According to your specific business and goals, there are various metrics you can use to help you track your progress and optimize your strategy. Once you know your goals, you can think through which metrics will help you reach them. To this end, the next several posts will be dedicated to goal-based metrics. We will examine specific metrics, what they tell us, how they are calculated, the best ways to implement their tracking, and what business goal they help us achieve. The hope is that you will be able to take some of these metrics and implement them to enhance your own business strategy.

Number of times you’ve said thank you / Number of times you’ve been helped = Your level of gratitude

According to this math, if the ratio equals “1”, you are perfectly grateful. Except you’re not. Saying thank you is nice, but real gratitude involves more than just talking. Let’s improve our equation:

Number of times you’ve helped / Number of times you’ve been helped = Your level of gratitude

Now, a score of “1” would indicate perfect gratitude. Except it still doesn’t. Are we really able to calculate this metric with exactness? Let’s look at this equation:

Number of times you have been helped that you know of / Total number of times you have been helped = Your level of awareness

No one will ever earn a score of “1” on this metric. We are forgetful, we lose track, we tend to focus on the negative more than the positive, and we just aren’t aware of everything that happens or has happened. Can you calculate the number of things your parents have done for you? Not likely; a numerous amount of them happened when you were a baby. How about calculating how much sacrifice has gone into making your country free? Again, it’s impossible. And these two examples say nothing about the things that are done for us day by day that we simply don’t know about.

The point is, we are all in a great deal of gratitude debt. So much so, that even if we spent our whole lives being grateful in every way we knew how, we’d never get it paid off. So why bother calculating it?

Well, we shouldn’t. We have learned our lesson from trying to calculate it. And that lesson is that we need to be more grateful than we think we should be. Because in the final analysis, even that will end up being less than we really should be.

Showing gratitude, being helpful, and adding value are good marketing practices. More importantly, they’re good human practices.

Three activities encompass today’s marketing: Listening, Community Building, and Content Creation & Promotion. Wrap all of those up with analytics for optimization, and you have a substantial and functional marketing analytics approach.

Listening

We understand by listening. But it must be active listening. It takes concentration and effort to be a good listener and really understand and take in what people tell you; the same is true of marketing listening strategies.

There are many tools and methods available for listening. Social media monitoring allows you to keep up on what people are saying about your brand and industry. Web analytics allow you to understand how people interact with your site. Online surveys (4-Q is one of the better ones) allow you to poll your customers directly. Alerts from sources such as Google Alerts and Backtype allow you to keep tabs on new content that is put up on the web according to keywords.

Community Building

An important aspect to remember about business and marketing is that they are about human relationships. No matter how many tools, analytics, and online channels that are available to us, these must always be used with the larger perspective that they exist to facilitate real human relationships.

Building a community means networking. It means finding areas of need and helping out where you can. It means responding, engaging, and interacting with other people. It means growing and nurturing mutually beneficial relationships. It means building trust. Taking the time to build a strong community not only has benefits for you, but it also helps everyone as a whole.

Again, there are numerous tools and methods for building a community. Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow for high levels of interaction. Forums, blogs, and wiki’s allow you to participate with groups of people online. Business sites such as LinkedIn allow you to collaborate with other professionals. Sites such as meetup.com allow you to find people in your area to meet with in person. Being a genuine and helpful person allows you to build meaningful, real relationships.

Content Creation and Promotion

Your content, in many cases, determines who you are online. It is the substance of your web presence. If you have little content, people probably won’t find you. If you don’t have valuable content, people won’t want to come back once they do find you.

Content includes web pages, blog posts, videos, podcasts, photos, webinars, whitepapers, online polls and questionnaires, tweets, comments, etc. Produce content that is valuable, interesting, or funny to your market, and produce enough of it, and they will find you. Keep producing it, and they will keep coming back for more.

There are numerous ways to prime your content and spread it so that it can be found. These include article and directory submissions, social sharing sites, social media sites, best practices for search engine optimization, advertising, and so forth. Keeping in mind good design and promotional practices is also important in this arena.

Optimization

This is where the analytics enter the picture. The remarkable thing about all of the above marketing components is that they can be tracked, measured, and improved using analytical methods. By adding the analytics component, you can be sure you are allocating your time and money where it counts. The data analytics gives you the insight you need to fine-tune your marketing program.

The above was meant as an outline to a simple yet robust marketing plan. Throughout the coming days and weeks, the three aspects of marketing will be covered in depth, along with actionable methods of implementing and optimizing them.

First, let’s discuss the term marketing, and start by defining what it is not (or at least, what it shouldn’t be). Real marketing is not manipulative. Real marketing is not the slick used car salesman trying to rip you off. Real marketing is not trying to make a trash product look better than it really is. Real marketing is not deceitful.

Real marketing means bringing valuable products and services to the people who need, want, and are able to purchase them. Assuming you have a product or service that is valuable to other people, you already have a market. The trick for you now is finding that market, educating about your product or service, and building trust so that the market will purchase. When this occurs, both parties win – you make the sale, and your market gets your valuable product or service.

It sounds like a simple idea, and in theory, it is. It’s when we need to apply this theory to real world situations and make marketing work that the problems occur. There are many questions to be answered, such as: Who is my market (who needs my product or service)? What will resonate with them? How do I best educate them about my product or service? What are the best channels to reach them? How do I communicate with them in a way that they will understand? What are the ways I build trust with them?

Analytics

Because there are so many variables involved in marketing, it’s not possible to have exact answers to these questions. What’s more, the variables always seem to be in flux and we never have complete control over them, making it hard to find concrete, sure answers. Despite these difficulties, however, it still remains that we need marketing to work.

This is where the analytics enter the picture. Analytics, in practical terms, can be defined as the investigation of available data and facts (be it qualitative or quantitative) to arrive at an optimal decision. The analyst seeks to find true, valuable insight from the investigation of the data and circumstances.

Marketing Analytics

Combining the two terms, we arrive at marketing analytics, or the practice of investigating data and facts to make optimal and functional marketing decisions. The marketing analytics practitioner, then, must not only be able to do this type of analysis and see the data in context to get real insight, but he must also be able to translate this insight into action.

To be successful at marketing analytics, one must draw from a large base of knowledge and skills. An understanding of sociology, human relationships, psychology, communications, and statistics is necessary. Being able to write, educate, make an idea sticky, manipulate data, see data in context, and break down complexity into simplicity is essential. Marketing analytics can span from doing web analytics, search engine optimization, good website or advertisement design, social media, traditional PR channels, content creation, television and radio campaigns, to a myriad of other activities.

In short, it is not something you master in a day. It is a multi-faceted discipline that requires study, practice, and dedication. The purpose of this blog is to help you understand and effectively use marketing analytics. We hope that by covering various aspects of marketing analytics on a daily basis, we can all come to a greater understanding and gain the ability to have success in the discipline.