digMarketing - dig to grow.
About Me

"dig" is short for digital, but it also happens to be a great metaphor for Marketing. You dig when you want to grow something, before you start to build something, when looking for buried treasure. You dig to harvest and you dig to find your target markets, their hot buttons, and how to reach them. You dig to figure out what works. That's what "dig" is all about. We believe marketing is not just about standing on a hilltop and shouting. It's about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty. There's only one way to grow and that's to dig.

If you want to know more, email me: deb@digmktg.com.

Or go to digMktg.com

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All I want for Christmas is for iTunes to get their act together

Amazon knows a little bit about me. They know what books I've bought from them and through their LinkedIn application, they know about a couple of books I didn't buy from them. But they might know about 5% of my reading habits. The most boring 5%, in fact, because it's the 5% I'm willing to wait 3 days for. With this information, they tailor my customer experience when I'm on their website and periodically send me targeted emails based on my buying habits. It doesn't do them a whole lot of good, because the other 95% of my reading habits are the interesting part they don't know about. It's the classic and modern fiction, the poetry, the essays...this is the stuff I would really love to get book recommendations on. But I don't blame Amazon for that. How could I? They know nothing about it.
But iTunes, on the other hand, has no excuse. When I set up iTunes and became an enthusiastic user, I ripped every CD I owned so I could carry my favorite music on my iPod. They know more than just the music I've purchased from them (probably 5%), they know EVERYTHING about my musical tastes. So what do they do with this information? Do they customize my user experience? Well...no. Come on! Tell me they use a Pandora-esque application to acquaint me with new music based on the music in my iTunes. Ummm... Do they at least use email to market to me based on my musical preferences? Wow. This is embarrassing.

Apple, you're so amazing at engineering and design. Work with me, here.

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Filed under  //  Amazon.com   iTunes   marketing strategy   Pandora  
Posted 3 months ago

"Customer Engagement" agency leverages Youtube to talk about Facebook to promote their social media services!

Okay, it's fun, no doubt. But what do you think about Big Fuel's model of engagement with the customer/prospect "off message" and then bringing them to the commerce table? It certainly worked for them. After seeing this video, I was interested in learning what kind of company would put out such a creative, well-produced, entertaining video about, well, nothing! Result: I clicked through to check them out. And if you do, too, you'll see their business model played out on the front page. I'd love to hear your thoughts about whether their approach can work.

You gotta dig www.BigFuel.com.

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Filed under  //  customer engagement   marketing strategy   social media  
Posted 7 months ago

Don't hire me to do your web analytics!

As much as I love wrapping my mind around the results of a well-executed, carefully measured marketing plan, analytics are only a means to an end. The point is to make smart decisions, period. Better decisions than your competitors, one would hope. You ask questions of your markets (prospects, loyal customers, even listeners) and they answer honestly, unfailingly, in the form of statistics. That is, if you do it right and if you know how to listen.

 If you're not making decisions with the metrics you track, you need to have a hard talk with yourself. Because if your metrics aren't actionable, there are a thousand other more important things you could be doing with your time, liked understanding your competition better, understanding your customers better, or better yet, understanding your competition's customers better!

 Here's one approach to help you get focused. Before looking at your web analytics reports, try coming up with business rules for the decisions you will make about each one.

   1) Open up a spreadsheet
  2) Down the left hand side, list each metric you track for your digital marketing activities (PPC campaigns, email campaigns, social media sites, etc.)
  3) Across the top, list columns: Business Goal, Result, Tolerance 1, Action 1, Tolerance 2, Action 2, Tolerance 3, Action 3.
  4) For each metric, list the business goal that metric addresses and how you will know when you have achieved it.
  5) For each metric, select appropriate tolerances and define the actions you will take if your results fall within these tolerances.

 If you think this takes too long, maybe you have too many metrics. If you are focusing on the critical few, this will be a quick and simple exercise that will help you focus your thinking and will make your report review go very quickly. If you have metrics that don't fit neatly within this template, this process should at least get you started thinking about how to make your metrics more actionable. You can take the same approach with each of your target segments. It may sound a bit mechanical, but it beats swimming in a sea of data and not knowing where to start.

 Start out with a stand-out product or service, add a genius marketing plan, execute and manage that plan with discipline. Every step along the way can be improved with great analytics.

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Filed under  //  consultant   marketing   marketing strategy   ROI   web analytics  
Posted 7 months ago