Best of the MarTechBot showcases the MarTechBot’s responses to prompts submitted by readers. See more about how marketers are using MarTechBot here. The language model is based on content from MarTech embedded on top of ChatGPT. The editors of MarTech selected this response for its usefulness and have supplemented it with additional relevant content.

I am the first generative AI chatbot for marketing technology professionals. I am trained with MarTech content. Here’s something somebody asked me! After that, how to improve prompts to get even better answers from me.

Prompt:

How to source first-party data for a CDP?

Answer:

To source first-party data for a Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can follow these steps:

1. Identify your data sources: Determine the various touchpoints where you collect customer data, such as your website, mobile app, CRM system, email marketing platform, social media platforms, and any other relevant sources.

2. Collect data from your website and app: Implement tracking codes or tags on your website and mobile app to capture user interactions, such as page views, clicks, form submissions, and purchases. This data can include demographic information, browsing behavior, and transaction history.

3. Integrate with your CRM system: Connect your CDP with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to import customer data, including contact information, purchase history, customer preferences, and any other relevant data points.

4. Import data from other marketing platforms: Integrate your CDP with other marketing platforms you use, such as email marketing software, social media advertising platforms, and marketing automation tools. This allows you to import data related to email campaigns, social media interactions, and other marketing activities.

5. Leverage offline data sources: If you have offline touchpoints, such as in-store purchases or call center interactions, find ways to capture and integrate that data into your CDP. This can be done through manual data entry, data import processes, or by using tools that bridge the gap between offline and online data.

6. Implement data capture strategies: Use various methods to collect additional first-party data, such as surveys, preference centers, contests, and promotions. Encourage customers to provide their information voluntarily and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations.

7. Ensure data quality and accuracy: Regularly clean and validate your data to maintain its quality and accuracy. Remove duplicate records, correct any errors, and update outdated information.

8. Establish data governance policies: Define clear guidelines and processes for data collection, storage, and usage. Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA, and obtain proper consent from customers for data processing.

9. Continuously update and enrich your data: Regularly update your customer profiles with new data points and enrich them with additional information, such as social media profiles, behavioral data, or third-party data sources.

10. Regularly analyze and segment your data: Utilize your CDP’s capabilities to analyze and segment your first-party data. This allows you to create personalized marketing campaigns, target specific customer segments, and gain insights into customer behavior and preferences.

By following these steps, you can effectively source first-party data for your CDP and leverage it to drive personalized marketing efforts, improve customer experiences, and achieve your marketing objectives.

Updated prompt:

Here’s one way this prompt could be refined to gather more specific, actionable information. MarTechBot now has 10+ personas to provide more targeted responses. For this prompt, try selecting the marketing operations (MOps) persona. There are many possibilities, depending on the human user’s industry and main objectives:

Before we start, in addition to your other context, you lead marketing operations for a regional auto repair chain. How will you source first-party data for a new CDP? Please list four actions your team should prioritize. Please list the benefit for each action along with any marketing technology tool the company should use for the action. Please keep responses simple.

The key elements and enhancements to this prompt are as follows:

(Task)

How will you source first-party data for a new CDP?

(Context)

You lead marketing operations for a regional auto repair chain.

(Format)

Please list four actions your team should prioritize. Please list the benefit for each action along with any marketing technology tool the company should use for the action.

(Tone)

Please keep responses simple.

Dig deeper: How Coca-Cola activated an enterprise CDP

Updated answer:

To source first-party data for a new Customer Data Platform (CDP) for your regional auto repair chain, here are four actions your team should prioritize:

1. Implement website tracking: Use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics to track user behavior on your website. This will provide valuable insights into customer preferences, interests, and interactions, helping you personalize marketing efforts and improve customer experience.

2. Capture customer information at touchpoints: Utilize a CRM system like Salesforce or HubSpot to capture customer information at various touchpoints such as online bookings, service inquiries, or loyalty program sign-ups. This will enable you to build a comprehensive customer profile and tailor marketing campaigns based on individual preferences.

3. Leverage email marketing campaigns: Utilize an email marketing automation tool like Mailchimp or Marketo to send targeted email campaigns. By analyzing customer responses and engagement metrics, you can gather valuable data on customer preferences, interests, and purchase behavior.

4. Encourage customer feedback and reviews: Implement a customer feedback system, such as SurveyMonkey or Trustpilot, to collect feedback and reviews from customers. This will provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction, preferences, and areas for improvement, helping you enhance your marketing strategies and customer experience.

Benefits of these actions:

1. Improved personalization: By tracking website behavior and capturing customer information, you can personalize marketing efforts, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

2. Enhanced customer profiling: By integrating CRM systems, you can create comprehensive customer profiles, enabling targeted marketing campaigns and better understanding of customer needs.

3. Data-driven decision-making: Analyzing email campaign metrics and customer feedback will provide actionable insights for data-driven decision-making, optimizing marketing strategies and improving ROI.

4. Increased customer satisfaction: Gathering customer feedback and reviews will help identify areas for improvement, allowing you to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Please note that the specific marketing technology tools mentioned are examples, and you should choose the ones that best fit your organization’s needs and budget.

Now it’s your turn to give MarTechBot a try. It’s free and includes multiple expert personas to choose from, as well as an image generator.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

The post Sourcing first-party data for a CDP: Best of the MarTechBot appeared first on MarTech.

To know and be known is the essence of a relationship. To know — and understand — your customers, you need to listen to them. It seems so obvious, yet many marketing efforts miss this perspective. For all the claims of being “customer-obsessed,” brand stories focus too much on the brand itself and not the reason for its existence. 

B2B buyers need even more empathy, information and reassurance when deciding to purchase. Here are some key ways to ensure the customer’s voice is captured and conveyed to help establish a long-term, mutually valuable relationship.

1. Recognize who the hero is 

Customers aren’t interested in your story; they’re interested in learning how your product or service will help them survive or thrive in their story, according to Donald Miller, who developed the StoryBrand framework. 

The customer is the hero, while your brand is the guide in navigating and successfully overcoming the customer’s problem. Focus your marketing on making your customer the star, demonstrating the benefits they’ll gain from your brand. Save your company’s story and accomplishments for the boilerplate and your website’s About Us page.

2. Create your customer personas 

Starting out in public relations, knowing your audience is one of the most important lessons you learn and carry with you. For example, don’t pitch a reporter who doesn’t even cover your industry. You have to do research to understand who you need to communicate with, what messages will resonate with them and which channels will be most effective in delivering the messages. 

In addition to demographics, look at psychographics that include values, interests, priorities and also potential objections. Although buyer personas are fictitious representations of customers, they must be based on reality. That means conversing with existing clients and prospects and incorporating those insights into your profiles. 

Dig deeper: How to develop a winning B2B ideal customer profile

3. Build your brand for them 

The art and science of branding is about creating a lasting impression in consumers’ minds, distinguishing your brand’s goods and services from those of others in the market. Again, establishing or refreshing your brand isn’t about you. It’s about your customers. What promise of value are you making to them, and why is that important to them? 

I work with many highly specialized technology companies and organizations that get caught up in their industry’s jargon or way of talking about their products and services. But B2B buyers are humans after all. Be sure the messages you or your agency partners develop are clear and compelling, and don’t shy away from humor or other emotional appeals. Test your concepts with some of your customers, especially if translations will be required for global adoption. 

Dig deeper: Building a brand strategy: Essentials for long-term success

4. Quote them whenever you can

In my first job at a software company, I was the customer communications manager responsible for documenting case studies. This role produced success stories and videos that helped close new business, provided quotes for press releases and publications and featured speakers at our annual user conferences. I talked to hundreds of people who used our software and cultivated relationships that were beneficial in terms of PR for us and them. 

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

Nothing is more powerful than your customers’ stories — including reviews and mentions in social media posts. Don’t forget to ask if they’re interested in writing a guest blog. Some organizations won’t go on record. Even if this is a challenge, capture the narratives about the problems solved and the results achieved. This information can still shape your marketing and influence buying decisions, even without revealing the source.

5. Ask for feedback and do something with it 

In the software job I mentioned, I also managed the annual customer satisfaction survey, collaborating with an external firm to update the survey, conduct interviews and provide the results. 

That was a while ago, so numerous tools are now available to digitize informal or pulse surveys and formal NPS and CSAT programs. Integration with CRM and customer success systems is also possible, giving organizations a more comprehensive view of how their products and services are helping customers. 

This feedback — good and bad — needs to make its way to the appropriate departments for action. Commend employees who ensured an implementation occurred on time and within budget and let product management know if there are repeated questions or complaints about a particular feature. 

If your company has a product forum, you’ll want to monitor it for trends and insights and run those up the chain as well. You also might get some good ideas for blogs, webinars or other marketing materials.  

Ensure your marketing efforts reflect the voice of your customers

“What’s in it for me?” This is the fundamental question prospects and existing customers seek to answer when they encounter your marketing, whether that’s your website, a webinar or a conversation. If you don’t clearly articulate how you can solve — or keep solving — their problems and make their lives better, you’ll probably be ignored. 

Avoid wasting time and resources by tuning into your customers and being vulnerable enough to hear what they say. Then harness that information in ways that inspire you, your creative talent, the sales team and those who make your products. Customer-focused, value-based messages will take your marketing where it needs to go.  

Dig deeper: How to build a B2B brand that delivers lasting value

The post 5 big ways to turn up the voice of your customer in your marketing appeared first on MarTech.

A new study by search industry expert Rand Fishkin has revealed that Google’s rollout of AI overviews in May led to a noticeable decrease in search volume, particularly on mobile devices.

The study, which analyzed millions of Google searches in the United States and European Union, sheds light on the unexpected consequences of AI integration.

AI Overviews Rollout & Reversal

In May 2024, Google rolled out AI overviews in the United States, which generate summaries for many search queries.

However, the feature was met with mixed reactions and was quickly dialed back by the end of the month.

In a blog post published on May 30, Google admitted to inaccurate or unhelpful AI overviews, particularly for unusual queries.

Google says it implemented over a dozen technical improvements to its systems in response.

A subsequent study by SE Ranking found the frequency of these summaries decreased, with only 8% of searches now triggering an AI Overview. However, when shown, these overviews are now longer and more detailed, averaging 25% more content.

SE Ranking also noted that after expansion, AI overviews typically link to fewer sources, usually around four.

Decline In Mobile Searches

Fishkin’s analysis reveals that the introduction of AI Overviews coincided with a marked decline in mobile searches in May.

While desktop searches saw a slight increase, the drop in mobile searches was significant, considering that mobile accounts for nearly two-thirds of all Google queries.

This finding suggests that users may have been less inclined to search on their mobile devices when confronted with AI-generated summaries.

Fishkin commented:

“The most visible changes in May were shared by both the EU and US, notably… Mobile searches fell a considerable amount (if anything spooked Google into rolling back this feature, I’d put my money on this being it).”

He adds:

“If I were running Google, that dip in mobile searches (remember, mobile accounts for almost 2/3rds of all Google queries) would scare the stock-price-worshiping-crap outta me.”

Impact On Overall Search Behavior

Despite the dip in mobile searches, the study found that search behavior remained relatively stable during the AI overviews rollout.

The number of clicks per search on mobile devices increased slightly, while desktop clicks per search remained flat.

This indicates that while some users may have been deterred from initiating searches, those who did engage with the AI Overviews still clicked on results at a similar or slightly higher rate than the previous months.

Implications For Google & the Search Industry

The study highlights the challenges Google faces in integrating AI-generated content into its search results.

Additionally, the research found other concerning trends in Google search behavior:

Low Click-through Rates: Only 360 out of every 1,000 Google searches in the US result in clicks to non-Google websites. The EU fares slightly better with 374 clicks per 1,000 searches.
Zero-click Searches Dominate: Nearly 60% of searches in both regions end without any clicks, classified as “zero-click searches.”
Google’s Self-referral Traffic: About 30% of clicks from US searches go to Google-owned properties, with a somewhat lower percentage in the EU.

Why SEJ Cares

This study underscores the need for adaptable SEO strategies.

As an industry, we may need to shift focus towards optimizing for zero-click searches and diversifying traffic sources beyond Google.

The findings also raise questions about the future of AI in search.

While major tech companies continue to invest in AI technologies, this study suggests that implementation may not always yield the expected results.

Featured Image: Marco Lazzarini/Shutterstock

Having a website that doesn’t convert is a little like having a bucket with a hole in it. Do you keep filling it up while the water’s pouring out — or do you fix the hole then add water? In other words, do you channel your budget into attracting people who are “pouring” through without taking action, or do you fine-tune your website so it’s appealing enough for them to stick around?

Our recommendation? Optimize the conversion rate of your website, before you spend on increasing your traffic to it.

Here’s a web design statistic to bear in mind: you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. If your site’s too slow, or unattractive, or the wording isn’t clear, they’ll bounce faster than you can say “leaky bucket”. Which is a shame, because you’ve put lots of effort into designing a beautiful product page and About Us, and people just aren’t getting to see it.

As a digital web design and conversion agency in Melbourne, Australia, we’ve been helping our customers optimize their websites for over 10 years, but it wasn’t until mid-2019 that we decided to turn the tables and take a look at our own site.

As it turned out, we had a bit of a leaky bucket situation of our own: while our traffic was good and conversions were okay, there was definitely room for improvement.

In this article, I’m going to talk a little more about conversions: what they are, why they matter, and how they help your business. I’ll then share how I made lots of little tweaks that cumulatively led to my business attracting a higher tier of customers, more inquiries, plus over $780,000 worth of new sales opportunities within the first 26 weeks of making some of those changes. Let’s get into it!

What is conversion?

Your conversion rate is a figure that represents the percentage of visitors who come to your site and take the desired action, e.g. subscribing to your newsletter, booking a demo, purchasing a product, and so on.

Conversions come in all shapes and sizes, depending on what your website does. If you sell a product, making a sale would be your primary goal (aka a macro-conversion). If you run, say, a tour company or media outlet, then subscribing or booking a consultation might be your primary goal.

If your visitor isn’t quite ready to make a purchase or book a consultation, they might take an intermediary step — like signing up to your free newsletter, or following you on social media. This is what’s known as a micro-conversion: a little step that leads towards (hopefully) a bigger one.

A quick recap

A conversion can apply to any number of actions — from making a purchase, to following on social media.

Macro-conversions are those we usually associate with sales: a phone call, an email, or a trip to the checkout. These happen when the customer has done their research and is ready to leap in with a purchase. If you picture the classic conversion funnel, they’re already at the bottom.

Micro-conversions, on the other hand, are small steps that lead toward a sale. They’re not the ultimate win, but they’re a step in the right direction.

Most sites and apps have multiple conversion goals, each with its own conversion rate.

Micro-conversions vs. macro-conversions: which is better?

The short answer? Both. Ideally, you want micro- and macro-conversions to be happening all the time so you have a continual flow of customers working their way through your sales funnel. If you have neither, then your website is behaving like a leaky bucket.

Here are two common issues that seem like good things, but ultimately lead to problems:

High web traffic (good thing) but no micro- or macro-conversions (bad thing — leaky bucket alert)

High web traffic (good thing) plenty of micro-conversions (good thing), but no macro conversions (bad thing)

A lot of businesses spend heaps of money making sure their employees work efficiently, but less of the budget goes into what is actually one of your best marketing tools: your website.

Spending money on marketing will always be a good thing. Getting customers to your site means more eyes on your business — but when your website doesn’t convert visitors into sales, that’s when you’re wasting your marketing dollars. When it comes to conversion rate statistics, one of the biggest eye-openers I read was this: the average user’s attention span has dropped from 12 to a mere 7 seconds. That’s how long you’ve got to impress before they bail — so you’d better make sure your website is fast, clear, and attractive.

Our problem

Our phone wasn’t ringing as much as we’d have liked, despite spending plenty of dollars on SEO and Adwords. We looked into our analytics and realized traffic wasn’t an issue: a decent number of people were visiting our site, but too few were taking action — i.e. inquiring. Here’s where some of our issues lay:

Our site wasn’t as fast as it could have been (anything with a load time of two seconds or over is considered slow. Ours was hovering around 5-6, and that was having a negative impact on conversions).

Our CTA conversions were low (people weren’t clicking — or they were dropping off because the CTA wasn’t where it needed to be).

We were relying on guesswork for some of our design decisions — which meant we had no way of measuring what worked, and what didn’t.

In general, things were good but not great. Or in other words, there was room for improvement.

What we did to fix it

Improving your site’s conversions isn’t a one-size-fits all thing — which means what works for one person might not work for you. It’s a gradual journey of trying different things out and building up successes over time. We knew this having worked on hundreds of client websites over the years, so we went into our own redesign with this in mind. Here are some of the steps we took that had an impact.

We decided to improve our site

First of all, we decided to fix our company website. This sounds like an obvious one, but how many times have you thought “I’ll do this really important thing”, then never gotten round to it. Or rushed ahead in excitement, made a few tweaks yourself, then let your efforts grind to a halt because other things took precedence?

This is an all-too-common problem when you run a business and things are just… okay. Often there’s no real drive to fix things and we fall back into doing what seems more pressing: selling, talking to customers, and running the business.

Deciding you want to improve your site’s conversions starts with a decision that involves you and everyone else in the company, and that’s what we did. We got the design and analytics experts involved. We invested time and money into the project, which made it feel substantial. We even made EDMs to announce the site launch (like the one below) to let everyone know what we’d been up to. In short, we made it feel like an event.

We got to know our users

There are many different types of user: some are ready to buy, some are just doing some window shopping. Knowing what type of person visits your site will help you create something that caters to their needs.

We looked at our analytics data and discovered visitors to our site were a bit of both, but tended to be more ready to buy than not. This meant we needed to focus on getting macro-conversions — in other words, make our site geared towards sales — while not overlooking the visitors doing some initial research. For those users, we implemented a blog as a way to improve our SEO, educate leads, and build up our reputation.

User insight can also help you shape the feel of your site. We discovered that the marketing managers we were targeting at the time were predominantly women, and that certain images and colours resonated better among that specific demographic. We didn’t go for the (obvious pictures of the team or our offices), instead relying on data and the psychology of attraction to delve into the mind of the users.

We improved site speed

Sending visitors to good sites with bad speeds erodes trust and sends them running. Multiple studies show that site speed matters when it comes to conversion rates. It’s one of the top SEO ranking factors, and a big factor when it comes to user experience: pages that load in under a second convert around 2.5 times higher than pages taking five seconds or more.

We built our website for speed. Moz has a great guide on page speed best practices, and from that list, we did the following things:

We optimized images.

We managed our own caching.

We compressed our files.

We improved page load times (Moz has another great article about how to speed up time to first Byte). A good web page load time is considered to be anything under two seconds — which we achieved.

In addition, we also customized our own hosting to make our site faster.

We introduced more tracking

As well as making our site faster, we introduced a lot more tracking. That allowed us to refine our content, our messaging, the structure of the site, and so on, which continually adds to the conversion.

We used Google Optimize to run A/B tests across a variety of things to understand how people interacted with our site. Here are some of the tweaks we made that had a positive impact:

Social proofing can be a really effective tool if used correctly, so we added some stats to our landing page copy.

Google Analytics showed us visitors were reaching certain pages and not knowing quite where to go next, so we added CTAs that used active language. So instead of saying, “If you’d like to find out more, let us know”, we said “Get a quote”, along with two options for getting in touch.

We spent an entire month testing four words on our homepage. We actually failed (the words didn’t have a positive impact), but it allowed us to test our hypothesis. We did small tweaks and tests like this all over the site.

We used heat mapping to see where visitors were clicking, and which words caught their eye. With this data, we knew where to place buttons and key messaging.

We looked into user behavior

Understanding your visitor is always a good place to start, and there are two ways to go about this:

Quantitative research (numbers and data-based research)

Qualitative research (people-based research)

We did a mixture of both.

For the quantitative research, we used Google Analytics, Google Optimize, and Hotjar to get an in-depth, numbers-based look at how people were interacting with our site.

Heat-mapping software shows how people click and scroll through a page. Hot spots indicate places where people naturally gravitate.

We could see where people were coming into our site (which pages they landed on first), what channel brought them there, which features they were engaging with, how long they spent on each page, and where they abandoned the site.

For the qualitative research, we focused primarily on interviews.

We asked customers what they thought about certain CTAs (whether they worked or not, and why).

We made messaging changes and asked customers and suppliers whether they made sense.

We invited a psychologist into the office and asked them what they thought about our design.

What we learned

We found out our design was good, but our CTAs weren’t quite hitting the mark. For example, one CTA only gave the reader the option to call. But, as one of our interviewees pointed out, not everyone likes using the phone — so we added an email address.

We were intentional but ad hoc about our asking process. This worked for us — but you might want to be a bit more formal about your approach (Moz has a great practical guide to conducting qualitative usability testing if you’re after a more in-depth look).

The results

Combined, these minor tweaks had a mighty impact. There’s a big difference in how our site looks and how we rank. The bottom line: after the rebuild, we got more work, and the business did much better. Here are some of the gains we’ve seen over the past two years.

Our dwell time increased by 73%, going from 1.5 to 2.5 minutes.

We received four-times more inquiries by email and phone.

Our organic traffic increased despite us not channeling more funds into PPC ads.

We also realized our clients were bigger, paying on average 2.5 times more for jobs: in mid-2018, our average cost-per-job was $8,000. Now, it’s $17,000.

Our client brand names became more recognizable, household names — including two of Australia’s top universities, and a well-known manufacturing/production brand.

Within the first 26 weeks, we got over $770,000 worth of sales opportunities (if we’d accepted every job that came our way).

Our prospects began asking to work with us, rather than us having to persuade them to give us the business.

We started getting higher quality inquiries — warmer leads who had more intent to buy.

Some practical changes you can make to improve your website conversions

When it comes to website changes, it’s important to remember that what works for one person might not work for you.

We’ve used site speed boosters for our clients before and gotten really great results. At other times, we’ve tried it and it just broke the website. This is why it’s so important to measure as you go, use what works for your individual needs, and remember that “failures” are just as helpful as wins.

Below are some tips — some of which we did on our own site, others are things we’ve done for others.

Tip number 1: Get stronger hosting that allows you to consider things like CDNs. Hiring a developer should always be your top choice, but it’s not always possible to have that luxury. In this instance, we recommend considering CDNs, and depending on the build of your site, paying for tools like NitroPack which can help with caching and compression for faster site speeds.

Tip number 2: Focus your time. Identify top landing pages with Moz Pro and channel your efforts in these places as a priority. Use the 80/20 principle and put your attention on the 20% that gets you 80% of your success.

Tip number 3: Run A/B tests using Google Optimize to test various hypotheses and ideas (Moz has a really handy guide for running split tests using Google). Don’t be afraid of the results — failures can help confirm that what you are currently doing right. You can also access some in-depth data about your site’s performance in Google Lighthouse.

Tip number 4: Trial various messages in Google Ads (as a way of testing targeted messaging). Google provides many keyword suggestions on trending words and phrases that are worth considering.

Tip number 5: Combine qualitative and quantitative research to get to know how your users interact with your site — and keep testing on an ongoing basis.

Tip number 6: Don’t get too hung up on charts going up, or figures turning orange: do what works for you. If adding a video to your homepage slows it down a little but has an overall positive effect on your conversion, then it’s worth the tradeoff.

Tip number 7: Prioritize the needs of your target customers and focus every build and design choice around them.

Recommended tools

Nitropack: speed up your site if you’ve not built it for speed from the beginning.

Google Optimize: run A/B tests

HotJar: see how people use your site via heat mapping and behaviour analytics.

Pingdom / GTMetrix: measure site speed (both is better if you want to make sure you meet everyone’s requirements).

Google Analytics: find drop-off points, track conversion, A/B test, set goals.

Qualaroo: poll your visitors while they are on your site with a popup window.

Google Consumer Surveys: create a survey, Google recruits the participants and provides results and analysis.

Moz Pro: Identify top landing pages when you connect this tool to your Google Analytics profile to create custom reports.

How to keep your conversion rates high

Treat your website like your car. Regular little tweaks to keep it purring, occasional deeper inspections to make sure there are no problems lurking just out of sight. Here’s what we do:

We look at Google Analytics monthly. It helps to understand what’s working, and what’s not.

We use goal tracking in GA to keep things moving in the right direction.

We use Pingdom’s free service to monitor the availability and response time of our site.

We regularly ask people what they think about the site and its messaging (keeping the qualitative research coming in).

Conclusion

Spending money on marketing is a good thing, but when you don’t have a good conversion rate, that’s when your website’s behaving like a leaky bucket. Your website is one of your strongest sales tools, so it really does pay to make sure it’s working at peak performance.

I’ve shared a few of my favorite tools and techniques, but above all, my one bit of advice is to consider your own requirements. You can improve your site speed if you remove all tags and keep it plain. But that’s not what you want: it’s finding the balance between creativity and performance, and that will always depend on what’s important.

For us as a design agency, we need a site that’s beautiful and creative. Yes, having a moving background on our homepage slows it down a little bit, but it improves our conversions overall.

The bottom line: Consider your unique users, and make sure your website is in line with the goals of whoever you’re speaking with.

We can do all we want to please Google, but when it comes to sales and leads, it means more to have a higher converting and more effective website. We did well in inquiries (actual phone calls and email leads) despite a rapid increase in site performance requirements from Google. This only comes down to one thing: having a site customer conversion framework that’s effective.

Marketing technology, or martech, refers to tools and systems designed to support marketing efforts. It can also encompass technology used for sales and advertising. Because of its broad scope, it’s crucial for marketers with diverse expertise to participate in setting up and managing the martech stack.

There’s no single best way to organize martech oversight. The structure should be flexible and involve people from various disciplines. It needs to adapt as technology changes and as the company grows, while ensuring the technology remains effective and provides a good return on investment. 

Here’s how marketers can take part in — and even lead — the teams managing marketing technology.

Competencies needed for effective martech management

To effectively lead and participate in managing marketing technology, you must think about it strategically. Developing skills in martech architecture is crucial, as this expertise is essential for martech management and is not limited to IT teams.

You can add significant value by seeing how all marketing processes fit together and using martech to enhance them. Because managing martech requires teamwork, you can become a key advisor or even a leader in these collaborative efforts.

To prepare you in guiding and leading martech teams, I’ll use the six key martech skills outlined by Austin Hay in his Reforge course. These skills can be learned and developed within marketing teams.

1. Generalized system understanding

This involves having an overall understanding of how data flows throughout the martech stack and why each element of a system is chosen. You should be able to bring your understanding of the overall business strategy, including why customer data points are being collected and how to use them to improve the customer experience. 

2. Tool management 

You should be able to safely set up, integrate and administer tools of any kind. Ensure the marketing team understands why the setup was done in such a way and how this setup matches and can improve/automate marketing processes beyond top-of-funnel activities. You may (or may not) help in the setup itself, but you need to understand why things are set up the way they are.

3. Architecture vision

This competency is about planning how the next version of your stack will manifest to accomplish business goals. This is the most important of the competencies, as it allows for the continuing evolution of the martech. 

As a marketer, you are well-positioned to excel here because you understand the marketing processes that technology supports. You should be able to show how updates to the martech stack can help achieve business goals and improve marketing processes.

4. Capability assessment

This one is about the ability to assess tools/vendors’ value. Consider tools/vendors that could solve a problem. Work closely with other teams also involved and lead these efforts (such as IT and procurement) to ensure the right marketing problems are defined and considered during this assessment phase.

5. Tool procurement

This involves establishing vendor relationships based on business needs and the martech landscape. You can facilitate this by engaging the right stakeholders from both the vendor and client sides, ensuring the process starts correctly.

6. Organization management

It’s crucial for companies to hire and train teams to meet martech needs and grow effectively. You must build and maintain a team that develops diverse competencies, avoiding reliance on one platform or method. The goal is to align marketing processes with technology to enhance both and achieve overall business objectives.

By leveraging a systemic, big-picture view of marketing processes and how customer data can be used to improve customer experience, marketers can bring unique insights and perspectives into selecting, deploying and maintaining marketing technology. This creates a marketing technology virtuous cycle, where the return on investment of such technology is realized not only from customer-related outcomes but also from improvements throughout marketing processes. 

The post 6 core competencies every martech manager needs appeared first on MarTech.

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom Capper walks you through a problem many SEOs have faced: cannibalization. What is it, how do you identify it, and how can you fix it? Watch to find out! 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today we’re going to be talking about cannibalization, which here in the UK we spell like this: cannibalisation. With that out of the way, what do we mean by cannibalization?

What is cannibalization?

So this is basically where one site has two competing URLs and performs, we suspect, less well because of it. So maybe we think the site is splitting its equity between its two different URLs, or maybe Google is getting confused about which one to show. Or maybe Google considers it a duplicate content problem or something like that. One way or another, the site does less well as a result of having two URLs. 

So I’ve got this imaginary SERP here as an example. So imagine that Moz is trying to rank for the keyword “burgers.” Just imagine that Moz has decided to take a wild tangent in its business model and we’re going to try and rank for “burgers” now.

So in position one here, we’ve got Inferior Bergz, and we would hope to outrank these people really, but for some reason we’re not doing. Then in position two, we’ve got Moz’s Buy Burgers page on the moz.com/shop subdirectory, which obviously doesn’t exist, but this is a hypothetical. This is a commercial landing page where you can go and purchase a burger. 

Then in position three, we’ve got this Best Burgers page on the Moz blog. It’s more informational. It’s telling you what are the attributes to a good burger, how can you identify a good burger, where should you go to acquire a good burger, all this kind of more neutral editorial information.

So we hypothesize in this situation that maybe if Moz only had one page going for this keyword, maybe it could actually supplant the top spot. If we think that’s the case, then we would probably talk about this as cannibalization.

However, the alternative hypothesis is, well, actually there could be two intents here. It might be that Google wishes to show a commercial page and an informational page on this SERP, and it so happens that the second best commercial page is Moz’s and the best informational page is also Moz’s. We’ve heard Google talk in recent years or representatives of Google talk in recent years about having positions on search results that are sort of reserved for certain kinds of results, that might be reserved for an informational result or something like that. So this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s cannibalization. So we’re going to talk a little bit later on about how we might sort of disambiguate a situation like this.

Classic cannibalization

First, though, let’s talk about the classic case. So the classic, really clear-cut, really obvious case of cannibalization is where you see a graph like this one. 

So this is the kind of graph you would see a lot of rank tracking software. You can see time and the days of the week going along the bottom axis. Then we’ve got rank, and we obviously want to be as high as possible and close to position one.

Then we see the two URLS, which are color-coded, and are green and red here. When one of them ranks, the other just falls away to oblivion, isn’t even in the top 100. There’s only ever one appearing at the same time, and they sort of supplant each other in the SERP. When we see this kind of behavior, we can be pretty confident that what we’re seeing is some kind of cannibalization.

Less-obvious cases

Sometimes it’s less obvious though. So a good example that I found recently is if, or at least in my case, if I Google search Naples, as in the place name, I see Wikipedia ranking first and second. The Wikipedia page ranking first was about Naples, Italy, and the Wikipedia page at second was about Naples, Florida.

Now I do not think that Wikipedia is cannibalizing itself in that situation. I think that they just happen to have… Google had decided that this SERP is ambiguous and that this keyword “Naples” requires multiple intents to be served, and Wikipedia happens to be the best page for two of those intents.

So I wouldn’t go to Wikipedia and say, “Oh, you need to combine these two pages into a Naples, Florida and Italy page” or something like that. That’s clearly not necessary. 

Questions to ask 

So if you want to figure out in that kind of more ambiguous case whether there’s cannibalization going on, then there are some questions we might ask ourselves.

1. Do we think we’re underperforming? 

So one of the best questions we might ask, which is a difficult one in SEO, is: Do we think we’re underperforming? So I know every SEO in the world feels like their site deserves to rank higher, well, maybe most. But do we have other examples of very similar keywords where we only have one page, where we’re doing significantly better? Or was it the case that when we introduced the second page, we suddenly collapsed? Because if we see behavior like that, then that might,  you know, it’s not clear-cut, but it might give us some suspicions. 

2. Do competing pages both appear? 

Similarly, if we look at examples of similar keywords that are less ambiguous in intent, so perhaps in the burgers case, if the SERP for “best burgers” and the SERP for “buy burgers,” if those two keywords had completely different results in general, then we might think, oh, okay, we should have two separate pages here, and we just need to make sure that they’re clearly differentiated.

But if actually it’s the same pages appearing on all of those keywords, we might want to consider having one page as well because that seems to be what Google is preferring. It’s not really separating out these intents. So that’s the kind of thing we can look for is, like I say, not clear-cut but a bit of a hint. 

3. Consolidate or differentiate? 

Once we’ve figured out whether we want to have two pages or one, or whether we think the best solution in this case is to have two pages or one, we’re going to want to either consolidate or differentiate.

So if we think there should only be one page, we might want to take our two pages, combine the best of the content, pick the strongest URL in terms of backlinks and history and so on, and redirect the other URL to this combined page that has the best content, that serves the slight variance of what we now know is one intent and so on and so forth.

If we want two pages, then obviously we don’t want them to cannibalize. So we need to make sure that they’re clearly differentiated. Now what often happens here is a commercial page, like this Buy Burgers page, ironically for SEO reasons, there might be a block of text at the bottom with a bunch of editorial or SEO text about burgers, and that can make it quite confusing what intent this page is serving.

Similarly, on this page, we might at some stage have decided that we want to feature some products on there or something. It might have started looking quite commercial. So we need to make sure that if we’re going to have both of these, that they are very clearly speaking to separate intents and not containing the same information and the same keywords for the most part and that kind of thing.

Quick tip

Lastly, it would be better if we didn’t get into the situation in the first place. So a quick tip that I would recommend, just as a last takeaway, is before you produce a piece of content, say for example before I produced this Whiteboard Friday, I did a site:moz.com cannibalization so I can see what content had previously existed on Moz.com that was about cannibalization.

I can see, oh, this piece is very old, so we might — it’s a very old Whiteboard Friday, so we might consider redirecting it. This piece mentions cannibalization, so it’s not really about that. It’s maybe about something else. So as long as it’s not targeting that keyword we should be fine and so on and so forth. Just think about what other pieces exist, because if there is something that’s basically targeting the same keyword, then obviously you might want to consider consolidating or redirecting or maybe just updating the old piece.

That’s all for today. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

While retail media networks (RMNs) continue to evolve, they are fragmented and confusing for brands. Two experts in data and marketing  — Keen CEO Greg Dolan and Len Ostroff, SVP of sales and partnerships at Crisp — spoke about RMNs at The MarTech Conference (free registration to view the entire program).

Here are the three biggest challenges of RMNs and insights into how marketers can overcome them.

Dig deeper: Why we care about retail media networks

Include multiple retail media networks in your strategy

Your customer’s journey is more complicated than ever. If you’re a brand that depends heavily on retailers — for instance, a consumer packaged good — many of the important steps the customer makes are on a retailer’s website or in a store. Much of the data that proves the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is owned by these retailers.

Len spoke about his experience in digital advertising, where he found that retailers shared a lot of data with their suppliers. The tricky part for marketers is that there’s no standard for how the data is shared and no standard way to compare measurements across retailers. (Last year, the IAB kicked off a process for the industry to standardize by releasing measurement guidelines.)

Although the disparity in measurement standards presents a challenge to marketers, brands must explore the advertising opportunities available through each retail network — because within those networks are the touchpoints close to your customers’ sales.

Here, Len explains why data from different retailers is important and how marketers use it.

Understand each retail media network’s unique approach

Just because your valued customers make purchases through similar processes at different retailers doesn’t mean the retailers themselves have similar RMNs. Each retailer has taken a unique approach in building its RMN.

The consequences of this mean that a media strategy that works well at one retailer might not necessarily follow for another. Each RMN has its own particular “spin.” Marketers must compare and match what the RMN offers with the brand’s campaign goals.

In the video below, Len and Greg discuss how RMNs have evolved. Hearing about their experience makes it easier to see why each RMN is so different.

Loyalty is the gold standard for data

Not all customer data is equal. When engaging existing customers, loyalty data is perhaps the most valuable in driving repeat purchases and finding out what campaign strategies work best.

Many retailers have loyalty programs and memberships. Sam’s Club, for instance, requires membership for retail customers and also has an RMN. Brands can establish loyalty programs of their own. These programs are crucial for amassing first-party data, which is more important than ever with the deprecation of third-party cookies and new privacy regulations.

Len explains here why he thinks loyalty data is so important. If you’re a retailer, it’s driving your RMN. If you’re a brand, it’s a game changer for which RMNs you include in your digital strategy.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

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