Category: Marketing

Everything You Need to Know About GA4 Migration

Many of you have probably been receiving notifications for more than a year about migrating your Google Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). On July 1, 2023, Google will discontinue Universal Analytics, which means none of your website analytic data will track through that property anymore. In December 2023, all data from Universal Analytics will be erased.

What that means is that you must make the switch if you want to have consistent – or any – website tracking information. But LeadPoint Digital clients don’t have to do a thing. (We’ve got you covered already.)

What to Expect

To break it down simply, the data we review with our clients monthly will change for the better and be more expansive. The largest change from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 is that your website data will be tracked through events, rather than pageviews.

The Good News: Google Analytics caught up with LeadPoint Digital! Long before Google Analytics 4 was announced, LeadPoint tracked your website data through events. Most of the data we review with you on a weekly or monthly basis has been events-based since our relationship began. Event metrics that we regularly review with our clients are form submissions, document downloads, clicks to social media, video viewing rates, clicks to call, clicks on email address, and clicks to important outbound websites.

The Bad News: All the data we tracked for your website to this point will disappear in December 2023. LeadPoint Digital is taking measures to download all historical data for comparison under the new Google Analytics 4 tracking. We have also been tracking Google Analytics 4 data over the last year, so we should have data to compare immediately.

Smarter Marketing with GA4

• User-ID Tracking
• Customer Data Integration
• Data-Driven Lead Tracking

User-ID tracking will better measure websites that have registered users, such as e-commerce or login areas. This will enable you to track your registered users as one journey whether they visit through a mobile device, laptop, or tablet. In the past, these visitors were viewed as three separate visits. Now we can measure the cross-device behavior between registered users.

Customer data integration will allow you to upload customer and prospect data from your point of sale, customer relationship management, or other offline data collection. The benefit to this is to track your overall business performance in a unified view and match website behavior for all users. This will help with full-funnel tracking for offline sales. For example, if a user submits information through your website, but purchases offline, the closing sale data can be incorporated and tied to the initial lead, providing more accurate return-on-investment data and customer journey data.

Data-driven lead attribution was recently released on Google Universal Analytics. LeadPoint Digital has already been using the data-driven lead attribution and it will be automatically migrated to your Google Analytics 4 environment.

In the past, lead attribution for digital marketing campaigns has been tracked by last click, which means the digital marketing campaign only gets credit if that’s the last source a website visitor comes from before taking a conversion action on your website. The problem with that is a website visitor may interact with multiple marketing campaigns such as social media, email, organic search, and/or paid search. Data-driven lead attribution now weighs the lead based on the campaigns the visitor interacted with. This will allow you to see the true performance of your digital marketing campaigns by getting a holistic view of the customer journey.

What You Have To Do

Nothing. LeadPoint Digital has it all covered for you. We’ve successfully migrated all clients to the new Google Analytics 4 and have been tracking data. There are a lot of buzzwords being thrown around and new naming systems of metrics. This does not affect our clients; this is all behind-the-scenes information that is important for your LeadPoint team. We can educate you on the meaning of these changes if you desire, but we’ve taken care of everything so you can focus on your regular business activities and trust that LeadPoint has your digital marketing campaigns and reporting covered!

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What is the Digital Marketing Funnel?

There’s a well-known concept in marketing that most people understand – the marketing funnel. The marketing, or sales, funnel is a concept that helps you understand the process from creating awareness and interest all the way to generating leads and conversions.

When it comes to digital marketing, there’s a similar funnel. The digital marketing funnel has four levels: High Funnel, Mid-High Funnel, Mid-Low Funnel, and Low Funnel. Each level requires a different advertising message and a different measurement of success.

High Funnel

This stage often represents your potential customers’ first exposure to your brand. The messages you put out for this audience should generate top-of-mind awareness. They’re meant to get people familiar with your brand and what you provide.

Advertising at this stage doesn’t produce an immediately high conversion rate. It’s meant to make impressions and capture the attention of potential buyers. With commitment and time, high-funnel marketing will drive sales to the lower portions of the funnel and closer to a purchase or relationship.

Digital marketing at this stage is typically paid and might consist of display ads and sponsorships on newspaper and local news websites, or a network of sites.

Internet radio also falls into this category. Traditional forms of high-funnel advertising include sponsorships, billboards, and bus and bus bench advertising.

Mid-High Funnel

At this level of the funnel, you’re still creating top-of-mind awareness, but your audience is already aware of your brand and what you do. The message is typically value-based (features, benefits, perspective, etc.) and designed to separate you from your competition.

This form of advertising still doesn’t have a great conversion rate, but because of the type of message it is, it’s more likely to push people down the funnel.

Digital marketing in this stage of the funnel is still primarily paid, such as display advertising on interest-specific websites, or sponsorships that are related more closely to your audience’s interests.

Because social media advertising can be targeted based on demographics and psychographics, it can be an effective channel for reaching people at this level of the funnel. Streaming audio and video also float between the high funnel and mid-high funnel.

Content marketing is the most popular form of digital marketing that falls in the mid-high funnel.

Television and terrestrial radio are complementary channels in traditional advertising.

Mid-Low Funnel

Once you hit this part of the funnel, you’re starting to drive sales. Advertising messages should be incentive-based and include coupons, promotions, and exclusive offers. The goal at this stage is to move people to action.

Digital marketing in the mid-low funnel is a mix of paid and organic. Email marketing, re-marketing, text message marketing, and, in some cases, social media. These channels deliver a targeted, incentive-based message to your audience.

Equivalents in traditional advertising include direct mail, newspaper ads, money-saver ads, and coupon books.

Low Funnel

Low-funnel marketing provides the best immediate return on investment (ROI). Messaging is 100% call-to-action, encouraging your audience to contact you.

Companies spend most of their digital marketing budget in this stage of the funnel. It includes search engine optimization, search engine advertising, and local directory advertising because search engines and directories are where people go when they’re ready to buy.

In traditional advertising, that used to be the phone book or direct mail pieces.

Applying Digital Strategy

After you’ve identified which audiences you want advertising to reach, you apply appropriate digital marketing and traditional media tactics. Digital marketing can be an effective way to move prospects through the buying cycle.

LeadPoint Digital can help you to identify which forms of digital marketing will help you meet marketing goals. We’ll help you create a customized plan with a focus on business objectives and lead generation for different parts of the market funnel and sales cycle.

Contact us to learn more.

Personas are the anchor of many digital marketing agency strategies. Understanding your client’s audience is vital to building a successful digital marketing strategy that delivers results.

The Problem with Personas

Think about it: Personas are your client’s “perception,” their audience’s “perception,” which results in your own “perception,” which ultimately becomes the “persona(s).”

It doesn’t just sound confusing; it is confusing to mix and match so many perceptions of the same reality. But it doesn’t have to be.

Apple built their entire company based on what people don’t know they want!

Aha! Moment for Building Better Personas

Every other month, we hold communication training for our team because it’s an undeniable skill present in every aspect of agency life and our personal lives. At the end of every 2-hour session, we make it a point to apply our training to real scenarios.

After nearly 10 years of bi-monthly communication training, the “aha!” moment hit me. All the things we discussed in our training were never part of persona building. Let alone any persona our client provided us, or we saw from other competing agencies.

Using Communication Laws to Build Better in Personas

There are many studies, research, and formulas that make people better communicators.

Trust us. We’ve been through them all. But they all boiled down to these primary laws, which allow you to build personas that digital marketers actually get value from.

1. Representation Style

This is how people process the world and things around them. This gives you a medium on how to best communicate to this persona, which includes:

• Visual (see)
• Auditory (listen, read, write)
• Kinesthetic (touch, smell, taste)

2. Attitude

All people have 6 attitudes that perceive value to them. Everyone holds all these attitudes, but your personas will have attitudes that carry more weight than others. Using this gives you the formula to create value props for each attitude:

• Theoretical (more facts and figures)
• Utilitarian (wants good investment)
• Aesthetic (needs to look good)
• Social (what will others think of me)
• Individualistic (how do I make product/service better)
• Traditional (needs to fit with personal values and global outlook)

3. Language & Behavior

Like the game of telephone, everyone deletes or distorts information based on their behaviors and language. These behavioral characteristics will help identify how your persona makes a decision:

• Motivation = Proactive vs. Reactive (avoid future trouble or is in trouble)
• Direction = Toward vs. Away From (solutions to get closer to a goal or reasons why goal can’t be achieved)
• Source = Internal vs. External (makes a decision on how they feel or make a decision based on validation from another)
• Reason = Options vs. Procedures (likes control in decision making or likes clear path to decision)
• Scope = Specific vs. Global (small details vs. lofty bigger picture)

4. Human Relations

Being able to understand people and their nature allows you to communicate with your persona skillfully, which includes:

• How to make people feel important
• How to set peoples’ moods
• How to influence people
• How to convince people

Here’s the Point …

It’s great to understand your audience’s demographics, interests, geographics, and psychographics. But it doesn’t do your digital marketing any good if you don’t know how to utilize that data to sell more products or deliver more services. Incorporating human nature laws and communication behaviors into your personas enables you to craft marketing messages that resonate with your entire audience and deliver results.

Knowing Your Audience to Improve Brand Awareness

Learn from large audio and video streaming services to curate your email marketing and website for a more personalized experience.

I’m a huge music fan so one app I can’t get enough of is Spotify. On top of streaming any song in the known universe, Spotify curates incredibly genre-specific playlists just for you every week. My music taste exists on a spectrum of classic rock, EDM, and indie pop. Somehow Spotify manages to encapsulate my unique taste and spices up my music palette with new songs and artists I’ve yet to discover – every single week!

As of 2019, Spotify had 271 million users in 79 countries – they are the leading driver of revenue to the music business today. This got me thinking about all the different people who use Spotify around the world, and how they curate unique playlists for each of its users. Spotify knows its people, they know music lovers across the globe, and exactly what they want, when they want it. Ever heard of New Music Friday? A playlist of new songs from music’s top artists every Friday… yes, please!

Here’s the Point …

Think of your email marketing programs. We analyze our results and brainstorm ways to increase engagement with new subject lines and more calls-to-action with a basic knowledge of the audiences we’re targeting. You may feel you’re just shooting in the dark, hoping at least a handful of your contacts are interested in your emails.

Spotify doesn’t just hope I’m going to like the playlists it sends me every week; they know because they know me. Segmenting your email lists is a great place to start discovering who your contacts are so you can deliver communications tailored to their needs and wants. Start segmenting with the information you already have for your contacts – email engagement.

You know who opened your emails and clicked on them, and what they clicked on! Use this data to create an email campaign targeted at these people who showed some interest in your sale, event, resource, etc. Do you have any demographic or geographic data on these contacts? Look for commonalities and think of how you can segment the list even more to deliver hyper-focused messaging. Email engagement is one of the many ways you can segment your email lists.

After you’ve mastered email marketing – inbound marketing is the next step to customize a complete digital experience to strengthen your audience’s relationship with your brand.

We all have one thing in common, our differences! People’s uniqueness provides amazing opportunities to discover the different backgrounds, interests, and motives of your customers and communicate in a way that truly matters to each person.

What segmenting strategies have you found to be successful?