how to communicate and leverage web and social media analytics

How to Communicate and Leverage Web and Social

Media Analytics

Lee Odden Interview

It’s a claim almost every digital marketer wishes they could make: Writing the book on how to integrate SEO, social media and content marketing strategies.

After Optimize was published in 2012, Lee Odden can say he was first to the finish.

Over the past 15 years, he has consulted for Fortune 500 companies while acting as CEO for TopRank Marketing – a firm based outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Publications such as The Economist and Wall Street Journal have recognized him for his marketing and public relations expertise. So has the industry itself, as he’s delivered speeches across Asia, Europe and North America.

“If you want your content to be great, ask your

community to participate.

-Lee Odden

Using SEO and Social Media Analytics

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Check out Keyhole; social media analytics tool for hashtag, keyword and account tracking

3 Phases of Optimization

Keyhole: In your book, Optimize, you identify 3 phases of optimization: Planning, implementation, and scaling. How important are analytics throughout this process?

Lee Odden: Very important. Measurement and analytics are big parts of what informs strategy.

They also give you the information you need to determine if you’re on track, so that you can identify missteps or other optimization opportunities. Ultimately, measurement lets you know if you’ve reached your goals or not.

http://goo.gl/UWVwX9


Trial and Error

Keyhole: There’s always room for trial and error throughout the cycle, correct?

Lee Odden: Yes. These days, the complexity of digital marketing requires there to be some allocation for experimentation. And I think that’s a big misstep for a lot of companies – they need to allocate for that.

Keyhole: Would you say those companies are playing it too safely?

Lee Odden: The dynamic nature of the social web...requires marketers to have their finger on the pulse of what’s going to be innovative. And you can only learn what’s innovative through direct observation and experimentation.



Analytics

Keyhole: How does your team at TopRank use analytics to guide your strategies?

Lee Odden: Analytics is present in every aspect of what we do. We collect data to inform our approaches and content ideation, as well as analyzing performance, optimizing ongoing activities and communicating the results of our programs.

Analytics is either performance- or research-based... We’re looking for signals of success. And we’re looking for signals of failure to inform our actions.

Keyhole: For SEO and social media optimization, which specific analytics tools do your team use?

Lee Odden: We use several tools for what we call the “mechanical” or “technical” SEO side.

We really like SEMRush. And BuzzSumo, as a social search engine...But on the social media side...there’s this tool called Keyhole. I tend to use it more for events, but there are some topics we track with Keyhole. We also use Rival IQ for competitive social analysis and light SEO.



Before Digital Analytics

Keyhole: Before so many digital analytics tools became widely available, how would you go about tracking the success of individual marketing campaigns?

Lee Odden: We would use traditional analytics, which these days is like saying Google Analytics.

Now there are also more business intelligence, or aggregate, tools one might use to pull different data sources through feeds or APIs to visualize data in dashboard format – where social, search and other web analytics data are displayed together.

And those are how we communicate marketing campaigns and performance information to our team members and clients.


Explaining and Communicating the Value of Metrics

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Analytics Reports

Keyhole: For those freelancing, consulting or in an agency setting, what advice do you have when it comes to sharing and explaining analytics reports to clients?

Lee Odden: Anybody can report tabular data and read ranking and traffic reports. It’s just reading numbers. What differentiates…is actually explaining why. Tell the story and provide insight. I need to know what the trend is. Are we moving in the right direction? I think most executives who aren’t wearing their geek hats at the moment are interested in trend data.



Analytics Reports

Lee Odden: If there’s a particularly-dramatic spike up or down, they want to understand why that happened and what we’re doing about it ...

Ideally, it’s great to say something like “we forecasted this type of performance and here’s what happened. And we think because of these correlations, if we take these steps, we can actually realize a certain percentage increase over what we anticipated” or “we’re not meeting what we forecasted, here’s what we’re doing to fix that. And based on our analyses, we’re making these choices to move us in the right direction.”

That’s communication that delivers value when it comes to analytics.


On the TopRank Blog and Content Marketing’s Future

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Online Marketing Blog

Keyhole: Your Online Marketing Blog has been going strong for more than 12 years and has picked up its fair share of awards along the way. Take us through that journey of how the blog started and evolved.

Lee Odden: 12 years of blogging in 30 seconds.

It started as an experiment. And when you do anything for a long time, you should get good at it. The feedback mechanism from the web was very inspirational for content ideas and kind of sensing – as you do as an optimistic marketer – what kind of information you could publish on a blogging platform that would actually attract buyers, candidates, partners and – in my case – speaking opportunities.



Online Marketing Blog

Going back to that cycle of optimization, it became a place where I could publish ideas, interact with people, polish my writing skills and actually use it as the connective tissue between how I represented myself digitally and the real-world experiences I would have when speaking at events.

While speaking at events, I would bring people with me and we would live blog for prospective clients. We would sit in on them giving presentations...and we would live blog what they had to say.

Those people at major brands or great websites would see what we wrote about them and they’d link to us. Back in the day, that was a wonderful method of earning high-quality links from major brand newsrooms that considered our live blog as media coverage.



Future of Content

Keyhole: With live-streaming apps such as Periscope becoming popular and similar programs being introduced, what does the future of content look like to you?

Lee Odden: In terms of what content will look like, there’s still a place for text-based material. Certainly not the way there was before, because the expectations of consumers is now to be info-tained in a business sense.

The other thing that I think is interesting in terms of what content will look like, is participation.

People are empowered to co-create with brands. If a brand makes that possible, I think consumers will be more interested than ever in co-creating content that serves mutual interests.There are so many ways to do it, especially because of mobile devices allowing people to participate at all times with brands on topics they’re passionate about. Content is an outcome with this type of participation, whether it’s a video, image or even text.


Becoming a Social Media Influencer

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Influencer

Keyhole: Having built an impressive social presence and establishing yourself as a thought-leader online, what advice would you give to someone looking to become an influencer in their given field?

Lee Odden: There’s a distinction between what I like to call “brand-dividuals” and influencers. Brand-dividuals are popular. When they talk about a given subject, people may take notice yet not necessarily act. But gosh – they certainly have high fan, friend and follower counts.

The ability to acquire influence is directly tied to your abilities to create and inspire action. In a way, the less you try to be influential, the more you can spend time on creating value and actually making great stuff with great people.



Advice

Keyhole: Are there any opinions or bits of advice you’d like to leave us with?

Lee Odden: If you want your content to be great, ask people to participate.

It’s a little rhyme related to participation marketing. And I think, as we talked about with regards to the future of content, we’re going to see more of that. It’s a collaborative effort.

I would encourage people to check out marketingblog.com – a domain that’s even easier to remember than the rhyme. You can find thousands of articles about digital topics that we’ve covered over the last 12 years.


THANKS!

Any questions?You can contactkeyhole.co/blog

@keyholekeyhole.co

http://keyhole.co/blog/how-to-use-web-and-social-media-analytics-lee-odden-interview/

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CREDITS

Special thanks to Lee Odden for the interview! @LeeOdden



PRESENTATION

Marcus Guido Content Marketing Specialist

Marcus creates Keyhole’s content and oversees media relations, successfully pitching social media data to authoritative publications.

Husnia Adel Marketing Co-ordinator

Husnia helps create Keyhole’s marketing strategies to secure traffic and boost online authority.

Jesse Quist Head of Marketing

Jesse manages the marketing team and draws up strategies to increase reach and exposure.

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