As we announced last week, our team is producing a six-part series on content marketing to be distributed for FREE via e-book at the end of June. 

This series was born out of one simple question from a few of our clients:

“What steps does your team use to approach content marketing?”

Let’s start at the beginning: How we create a content strategy. Enjoy!

Part One of Six: Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

This first part of our six part series will walk you through the following steps to create the strategy behind your content marketing efforts:

1. Leading with a Goal Driven Strategy
2. Outline Parameters
3. Roles & Responsibilities
4. Using Data to Create a Master Keyword Playbook
5. Creating a Content Calendar

Lead with a Goal Driven Strategy

First and foremost: All efforts should have tangible goals to measure success against.

To be more specific, these goals should focus exclusively on macro conversions, i.e. REVENUE.

As your group begins the strategic planning process, lead the entire strategy with these goals in mind. Every single idea your team brainstorms should focus on directly improving your bottom line performance. Great questions to consistently ask yourselves in the planning phase is:

• What is the purpose of this content?
• What actions would we like our site visitors to take after viewing / as a result of viewing this content?

Some great examples of tangible goals to measure success against include:

1. Increase in revenue from organic search engine referrals
2. Measure conversion percentage in converting non-paying leads into paying customers from content, such as e-books, white papers or other valuable resources

Outline Parameters for Your Content Strategy

You’re focused on revenue – great start! Now, the process of outlining your content marketing strategy begins with assembling company stakeholders to have a candid conversation.

Here are a few great questions to kick things off:

• Initially, how long will our content marketing effort last? A year-long test … Maybe two?
• What resources are we going to invest?
• Who leads this strategy? What success framework should be built up around that individual? 
• How exactly will success be measured?

At the conclusion of outlining your content strategy parameters, your group should have the following questions answered:

• Test timeframe for your content marketing strategy
• Resources to be invested; budgets, tools & actual human labor
• Roles and responsibilities
• Estimated outcomes & tangible goals of your content strategy

Fantastic! Your team has outlined the parameters for your content marketing strategy.

Next Up: Who is responsible & for what?

Roles & Responsibilities

We briefly touched on roles & responsibilities above, but felt the need to drive home how important it is that your team understands who is performing what actions as well as who the responsible stakeholders are.

A good way to break down roles & responsibilities is outlined below:

• Strategic Direction: This is a senior-level stakeholder who is going to drive the overall vision of the content marketing strategy
• Mid-Level Managers: This stakeholder is part manager, part in-the-weeds with the assistants executing the content strategy
• Assistant-Level Employees: These are the skilled individuals ‘in the trenches’ who are creating and promoting content

One of our favorite ways to visually display this is through a traditional org chart, like the drawing seen below:

Using Data to Create a Master Keyword Playbook

At this point, it’s time to determine what type of keywords your content will be created to rank for & bring in revenue from.

In most cases, we pull this data from the following sources:

• Google Keyword Research Tool
• Paid Search Marketing Data (Google Analytics)
• Organic Search Marketing Data (Google Analytics)

Let’s walk through each one of these data sources and then show you how to assemble the data.

Google Keyword Research Tool

Google Keyword Tool aggregates keyword performance data for each and every search performed on the Google search engine and presents it in a monthly snapshot. This tool hosts historic and current keyword data that can be used by marketers to use for research purposes.

Follow the steps below to use this tool for keyword research:

Step #1: Direct Browser to Google Keyword Tool

Point your browser to the following URL https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool 

Step #2: Authenticate

To authenticate, you’ll need to do one of two things:

1. Be currently logged in to your Google AdWords account
2. Enter a captcha (if you don’t have an AdWords account)

Step #3: Type in Beginning Phrases

At this point, it’s time to type in beginning thoughts on keywords or keyword phrases that your content will focus on.

For example: Examples relevant to this article include ‘content marketing strategy’, ‘content strategy’ & ‘content marketing’, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Notice the labels ‘competition’ and ‘local monthly searches’?

Competition indicates the amount of search competition those keywords have on a scale of ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’.

Local monthly searches indicates the volume of searches each keyword recieves in the US each month.

Step 4: Expand on Beginner Phrases

Notice below the ‘search terms’ section of Google Keyword Tool is a section labeled ‘keyword ideas’. See the screenshot below.

The ‘keyword ideas’ section includes similar keywords or keyword phrases that you may want to include.

All these keywords can be expanded by clicking on the blue arrow to the right of the term and selecting ‘show more like this’, as seen in the screenshot below:

Step 5: Export Research

While Google Keyword Tool is a great start, your team is going to want to include more data from paid & organic search sources to create a final version of your Master Keyword Playbook.

With that in mind, check the keyword searches & ideas that you would like to export and hit the ‘download’ button.

See screenshot below:

Paid Search Marketing Data

If your company is running paid search marketing campaigns through Bing Ads or Google AdWords, the keyword performance data can be a gold mine to include in your Master Keyword Playbook.

Let’s walk through the process to pull this data from Google AdWords:

Step #1: Log Into Google AdWords or Google Analytics

In most cases, we connect Google AdWords and Analytics so paid search data flows directly into the clients Google Analytics account.

In this example, we would log in to Google Analytics to extract Paid Search Marketing data.

Step #2: Drill Down into Advertising Traffic

Within the ‘traffic sources’ tab on the left-hand side of your Google analytics account, you’ll notice a section labeled ‘Advertising’. Expand this section along with the following section, labeled ‘AdWords’, to find Google AdWords Paid Search data.

After expanding those two sections, then click on ‘keywords’.

Step #3: Export Keyword Data

Similar to the Google Keyword Tool, you can & should export this keyword data out of Google Analytics.

After selecting the correct date range, scroll to the top of the ‘keywords’ section and click on the ‘export’ button. We recommend exporting all data as a .csv

See an example in the screenshot below:

Organic Search Marketing Data

In Google Analytics, the approach to find organic search marketing data is almost exactly the same as the approach we just walked through to find Paid Search Marketing data.

Just to be thorough, let’s walk through how to pull organic search keywords from Google Analytics:

Step #1: Log Into Google Analytics

Navigate to your Google Analytics account and log in to your website profile.

Step #2: Look at Organic Search Traffic Sources

Navigate to ‘traffic sources’, then click ‘search’. After the ‘search’ tab expand, click on the ‘organic’ section seen in the screenshot below.

Step #3: Export Keyword Data

One thing to notice here is how Google Analytics will display keyword performance data by default (opposed to sources, landing pages & more). These keywords are the data you want to export.

Just as we did with Paid Search Marketing data, you’ll want to hit the ‘export’ button and select the file type as .csv, seen in the screenshot below.

Assembling the Data into a Master Keyword Playbook

At this point, you’ll need to assemble the keywords you’ve extracted from the three sources noted above and create a Master Keyword Playbook.

This playbook will determine what keywords to target when creating content and act as your north star — all content creation decisions should be made using this playbook!

More importantly, these keywords should be what we call ‘commerce keywords’, or keywords / keyword phrases that drive toward a revenue-positive action. In our own Master Keyword Playbook, an example of using ‘commerce keywords’ is using the phrase ’how to find content marketing agency’ as opposed to “content marketing tips”.

In assembling your data, you are going to break down into two groups:

1. Broad Range Topics: Start with the 50,000 foot view, broad-range topics that you will create content around. Our own master keyword playbook includes broad range topics like ‘Internet Marketing’, ‘Agency’ & ‘B2B Marketing’ as those are broad client verticals and services that we perform
2. Tight-Knit Keyword Groups: Within your broad topics, you need to create tight keyword groupings. Using the ‘Agency’ example above, our keyword groups contain keywords queries such as ‘social media marketing agency’ and ‘social media marketing services’

The goal here is simple: Expand into as many broad range topics as possible, then tighten up your keyword groups within these topics.

This should all be performed within an excel spreadsheet. When your team has assembled the three data sources into a single spreadsheet, you’ll end up with a document that contains 4 – 8 broad range topics and hundreds of tight keyword groupings like the one below:

Creating a Content Calendar

You’re so close to launching your content marketing strategy! At this point, we have established your content strategy parameters, tangible goals, stakeholders involved & what you are going to write about.

It’s now time to create a content calendar to outline the following:

1. Publishing Frequency
2. Publishing Dates / Times
3. Content Types to Publish

There are a number of great content calendar tools that will help your group collobrate across the entire organization. We’ve taken the time to list a few of our favorites below:

• Contently
• WordPress
• DivvyHQ

In Review

Over this course of this post, we have covered how to do the following things:

• Lead with a Goal-Driven Content Strategy
• Outline Parameters for a Content Marketing Strategy
• Assign Roles & Responsibilities
• Create a Master Keyword Playbook
• Create a Content Calendar

Next week, we’ll build on our discussion of content calendars by dissecting & reviewing different types of content formats.

In the new opportunity we are offering, the MKG Media Group team would be happy to provide a free 15-minute consultation session to discuss content marketing with your brand.

–

Mike Krass | CEO
MKG Media Group

Aside from being the CEO at MKG Media Group, Mike is a dark beer aficionado with a healthy appetite for travel and pushing personal boundaries. A proud graduate of Washington State University, Mike currently calls San Francisco home.

Twitter // Google+ // Email

As clients continued to ask for our assistance with their content marketing strategy, we thought it would valuable to create a Content Marketing How-To Guide here on the blog for our loyal readers to learn more about our approach to Content Marketing Strategy here at MKG Media Group

During the next six weeks, we will discuss the following subjects:

• Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
• Description of Content Formats
• Using Data to Determine What Content to Write
• Using Data to Determine How Often to Publish Content
• How to Promote Your Content
• How to Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy

And if this couldn’t get any better, at the conclusion of this series we will post the entire MKG Media Group Content Marketing Bible on our website as a free, downloadable e-book.

See you next week for Part 1: Creating a Content Marketing Strategy!

In the new opportunity we are offering, the MKG Media Group team would be happy to provide a free 15-minute consultation session to discuss content marketing with your brand.

–

Mike Krass | CEO
MKG Media Group

Aside from being the CEO at MKG Media Group, Mike is a dark beer aficionado with a healthy appetite for travel and pushing personal boundaries. A proud graduate of Washington State University, Mike currently calls San Francisco home.

Twitter // Google+ // Email

Do you know how to calculate the lifetime value of a loyal customer?

Marketers often discuss the lifetime value of a loyal customer as a key metric to compare alongside customer acquisition costs, retention & churn rate.

In this article, we’ll walk through the process of calculating lifetime value using what’s known as ‘simple lifetime value’ equation.

Read on to learn the formula!

To begin with, I need to establish a few definitions:

1. Customer Lifetime Value: The total profit or loss seen from an individual customer over the ‘life time’ of their use of your product 
2. Customer Acquisition Costs: Dollar amount your  brand invests to acquire a single customer
3. Customer Retention: The percent of customers retained against the number of customers that approached you for a cancellation of service
4. Churn Rate: The rate at which customers churn, or cancel use of your service, over a specific period of time

Now that we have defined a few of the key terms to be discussed in this article, let’s all step back for a moment and ask a question:

How is your brand actually measuring the full lifetime value of your loyal customers?

We examine three key factors to measure customer lifetime value:

1. Ability to measure across devices & marketing tactic
2. Understanding anonymous vs. known users
3. Tools needed to tie these points together

Factor #1: Measuring Across Devices 

In this day and age, one of the biggest tasks involved in measuring lifetime value is:

How are you measuring performance across devices?

Capturing & measuring lifetime value across devices is most commonly performed through aliases.

Let’s walk you through an example of creating and integrating aliases:

1. Your website provides an anonymous identifier, “user123″ for example, each time a unique individual visits from a new device (iPhone, iPad, PC)
2. When the anonymous user finally signs in, using an email form for example, they authenticate themselves
3. As the user continues to sign in across devices (iPhone, iPad, PC) using their email address, that authentication process brings the disparate aliases together to create a complete picture of that individual user

Factor #2: Measuring Across Marketing Channels

Building on Factor #1 (Measuring Across Devices), it’s equally important to understand the lifetime value of the marketing channel that drove each user to originally purchase your product or service.

For the sake of argument, let’s discuss channel measurement in terms of last click attribution (as opposed to multichannel attribution).

Using aliases & authentication, you can measure individual customer value down to the unique marketing channel that drove customer acqusition in the following format:

• Customer Acquisition: How much investment did it take to acquire that customer originally?
• Retention Rate: Did she stay a customer following a free trial / initial sign up period? Or …
• Churn Rate: Was she part of the percent of users who cancelled their service following sign up?

Factor #3: Tools Needed

Your brand is ready to begin measuring customer lifetime value: Fantastic!

Now what tools do you need?

Let’s outline a short list showing of the type of tools you’ll need as well as a few examples of vendors that provide these capabilities:

• Web Analytics: A web analytics tool will allow you to create goal conversions & events to measure site engagement, marketing channel performance and product purchases. Examples of web analytics tool include Google Analytics, Omniture & WebTrends
• Data Management Platform: A data management platform provides you with the ability to create aliases, store anonymous customer data & integrate known customer data points for users who have authenticated. A low-fi (yet powerful) example of an aliasing tool is KISSmetrics, while a more robust data management platform like x+1 would provide more customer data storage & usage capabilities

A Sample Calculation of Customer Lifetime Value

Now I’ll caveat this calculation up front: There are a number of ways to calculate customer lifetime value.

I’ll just walk through what’s known as ‘Simple Lifetime Value’ equation.

First up, let’s get some definitions established:

• (span) = Average number of years customers remain loyal to ‘Client XYZ’. For this example, let’s assume average span is 20 years
• (revenue) = Measured in months, this is the revenue the individual customer spends on your product. Let’s assume your product costs $20 per month
• (months) = measurement on an annual basis. Just as a reminder, there are 12 months in a year

And now let’s walk through a sample equation:

(months x revenue) x span

Now when we fill in some data pulled from the ‘Client XYZ’ archives:

(12 x $20) x 20 = $4,800

There you have it: Client XYZ’s average lifetime customer value is $4,800.

Your turn! Try plugging in your own company data into the model outlined above and see what comes out!

In the new opportunity we are offering, the MKG Media Group team would be happy to provide a free 15-minute consultation session to calculating customer lifetime value for your brand.

–

Mike Krass | CEO
MKG Media Group

Aside from being the CEO at MKG Media Group, Mike is a dark beer aficionado with a healthy appetite for travel and pushing personal boundaries. A proud graduate of Washington State University, Mike currently calls San Francisco home.

Twitter // Google+ // Email

Recently, one of our clients asked to drive ALL their digital marketing efforts, tracked by 3rd party tags, to a Facebook Promotion page.

In remembering what Don Draper said two weeks ago in Mad Men, about saying yes when they should have said no, our initial gut instinct was to tell the client:

Absolutely not. With the way conversion tracking is set up right this minute, we cannot track performance on that Facebook Promotion page.

Instead, we took a step back to test whether or not their 3rd party tags could be tracked through a Facebook Promotion Page.

Ask Questions

Before we provide a solution to a client we first made sure we understood all the moving parts out of our control, in this case the only piece we didn’t control was the Facebook page and how it was built.

By simply asking, “How is this built? Are you using a specific program or writing it from scratch with HTML & CSS?” We got a very simply response from our client that they were using Shortstack, a free application to easily build Facebook Pages for promotions, sign-ups, photo contests, etc.

Research

By having this information we were able to quickly look at any documentation Shortstack had on 3rd party tracking. The only page we found was in regards to tracking referrals, but to track those we’d still need to implement 3rd party tags.

So we decided the best research is hands on research so we created a Shortstack account with a fake promotion to run a conversion test.

Trial & Error

By creating our own account we were able to walk through the user flow and see where the sign-up is confirmed.  In this case the only change was a simple copy addition, that simply said,

Thank you for your submission

Because it wasn’t a separate landing page we weren’t sure we were going to be able to track conversions at all. Before we gave up all hope and turn to our client to say no, we quickly walked one of our developers through the process he’s said to place an image tag after the thank you copy.

After digging further into the functionality of Shortstack we were able to do just that.

Follow These 4 Steps to Track Your Own Facebook Promotions Using 3rd Party Conversion Tags

In staying with the Shortstack Facebook Promotion page application, follow the steps below:

Step #1: Sign in to Shortstack

Step #2: Open The Promotion Page App

Open your App that houses the promotion you need to track. In our case, “Fake It ‘Til You Make It” is the test application we created.

Step #3: Edit the Promotion

Under ‘edit widgets’, click the pencil icon for Promotion.

Step #3: Implement Image Tag

• Scroll down to “Override Labels, Messages, and Other Text”
• Replace “Thank you for your submission” with: Thank you for your submission <img src=”//www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion/xxxxxxx/?value=0&amp;label=xxxxxxxxxxxx&amp;guid=ON&amp;script=0″ style=”height:1;  width:1″/>

Step #4: QA Test to Confirm Tracking is Operation

We use the Ghostery Plugin for Firefox & Chrome which allows us to see the conversion pixel fires in the purple box at the top right of our browser.

We’d Like to Hear From You!

Trying to do this exact thing, but having issues? The MKG Media Group team would be happy to provide a free 15-minute consultation to help you track all your digital marketing channels when driving to a Facebook Promotion. Click the link below to get in touch!

–

Kerry Guard | COO
MKG Media Group

After working at four other major agencies (Publicis Modem, MEC, & WDCW) on big brands (Verizon Wireless, General Mills, Microsoft, Western Digital, etc) Kerry partnered up with Mike Krass on this new venture in an effort to pave her own media destiny.

Twitter // Email

I would just like to commend you for the awesomeness that is your digital marketing, which features a heavy does of personalization marketing.

Not only did you deliver me a re-targeting ad on Facebook after I visited your website, but it was personalized with a hotel that I had JUST looked at.  I’m impressed.

On top of the ad being personalized to my browsing tastes, you accomplished a lot in just 90 characters.

In three steps, let’s break down the anatomy of your Facebook ad:

1. Title: Your Company Name – A good start as I’ve already been to your site so now I recognize who is talking to me
2. Image: Picture of the hotel I was looking at – A little busy for a thumbnail image, but I get the sense of ambiance
3. Body: Name of the hotel to remind me what I looked at … check.  Price of the hotel, check. Sense of urgency, check.

I clicked on the ad to make sure your personalization followed through to the website, and it did! You took me right to the Hudson Hotel landing page of your website.

The only blunder I see is the price listed is not the price from your ad. Because it’s such a 33% price difference ($120) it could cost you a user to bounce.

On top of your ad being clear, concise, and to the point, so is your landing page. Travel websites take note of the following:

• Big pictures
• Clean background
• Easy & fun navigation for checking availability
• Big, eye-catching buttons
• Easily shareable

Thank you Jetsetter for showing us marketers how Personalization Marketing is really done.

Kerry Guard | COO
MKG Media Group

After working at four other major agencies (Publicis Modem, MEC, & WDCW) on big brands (Verizon Wireless, General Mills, Microsoft, Western Digital, etc) Kerry partnered up with Mike Krass on this new venture in an effort to pave her own media destiny.

Twitter
Email

This question comes up all the time when speaking with brand marketers:

How do I find a good social marketing media agency?

As we’ve heard that question so many times lately, we decided to put together three tips for brands to use in finding their next great social media marketing shop.

Tip #1: Use Twitter Search as Your Guide

If you’re looking to hire a social media marketing agency, there’s probably one thing that’s absolutely necessary:

Their own social media channels should be active, filled with fresh content (their own & others) and engaging in conversations with others

Due to it’s very nature as an information sharing platform, we recommend brands use to Twitter to help source prospective social media marketing agencies that are active on that channel.

Here are a few steps to get you started:

1. Head to the URL search.twitter.com to begin searching recent tweets
2. Type in relevant hashtags, in this case #agency and #social
3. Sift through the tweets and, more importantly, the people / agencies who are posting these tweets

Take a look at the screenshot below:

As you can see at the top left, there is a ‘People’ section that allows you to click on individual brands/people that show up for the following hash tags.

When I hovered over it, I found the following:

• Four Social Media Marketing Agencies spanning from Vancouver, Canada, to London, England
• Two Digital Marketing Agencies, based here in the United States
• One Social Media Job Board

As our headline suggests, use Twitter as your guide! Look for social media marketing agencies that are active on their own channels to hire on to manage your own.

Tip #2: Take Your Need to Google

Much like using Twitter search as an avenue to find your next social media marketing agency, a properly tuned Google search should bring up a series of paid and organic search results for you to consider.

Let’s start with the paid search results:

1. I started with the search term ‘need social media agency’
2. Looking at the paid search results, I found more than 15 options on the first page alone

See my screenshot below:

Performing the same exercise, let’s take a look at the top 5 organic search results:

To help make sense of all these paid & organic search results, ask yourself the following:

• Do we need a full-blown social media marketing agency, or can we get away with a freelance hire?
• Are there tools advertised in these paid search results that could be utilized by my existing staff to perform the duties a social media marketing agency normally would help us with?
• Do I want a local agency or is my main focus on finding the best available option, regardless of location?

Tip #3: Peruse Marketing Websites for Case Studies

Marketing websites do a fantastic job of posting groundbreaking client work or agency-provided case studies that show off resultsof  innovative & new marketing techniques.

The best part of all this work being highlighted: The agency is always given credit in the footnotes!

Set up a Google Alert (instructions here) to monitor the following websites for social media marketing case studies and agencies:

1. AdLand.tv: AdLand is an independently ran website that features new and innovative marketing executions from brands and agencies
2. Media Bistro: Media Bistro features Agency Spy, an agency-specific section of their website that takes a look at new client business, where top agency talent is working at & more
3. Mashable Marketing Section: Featured in the image below, Mashable’s marketing section details how brands and agencies are implementing new marketing techniques, particularly in the realm of social media marketing

What Other Tips Have You Tried to Discover a Great Social Media Marketing Agency?

In the new opportunity we are offering, the MKG Media Group team would be happy to provide a free 15-minute consultation session to discuss social media marketing with your brand.

–

Mike Krass | CEO
MKG Media Group

Aside from being the CEO at MKG Media Group, Mike is a dark beer aficionado with a healthy appetite for travel and pushing personal boundaries. A proud graduate of Washington State University, Mike currently calls San Francisco home.

Twitter // Google+ // Email

In our previous blog posts, we discussed measuring the return on investment of marketing analytics and brought up the idea of a dashboard.

Just to review:

A dashboard is an interactive tool that aggregates all your data into a single view. Analytics from multiple sources are contained in one place, making it easier to assess your marketing progress.

In this post, we’re going to look at three tools that will help you compile key metrics across multiple channels––such as social media, paid advertising, and organic website traffic––and visualize that data in an easy-to-use and actionable way.

We’ll be taking a look at the following tools:

1. Dashzen
2. LeftTronic
3. GoodData

1. Dashzen

The first tool we’ll discuss is Dashzen.

Setting Up the Tool

Dashzen is a 100-percent free tool that is currently in beta. Users log in to Dashzen online and create a dashboard that will aggregate raw data from places like Facebook, Google Analytics, YouTube, Salesforce, and GitHub to provide integrated insights into how your marketing efforts are doing.

The Pros

• Features prebuilt templates & layouts, which make configuring the placement and sizing of gadgets within Dashzen an easy task
• Great for smaller companies looking for a straightforward dashboard without extraneous bells and whistles

The Cons

• Simplicity is both a pro and a con, as it limits the amount of customization you can build into this dashboarding tool
• While easy to visualize your data, there is a lack of custom design elements that make visualizing your data in very specific ways nearly impossible

2. Leftronic

Setting Up The Tool

The second free dashboard option is Leftronic. Leftronic is similar to Dashzen in that it offers real-time analytics in one place and has a 30-day free trial period.

The Pros

• A 30-day free trial allows you to test drive the tool before investing in a premium version ,  no credit care
• Choose from pre-built templates or fully customize the way your metrics are displayed on your dashboard
• Ability to purchase dashboard bundles of dashboards to build out (5 / 20 / 100 / etc)
• White label solution offers the ability to remove all LeftTronic branding and customize branding to each individual client

The Cons

• Somewhat clunky user interface takes a little bit of getting used to when designing your dashboards
• Only light/dark background available in most plans (outside of white label solution)
• Inability to combine multiple sources in a single graph without using HTML/XML, a great example being social sentiment & revenue on the same graph

3. GoodData

The Set Up

A third available dashboard tool is GoodData. GoodData is a tool that allows for Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) that delivers an extremely customized dashboarding experience.

As a side note, GoodData is the preferred dashboarding tool for us here at MKG Media Group.

The Pros

• Has numerous prebuilt connectors into the most widely used tools, such as Omniture SiteCatalyst, social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and Salesforce
• Ability to write your own HTML/XML connectors
• GoodData engineering support to assist in building out custom connectors

The Cons

• Price is a consideration for brands, as there is a ‘buy in’ to implement this type of custom dashboarding solution

Questions for You, our Loyal Readers!

1. Have you used any of these tools before?
2. If you employ a different solution, which one?
3. If you aren’t using any sort of dashboard tool to aggregate your analytics, let us know why not in the comments section!

–

Mike Krass | CEO
MKG Media Group

Aside from being the CEO at MKG Media Group, Mike is a dark beer aficionado with a healthy appetite for travel and pushing personal boundaries. A proud graduate of Washington State University, Mike currently calls San Francisco home.

Twitter // Google+ // Email

We’ve been named the Agency of Record for Zweena Health!

So who is Zweena Health and what do they do? Well, according to their website:

Zweena is an innovator of personal health solutions focused on empowering healthcare consumers and changing the way individuals use their own health information.

In laymen’s terms, Zweena provides consumers with the ability to collect, store & access their health record electronically.

In partnership with Microsoft HealthVault, Zweena provides one of the only electronic health record solutions where the consumer actually owns their own records, as opposed to a hospital or medical group having ownership over said records.

Take a look at their process below:

How Did MKG Media Group Connect with Zweena Health?

In a classic client/agency meeting, we connected with Zweena through a mutual friend.

Specifically, the story goes a little something like this:

• Two gentlemen riding the train from Princeton, New Jersey, to New York City strike up a conversation
• One of the gentleman is the CEO of a consumer health company based in Princeton and needs assistance with marketing
• The other gentleman’s niece owns a digital marketing agency in San Francisco and offers an introduction
• The consumer health company CEO and digital marketing agency meet and totally hit it off! Naturally, they end up working together happily ever after. Yay!

What Work Will MKG Media Group Perform for Zweena Health?

Without going too much into detail, the MKG Media Group team will perform the following services:

• Paid Search Marketing
• Organic Search Engine Marketing
• Content Marketing Strategy & Execution
• A/B & Multivariate Landing Page Testing
• Audience Segmentation & Targeting

From All of us Here at MKG Media Group, We’d Like to Welcome Zweena to our Esteemed Client Roster!

–

Mike Krass | CEO
MKG Media Group

Aside from being the CEO at MKG Media Group, Mike is a dark beer aficionado with a healthy appetite for travel and pushing personal boundaries. A proud graduate of Washington State University, Mike currently calls San Francisco home.

Twitter // Google+ // Email

First, if you’re unfamiliar with what Google Tag Manager (GTM) is, this is how Google describes their product:

“Google Tag Manager makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags — including analytics, remarketing, and more – with just a few clicks, and without bugging the IT folks.”

Sounds pretty sweet, right? It is! GTM code acts as a tag management system that places a “container” tag on your web page. Once in place, you’re able to specify rules as to when you want specific pieces of code to show up in the container, such as:

1. Set up rules that have Google Analytics code fire on every page of a website
2. Set up a rule that lets AdWords conversion code fire whenever someone hits a “thank you” page.

Hashtag done.

However, things aren’t so cut and dry with GTM. The support documentation is lacking in some critical areas. The following are some answers to questions those who are thinking of using GTM might have that Google doesn’t have any support documentation around.

Using Google Tag Manager on HTTPS pages

If you’re going to be placing GTM code on a secure web page (https), then you’ll need to make a small tweak to your Google Tag Manager code in order for it to work.

There are two instances in the Google Tag Manager code that starts with “src=”. Change the following “//www” to “https://www” for both.

This will then allow the GTM container code to accurately display on a secure web page.

I use MediaMind Ad Server and wish to use GTM to deploy that code. Can I?

Yes you can… but you need to tweak two lines of code.

First, you need to place the code in a custom image tag. This is an option you can select when creating a new tag. Then copy / paste the code that was given to you from MediaMind. Now, you’ll need to replace this line of code:

document.write(‘<scr’+'ipt src=”HTTP://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/ActivityServer.bs?cn=as&ActivityID=XXXXX&rnd=’ + ebRand + ‘”>’);

With this line of code:

jQuery.getScript(“HTTP://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/ActivityServer.bs?cn=as&ActivityID=XXXXX&;rnd=” + ebRand);

Do know you need to place the correct ActivityID (which I have as XXXXX in the examples) in the tweaked line of code in order to track the desired activity.

How can I easily check if GTM is installed properly?

We like two specific Chrome extensions: Google Tag Assistant and Ghostery. The pros & the cons are:

1. Google Tag Manager will only report on Google-specific code
2. Ghostery will report on a whole slew of different code types, including beacons, advertising tags, privacy trackers and widgets

You can find Google Tag Assistant here and Ghostery here.

Should I look to deploy GTM for my own / clients’ websites?

Yes and no. If you fall under the following scenarios, we would recommend looking to use GTM:

• Running paid search and are using conversion codes
• Running a retargeting or remessaging program (get tags on specific pages with burn pixels to stop remarketing to customers who have already converted)
• Have a possible need of adding code to a client’s website in the future

If you have any questions, we’ve certainly built up quite a bit of knowledge about GTM and are happy to help. Feel free to contact me (social media links below) or comment on this blog post.

We’d Like to Hear From You!

In the new opportunity we are offering, the MKG Media Group team would be happy to provide a free 15-minute consultation session to discuss tag management systems with your brand.

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Christian Bullock | Director of Search
MKG Media Group

When he’s not on the clock as the Director of Search at MKG, Christian is a player of both ice hockey and the trombone (though not necessarily at the same time). You’ll often find him deep in his RSS feed reader digesting industry news, reading a good book or being a participant in his daughter’s tea party.

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