Things you should know about Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google's analytics platform. It was released in October 2020 and is a significant upgrade from the previous version, Universal Analytics (UA). GA4 is designed to be more flexible, scalable, and privacy-focused.

Here are some of the key differences between GA4 and UA:

• Data model: GA4 uses an event-based data model, while UA uses a session-based data model. This means that GA4 tracks individual events, such as page views, button clicks, and form submissions, while UA tracks sessions, which are groups of related events that occur within a certain time period.
• Attribution modeling: GA4 offers a variety of attribution models, while UA only offers a few. This means that GA4 can give you a more accurate picture of how your marketing efforts are driving conversions.
• Privacy: GA4 is designed to be more privacy-focused than UA. This means that GA4 collects less data about users and makes it easier for users to control their privacy settings.

Persona Marketing vs Account-Based Marketing

Thanks to the rise of Marketo and its plethora of early adopters, the company has pushed the concept of why to switch (from Pardot, Eloqua, etc.) with Account-Based Marketing. The content language of which speaks to the many pain points of commonly used marketing automation tools. The fact of the matter is that both concepts require a lot of content to be created just to make a decent waterfall or drip marketing campaign.

Persona-based marketing really looks at data segmentation as its main focus for generating content for different decision makers and influencers in customer lifecycle management. For example. when targeting K-12 institutions as a software developer of an educational platform, your buyer personas may include superintendents, edtech buying consortiums (NY does this, for instance), principals; and the influencers may include teachers, students, and perhaps even PTA groups, if they are involved with new technology purchases or adoptions within a school district. It's also used by electronics manufacturers as well that sell direct or through distributors into businesses. With persona-based marketing, not every persona that is targeted with marketing content is a viable buyer. Most are information seekers and will eat up valuable production time creating digital content assets for their insatiable appetites. But, it is all good in the long run because these people are very vocal within their own organizations if they really like what you have to offer.

With both styles, your market strategy for reaching out to customers is based on a few firmographic segmentations to start: industry/vertical markets, revenue, location

Marketing Automation : AutoResponders

In this weekend's newsletter browsing, I scanned through a few headlines from Retail Dive and found that our local Powell's Books announced they were discontinuing use of Amazon.com for distribution of books. If you're a small business, Fulfillment by Amazon is probably not the way you want to go. The fees will eat up any profit you're hoping to gain for each item you list and advertise on the Amazon platform. But, this post isn't about FBA or supporting local retailers.

As part of the ad interstitials on Retail Dive, Validity offered a guide titled "Email Marketing for Retailers: The Complete Guide to Maximizing Your Email ROI". Looks intriguing, so I clicked. Got the guide and two autoresponder messages. The first had a subject line of "Your requested content: Email Marketing for Retailers". This is fine and expected. The email does everything right. It acknowledges that a request was made, includes a link for the PDF guide, and has other helpful information about the company's publicly available digital resources.

However, what immediately followed was a second auto-responder with the subject line of "Your Sender Score is step one." with content about welcoming and thanking me for checking my sender score.. which I did not do at all. Let this be a reminder to you about copying existing campaigns to repurpose for future campaigns, whether you use Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (aka ExactTarget), HubSpot, or other marketing automation tool. I can tell by the subdomain of the email content that Validity uses Pardot. Anyhow. Just a note of caution.

The execution looked flawless ... until I received that second irrelevant email.

I can also imagine that the second email was part of an engagement drip campaign, intended to start as soon as any content was downloaded by a prospect. So that is entirely possible as well.

If you want your own retail emails to keep their momentum and mindshare, don't make simple mistakes like this. Don't just assume that someone wants to hear of your other offerings right after they downloaded unrelated content from your website or marketing campaigns.

It's kind of rude. Heck, I haven't even finished reading the guide.

Commuter Podcasts

When I use public transit to commute from Vancouver to Portland, I could nap.. or I could fill my head with other things, such as podcast content. It's a 40 minute ride in the morning (provided that I hop on a bus before 7am) and an hour ride home (if I leave downtown Portland at 4pm), of course this is the inflexibility of the express bus that C-Tran (Vancouver) has; however, with the plague of humanity outside, transit travel is bit disrupted with travel times. I aim for podcasts that are about 30 mins to an hour long. I typically listen to business podcasts in the morning, and something fiction/sci fi/horror in the afternoon. It's likely that Android smartphones have the function as well as iPhones, but with the Podcasts app, I can download podcast episodes and then just listen on the go without having to rely on cellular data for podcast listening when away from wifi. Links are to the show's website, if one exists.

Non-fiction, less than 30 mins:

• Indicator by Planet Money
• Planet Money
• The Journal (by WSJ and Stitcher)
• Negotiations Ninja
• StoryCorps

Non-fiction, 30 mins to an hour:

• Slate's Negotiation Academy: Negotiate Anything
• Hidden Brain
• How I Built This w/ Guy Raz
• Freakonomics Radio
• Special Operations Medical Journal (field medicine)

Non-fiction, about an hour or longer:

• Tactical Breakdown (this features Canadian law enforcement)

Fiction, 30 mins to an hour:

• Levar Burton Reads (sci fi/fantasy)
• Penumbra (sci fi/fantasy)

A side note: If you have financial or company data on your phone, don't connect to public wifi even if your bus or train has it. Just saying. Better be safe than sorry after the fact.

The Online Brand Experience

Domino's has been running a lot of web ads for their Order 2 or more $5.99 per item coupon special; though, there appears to be a lot of mistakes in how their ecommerce engine is currently setup. Though, it could also just be user error. While adding items to a future order, the pricing and item descriptions are wrong. Well, the 8-piece chicken wings is showing up as a 4-piece menu item on the cart checkout screen. Is it 4 or 8 pieces? Maybe in an earlier incarnation of their online menu it was a 4-piece menu add-on item and nobody told the design team that the offer is for eight pieces. In fact, if you were to increase the order size for chicken wings, the base number of pieces is eight. Makes no sense at all.

Here is a screenshot:

2020-07-14 Screen Shot of Domino's Cart Checkout

Once you add the second item, the menu has a prompt that asks if you want to add a 3rd item for $5.99. Well. I don't know about your math skills, but $6.99 is a 15% price hike from $5.99.

Also, your second (or nth) item cannot be another pizza. This is sad because two medium 2-topping pizzas for $12 would be a total steal, I mean, a good deal.

The Juneteenth Branding Scramble

One of the crowd source outcomes of these #BLM protests is the public's reaction to state and city monuments regarding key figures of our nation's history. These are former presidents, politicians, and war "hero" figures who transformed our nation a couple hundred years ago...such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, etc., and pro-Confederacy monuments in the southern US states (e.g., Jefferson Davis). Here's a site that goes into detail about Juneteenth, celebrated annually on June 19. I'm pretty sure most people in the US have not really heard nor seen any cultural awareness festivals surrounding this non-holiday significant date; unless you live in Texas where it became a state holiday in 1980.

Racism is a hot topic this year and legacy brands want to be seen as being culturally sensitive to its consumers. These companies have announced that they're changing their racial stereotype product images of certain branded products:

• PepsiCo / Quaker Oats North America
• Aunt Jemima (product features a black woman)
• Mars Inc
• Uncle Ben's (logo features a black man)
• B&G Foods - Cream of Wheat (logo features a black chef)
• Conagra Brands
• Mrs. Butterworth's (a matronly-shaped bottle since 1961)
• Land o' Lakes - changed its almost 100-year old logo earlier this year to replaced the focal image of a Native American woman with the text "farmer owned"

Do you think brands are overreacting to public sentiment? Why would it matter if a black man or woman is a spokesperson for a consumer product? To me, as an Asian consumer, these products don't appear to have a sinister, racist motive for featuring African Americans in their product packaging.

If there were really such a fervor over racism on branded packaging, why then are Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworths the two most popular syrup brands by product revenue? 130.59 million Americans used Aunt Jemima and 51.8 million American used Mrs Butterworths in 2019, according to Statista. 54.86 million Americans consumed Uncle Ben's rice and rice dishes in 2019 (source: Statista), yielding $11 million in annual revenue.

Frankly, I'm not sure that a logo change would help you sell more product to the demographics that already purchase the product based on other factors: price, availability, taste, quality, etc. For brands that have been around for a long time, these announcements seem more like a PR stunt than anything else. IMHO. 

I suppose time will tell us if the logo rebrand has helped Land o' Lakes capture more consumer market share next year when they celebrate their 100th anniversary.

Library Kindle Reading List

Here's what's currently on the Kindle. Eventually I'll get through most of these and maybe even write a review of it. The current theme revolves around negotiation and its related tools subset: influence, charisma, and competitive intelligence gathering. Marketing is a lot like that. In the product and services content we write, we try to get you (the consumer) to want our products and services. 

• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
• The Scientist and the Spy by Mara Hvistendahl
• Sizing People Up: A Veteran FBI Agent's User Manual for Behavior Prediction by Dreeke & Stauth
• The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

It is unlikely that I'll get through all of these in the 21 days the library lets me read these books. But, fortunately, there's the renew button. Unfortunately, there is a long wait list for many of these titles. 

If you're more of an audiophile, you can see Chris Voss' presentations on TED, Talks at Google, or listen to the Armchair Expert podcast.