The biggest part of measuring your brand’s digital marketing success is understanding your customers’ online behavior and your digital ecosystem. There's a lot of talk about the importance of numbers in this age of Big Data, and with good reason - analytics are vital to digital marketing success. But if you don't know what you're measuring or why, all the data in the world won't make an impact, regardless of how much you collect. Until you know what you want to accomplish with your digital strategy, the numbers are secondary. We've probably said it before, but in the digital space, it really is all about your customers. The journey you've laid out - or perhaps most critically, neglected to layout - is the foundation upon which everything else should be built. Your customers and their journey are what defines your digital ecosystem. How to Track Your Digital Ecosystem In order to bring you up to speed on the 3 Ps of tracking your digital ecosystem as it relates to collecting meaningful data on your customers, we created another infographic for your learning pleasure. Happy analyzing! Thinking about all the components of a digital marketing strategy can be a daunting exercise. There's a lot of stuff, and if you're not actively keeping up with the industry, you can fall behind your competitors in the blink of an eye. But we hear you, we know it's tough out there. This is why we're here to tell you that focusing on a) your customers and their experience and b) the 3 Ps will go a long way in making things a little easier for you or your team to handle. So without further ado, here are the 3 Ps of tracking your digital ecosystem: The first P is for property. Your digital properties are the face of your brand in the online world. I like to think of a website as a brand's virtual representation of a large office building. If you were to walk into a company's office space it would have a huge impact on your perception of that company. In the same way, a website, which is often the first digital experience a potential customer has with your brand, will leave a lasting positive or negative impression on visitors. Another component of the first P is the three different kinds of digital properties your brand should be engaged with. We talked about websites, which are 100% controlled by the brands that own them. Social media is a two-way street between brands and the followers they engage with, so these are only partially controllable. And finally, third party review sites are vital properties that are completely controlled by other parties. The real key to the first P is understanding what you can control versus what you need to influence, and the difference between the two extremely important aspects of managing your digital ecosystem. The second P is for path - that is, the path that leads a customer to complete the action you've laid out for them. The first two Ps go hand-in-hand since before you set down a path, you first need to know which properties your customers are engaging with. Think of it like a drive-thru at a fast-food joint. You are presumably drawn to a fast-food restaurant by some form of marketing. Your first interaction is over an intercom, where you place your order. From there, you drive to the first window where you make your payment, and then to the second drive-thru window to collect your food. The point is there's a distinct, repeatable path that customers are required to follow in order to use a drive-thru. This should be the case for a customer who wants to engage with your digital properties as well. You should be driving your customer to the most attractive property you own (hopefully your website) and then directing them to an obvious "buy zone" (like the payment window at a drive-thru). And finally, just as a drive-thru attendant hands you food with a big smile and a hearty thank you, the customer's experience with your brand should continue after they make a purchase. Remember, loyal brand advocates and repeat business is vital to future success. The point at which everything we've discussed Philippines Photo Editor so far intersects with data and numbers is right here at the final P: purpose. The properties and the path both depend on the purpose, which in most cases is simply the reason you exist. For example, if the purpose of your website is to convert visitors into customers, then you know exactly what you need to measure: the number of leads and sales your website is receiving. If you have a campaign geared toward earning positive reviews and creating a "buzz" about your brand, then you should be measuring the ratio of positive to negative feedback that this purpose generates. Understanding the three Ps is a great way to get a handle on your brand's digital ecosystem and begin tracking the metrics that matter the most. Within the hectic, face-paced digital environment, it can be tough to decide what to measure and why, but the three Ps make it easy. Analyze and optimize your properties, lay out a path from your customers, and match the metrics you measure to your overall purpose. That's the end of the line for our digital ecosystem infographic, but here's the whole thing in its entirety, along with an embed code in case you'd like to share and write about it on your site.

As much as we want to believe we’re the best at what we do, that’s usually not the case. And I’m not being negative; there’s almost always somebody, somewhere, who has a better product or service than you do. Or at the very least, is working hard to build, create or invent a cheaper, more efficient alternative to whatever you offer. I’m sure there are people who would call this view cynical, but the reality is it’s simply a smart way to run a business. The point is, even if your product or service is the best right now, there’s no guarantee it’ll stay that way. Likewise, your brand might be running the best marketing campaigns since sliced bread; multiple pages ranking number one on Google for varying keywords, tons of social media engagement and conversion rates you have to see to believe. But your competitors are out there trying to do better. And not just that, they’re specifically analyzing what you’re doing and devising ways to improve on it. You better believe the business world is that tough or else you don’t stand a chance. It’s not all doom and gloom though, because that’s not what we’re about. We want to help you do better marketing, and in this particular case, there’s an opportunity to learn by comparing yourself to your most successful competitors. The formula is simple: what you currently do + what “they” do better = the best marketing strategy data can buy. Now then, onward to the comparisons! There are many tools you can use to compare your marketing efforts to a competitor’s: Google Analytics, SEMrush, gShift, Moz...all of these tools will provide useful comparisons. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to use BuzzSumo - a tool I love - to compare our blog to one of our Partners’ blogs, none other than industry giant, HubSpot. Here’s what we learned: The Bird's Eye View: Discover How You're Different So, we start at the beginning, with a general overview of content data from our blog and HubSpot's marketing blog. The first thing you'll notice is that HubSpot pushes out a lot more content than we do. But that's not surprising; they're a different kind of company, and much bigger. We operate in the same industry, yes, and we're competing for industry authority in certain spaces, but they've got a wider audience and as such, need to create more content. In any comparison to a competitor, there are certain things you should expect to find and for us, this was one of them. Even though we expected to be dwarfed by the sheer amount of content HubSpot churns out, it's still healthy for us to ask questions. Should Photo Editing Services we be creating more content? Is our current content output performing well? How would we ramp things up? We're excited by the fact we consistently, because that's a significant increase from two years ago. Given that HubSpot is having success with creating such a large amount of content, it seems likely we should consider it. We haven't even really started yet and already have some information we can use! Take A Hint From Your Network Next up is a side-by-side view of the two blogs' shares by social network. The interesting thing here is that the WSI blog has a more proportional share data than HubSpot. A significantly higher percentage of HubSpot's blog shares come from Twitter, with easily more than double their next most popular channel. By contrast, the number of shares the WSI blog receives from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook is fairly even. My second observation is these two blogs have slightly different social audiences. As mentioned, HubSpot sees the most shares of their blog content on Twitter, while we see the most shares on LinkedIn. This seems to present an opportunity, since we might have a more valuable audience on LinkedIn than HubSpot does. Any time you spot a chance to outperform a big competitor, you take it. The takeaway from this chart is that we should have a conversation about putting even more effort and energy into our LinkedIn presence.