get in touch today.
To serve the needs of your customers, it’s important to consider the journey that each of them will take with your company and your brand, through all stages of the marketing funnel. This covers when they:
first become aware of the products or services you offer
are considering the various companies and products available to them
make a purchase, or commit to your services.
Whether your customer is a regular or seeing your brand for the first time, its beneficial for your business to ensure they have a smooth path from their initial encounter to the point of ‘success’. The fewer issues they encounter, and the easier they can find what they’re looking for, the more likely they are to make a positive impact on your bottom line.
Have you considered this in relation to your website? Does it cater for the needs of current and potential customers, no matter what stage of the journey they’re at? And how can you use data analysis to find and resolve key issues with your site? Our guide will help you to answer these questions.
The complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.
The customer journey includes a number of different touch points, many of which are offline, such as awareness gained through media advertising, interactions with support staff over the phone, and visiting physical stores. This article focuses only on the customer touch points related to your website. However, there are still many different kinds of visits that users can make to your site – and therefore many touch points that you need to consider when analysing your customer’s journey online:
Has the customer just become aware of your brand and typed it into Google? Then they’ll likely arrive at your site on your main homepage, looking for more details about your company and reassurance of your credentials.
Are they Googling for a specific product or type of product that you happen to offer? Then they’ll likely start on a deeper page on your site, such as a product information or category page. While the customer needs to learn more about the specific topic of their search, they’ll also need to be brought up to speed on why they should give you their custom, rather than any of your competitors.
Has the customer bought from you already? Are they checking up on a previous order or looking for some help? Then chances are they’ll have followed a link in a confirmation email straight to your site’s support section, and need to find the answer to their questions with minimum effort and maximum reassurance.
The customer may not be interested in any e-commerce facilities your site may offer, and are instead looking for the address of the physical store nearest them. This means they’ll be heading for your store directory, and need to know where and when to go the store.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the customer touch points you need to consider – many are likely to be specific to what your customers require from your business. While considering the homepage and a few category pages will be beneficial, it’s not the full picture.
How can data analysis help?
You probably already use Google Analytics (or a similar analytics solution) on your company’s website, which, providing this is set up correctly, offers a wealth of useful data about how people are interacting with your site. Careful and thoughtful data analysis can help you to determine where problems are arising in your customers’ journeys, and highlight areas where your site is currently working well.
Without considering the data, you’d have to just guess – attempting to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and make assumptions as to how they think and behave is a risky strategy. If you’ve been living and breathing your brand on a day-to-day basis, removing your thought processes from what you already know is easier said than done. Besides, if the data is there and can remove the guesswork, then it just makes sense to use it!
How to analyse the customer journey
There are many metrics and data sets you can use to analyse customer journeys on your website. Here we’ll consider the five most likely to benefit your business:
Ranking URLs
Consider the users who arrive at your site via organic search – the URL they arrive on will be dictated by the search engine, and this might not be the one you expect. If a user searches for a particular type of product and you have a whole section devoted to it, Google may still send the user straight to your main homepage. Ranking in top position doesn’t guarantee that a user will land on a page related to their search.
You can check ranking URLs manually by looking at the relevant search engines yourselves, or track them over time using tools such as STAT or Accuranker. If the pages that are ranking don’t match the keyword the user is searching for, or their intent, you need to fix this.
First, make sure you actually do have a more suitable page that you think should be appearing. If you do, then it looks like search engine optimisation work is required, to try and persuade Google to change its mind.
For example, at Gravity Global we identify and monitor key terms for our clients as part of our SEO campaigns – we look to rectify issues and get the most suitable pages ranking in the best possible positions. This means ranking pages will provide a better user experience and experience improved conversion rates.
Exit rates
When a user reaches a key page on your site, such as a product or category page, you ideally want them to proceed towards the related point of conversion. However, if the content they land on doesn’t meet their needs – for example, because crucial details are not being explained or the next action required of the user is unclear – then they may leave the site and go elsewhere.
The ‘exit rate’ metric is the percentage of views for a specific page that result in the visitor leaving the site. Google Analytics allows you to see the exit rate for every tracked page, as well as the average for the site overall. If you find that an important page has a higher exit rate than the average, you should treat this as a potential red flag and take action.
Look at the content of the page that’s performing poorly and try to determine where it might be failing to meet the user’s expectations. Also, make sure it’s obvious what the user needs to do next – if the user can’t work out what’s required of them, they’ll probably find alternative means – or alternative companies – to get what they need.
However, be wary of exit rates – on some occasions, a page might naturally be the end of a successful journey without being a designated conversion. For example, if a mobile user searches for their nearest store and lands on the page with this information, their current need has been met, so an exit is a likely outcome.
Internal search
Google isn’t the only search tool where you need to consider results. If your site has its own internal search engine, then Google Analytics can track how people are making use of this facility on your site and what they’re searching for.
This data may show that some of the most searched for terms are products or services that you don’t offer. This can be a useful indicator for areas of future expansion within your company.
If users are searching for products or services that you already provide, this may suggest that people are having trouble locating the relevant pages in your current site structure. From this, you may decide to make these pages more prominent, for example using conversion optimisation or content marketing techniques.
Conversion and goal analysis
Common conversion processes are typically spread across multiple pages of a website – for example, making a purchase usually involves adding products to a cart, one or more pages of entering details, then making the payment before the final conversion is complete. Your hope is for most users to complete the whole process, but this isn’t always the case and many users stop the process before completion.
You can use a funnel report (assuming these various stages are setup correctly within Google Analytics) to map the customer journey through this process and analyse where users are dropping out. This can be helpful for determining where potential customers are encountering problems, and where improvements need to be made.
For example, let’s say that 80% of users who put an item in the basket make it to the page where they must enter their address – but only 40% get to the page following this. This means it’s highly likely that there is an issue on the address entry page.
Once you know there’s an issue with a certain page, you can use conversion rate optimisation to make improvements and encourage users to continue through the conversion process.
Performance by device
Many websites still have usability issues on smaller screens – but the number of users accessing the internet via mobile devices continues to grow. While your site may be performing brilliantly for those using a desktop computer, what about the potentially sizeable number using their iPhone or Android handset?
Google Analytics tracks the category of device used for each visit to your site, allowing your data to be segmented by device type. This means you can easily compare the performance of each, to determine whether those on a mobile or tablet have a noticeably lower conversion rate.
If you do find that conversion is poor for mobile or tablet users, the next steps are to determine why, and how to fix it. When Gravity Global identifies this as an issue on a client’s website, we usually recommend a full audit of the site from the perspective of both SEO and CRO, looking for potential quick wins and improvements in key areas to make sure users have a good user experience no matter what device they’re using.
If you’re looking to improve your website performance and customer journey we’d be happy to help. To find out more about how we can assist in your performance marketing click here. Alternatively email [email protected].
As a data analyst in a digital marketing agency, it’s essential for me to collect, analyse and report data accurately. This means using tools that are proven to deliver the best insights. Here are some of the data analysis tools that I regularly use and recommend:
Tools for data collection
To make accurate decisions you need accurate data. This can come from anywhere, whether that be a spreadsheet you’re using to track the number of office tea rounds you make or a customer database with millions of entries. You’ll already know the obvious marketing data sources such as Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush etc – so below are some data collection tools that you may not have heard of.
1. Supermetrics
Supermetrics is a life-saver if you want to produce reports in Excel or Google Sheets. You can use APIs to connect to multiple sources, such as Google Analytics, Bing Ads, MailChimp or SEMRush, and your spreadsheet will automatically display the data.
One of its most useful features is the AVOID_SAMPLING option in its Google Analytics “data grabber”. In scenarios where Google Analytics would sample data, Supermetrics try to avoid sampling. In my experience, this incredible data wizardry works nine times out of 10. It’s unclear how it works, but I assume that it splits the request into multiple queries, so it displays actual numbers rather than sampled figures.
2. URL Profiler
URL Profiler is a desktop-based software that allows you to gather bulk-data about URLs. You can collect MOZ metrics, Majestic metrics and social metrics (shares, likes, comments etc) in one place. It’s useful for everything SEO, from link audits to competitor analysis.
A particularly helpful feature is its semantic data capture tool. Using algorithms, it returns information about the content of a URL such as tone and readability.
3. Office of National Statistics (ONS)
Data is great – but free data is even better. If you need UK-specific data, then the ONS is the place to go. Their site offers information on the population that can be very useful. I’ve used the ONS to enrich customer profiling data and understand the population that lives near certain store locations.
Report data needs to be digested quickly, so that decisions can made and campaigns move forward. However, as humans, looking at a table of numbers doesn’t allow our brains to compute what is happening (or at least not as quickly or usefully as we need.) This is why data visualisation is an essential part of campaign reporting.
Another important factor of reporting is speed and efficiency. Creating reports on a regular basis can be a time-consuming task, especially if you’re collecting data from multiple sources and updating (what feels like) a million spreadsheets. To speed this process up, there must be automation.
4. Klipfolio
A great tool that provides data visualisation and automation is Klipfolio. It’s a Canadian software-as-a-service (SaaS) that provides dashboards to help its users monitor the performance of their marketing campaigns. The cost is lower than you expect, meaning it seriously competes with the likes of Qlik and Tableau.
Klipfolio connects with a vast range of data sources via integrated APIs – and if there isn’t an API for a data source, it’s easy enough to build your own within the platform! It even has a handy feature that allows you to email data as an attachment.
What so many dashboard tools fail at, is having the flexibility to combine data sources to show true marketing performance. Klipfolio not only provides what other dashboards can’t, it also allows for even greater flexibility with its the Excel-like functions within its widget editor.
To top it off, Klipfolio has a great support network and community of fellow developers that will guide you through every step – from building your first widget to improving the efficiency of your calculation performance.
No marketing team should take another step forward without first understanding what the future they’re stepping into will look like. Forecasting and predicting trends in products and services allows for more accurate decision-making. Of course, you need more than a medium with a crystal ball to understand what the future will look like. You need a data warrior armed with a terabit of analytical fodder and an analytics software package.
5. Orange
If, like me, you’ve previously used expensive enterprise software for modelling, you’ll be surprised to learn that the software I use most often is free. Orange is an open source point-and-click statistical analytics software package. You drag and drop “nodes” into a “workspace” and connect them with data pipelines. Each node can be left with its default parameters, or you can modify them.
There are an abundance of nodes to choose from, including data manipulation and data visualisation. My favourites are the Logistic Regression, Linear Regression and Neural Network nodes. If you’re a keen Python developer, you can even build your own nodes.
Other tools to help predictions and deep dive analysis:
Looking for more information about the most effective data analysis tools to use for your digital marketing campaigns? Drop us a message at [email protected]!
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