Welcome to My Blog

Greetings, readers. Welcome to the HubSpot Marketing Blog.

We’re very happy to have you here. You might not realize it, but getting here was no easy task. Today, in 2016, I blog for a living, which is pretty great. But were it not for the long, twisty journey that got blogging to its current state, I might not be here. You might not be reading this.

We’ve found that there’s quite a history behind blogs. According to the documentation we uncovered — and will share with you below — they’ve been around since 1994. They looked a lot different back then, and had many different names and meanings.

Merriam Webster currently defines a blog as “a web site on which someone writes about personal opinions, activities, and experiences.” Remember that — it’s going to come in handy later. But first, let’s talk about how we got here.

The Blogging Vernacular

The early vocabulary and semantics around blogging are more than a little muddy. As the practice developed, some of the more popular monikers were “weblog,” “personal web page,” and “online diary.” We’ll dive into each of these a bit as we explore the more primitive days of blogging.

Now, we simply say “blog” — that’s a pretty popular term in our vocabulary. But what it means continues to change. Bloggers have dozens of platforms and formats available (fun fact: HubSpot has a blogging platform, too), and there’s no longer a standard for what a blog is supposed to look like.

And their former look and feel was dictated by the language people used to use to describe the act of blogging. As you’ll see below, the word is primarily rooted in the idea of a log on the web. At one time, in fact, blogging was somewhat restrictive and limited to web-only subject matter.

Luckily, we’ve evolved and expanded how and why we blog since then. One day, someone figured out that we don’t have to stick to strictly technical topics when we put things on the Internet. (And thank goodness — remember that thing I said about blogging for a living?)

So, let’s see if we can better understand how that all took place. Grab some popcorn — you’re in for a 22-year-long tale.

The History of Blogging

1994-1997: The early stages

There’s a bit of debate around the first stages of blogging, much like the rest of its history — in the first half of the nineties, for example, there wasn’t a ton of online record-keeping, and most primitive blogs are either now archived or nowhere to be found.

Many of these original bloggers — despite not having yet earned that title — were the same people who first understood the value of the World Wide Web in the 1980s. One of them was then-Swarthmore-College undergrad, Justin Hall, who created a site called links.net in January 1994. It was essentially a review of HTML examples he came across from various online links, but it was enough for the New York Times Magazine to dub him the “founding father of personal bloggers”.

In that article, Hall brought up the semantics of blogging, and how he was assigned many titles during his primary days online (some of which are hilariously documented here).

“When I first started [blogging], they called it a personal home page,” he said, “then they said I’m one of the first Web diarists, and now I’m one of the first Web bloggers.”

That same year, Claudio Pinhanez (who today is a Social Data Analytics Senior Manager at IBM) began to log short entries into what he called an “Open Diary.”

But it wasn’t until December 1997 that the term “weblog” came to be. It was first used by Jorn Barger, creator of the website Robot Wisdom. He pioneered the term to describe a “log” of his internet activity, much like Hall did in 1994, which largely amounted to a list of the links he visited.

That may have set the tone for the new era of blogging that would follow less than a year later, when blogging-specific platforms began to debut.

1998-2001: More resources for bloggers

The later part of the nineties saw an uprising in resources created just for bloggers. One of them, Open Diary, launched in October 1998 and became one of the most pivotal blogging platforms — its name, was a nod to its open, community approach to blogging, as Open Diary was the first of its kind to have a membership model that allowed members of the community to comment on the work of others.

Open Diary, c. 1999. Source: Wayback Machine

In 1999 — though no one is quite sure exactly when — then-programmer Peter Merholz (who later went on to head up design at Groupon, OpenTable, and Jawbone, among others) shortened the term “weblog” to “blog.”

It was part of a period that displayed an influx of blogging opportunities, with each platform attempting to boast its own unique set of features for a particular audience. In 1999 alone, Blogger, (which would go on to be acquired by Google), LiveJournal, and Xanga all launched.

Blogger, c. 1999. Source: Wayback Machine

LiveJournal, c. 1999. Source: Wayback Machine

Xanga, c. 2000. Source: Wayback Machine

Xanga (for whom Twitter co-founder Biz Stone once served as creative director) actually began as a social networking site — sometimes compared to MySpace — and didn’t add blogging features until 2000.

This period of time also saw some of the first rumored video blogs. In January 2000, a man named Adam Kontras accompanied a written blog post with a video that updated friends and family on what he was doing. That November, professor Adrian Miles posted what some speculate to be one of the first video blogs, as well, calling it a “vog.”

“NO PETS ALLOWED. We smuggled him in. It was awesome. Felt all undercover.” Source: Adam Kontras

As the sun set on the nineties, blogging began to have quite an impact on many lives. People were starting to figure out how to monetize their blogs — which we’ll get into in a bit — and the stage was set for businesses and individuals alike to take bloggers seriously.

2002: A big year for blogging

The early 2000s saw a few significant events within the blogging realm. Technorati, one of the first blog search engines (but is today a company of “advertising technology specialists”), launched in February 2002.

That month, blogger Heather B. Armstrong was fired for writing about her colleagues on her personal blog, Dooce.com. While it’s not clear if she was the first blogger to be terminated because of her personal website’s content, it sparked a conversation about the privacy and freedom of expression for bloggers.

The subject arose again in 2004, when Congressional aide and controversial blogger Jessica Cutler would experience the same fate as Armstrong. Cutler, however, blogged anonymously until her identity was revealed by the website Wonkette.

The year 2002 also saw the dawn of “Mommy Bloggers,” which largely consisted of mothers blogging about parenting, aiming to create a sense of support and learning for their readers. Melinda Roberts founded TheMommyBlog.com — “one of the original mom blogs,” she writes — that April, creating a category that would continue to take storm for over a decade.

The following month, Newsweek predicted that blogs will replace traditional media and, rather in December of that year, it partially came to fruition, when Talking Points Memo broke the written transcript of Trent Lott’s infamous call into “Larry King Live” — when Lott illustriously sang the praises of Strom Thurmond. Blog entries like these would serve as a precursor to live blogging, which took shape the following year.

In August, Blog Ads was launched by Pressflex LLC. Less than a year later, Google would debut AdSense, which paired blogs with relevant advertisements (at the discretion of the blogger). Being able to advertise on blogs was a major milestone for bloggers, as it created the opportunity to monetize their work. It set the stage for blogs to be sponsored by major brands that fit their respective credos, or receive free products in exchange for endorsements or reviews. Blogging was turning into a business — and soon, a small population of bloggers would be using what used to be a hobby as their primary source of income.

The tumultuous Gawker — which New York Magazine cited as the initiation of gossip blogs — also launched in December 2002, only to cease operations in August 2016 after a high-profile legal battle.

2003: The momentum continues

TypePad and WordPress launched in 2003, continuing the trend of providing platform options to a growing number of bloggers. That’s the same year that live blogging is estimated to have started — the Guardian was one of the first outlets on record to make use of live blogging during the 2003 prime minister’s question time. The BBC refers to this blogging activity as “live text,” and has frequently used it for sporting events.

WordPress, c. 2005. Source: Wayback Machine

TypePad, c. 2003. Source: Wayback Machine

February 2003 also marked Google’s acquisition of Pyra Labs — the makers of Blogger. That was a sign of the growing business of blogging, particularly in the wake of the monetization programs that launched the previous year.

The early 2000s showed the first signs of a rise in political blogs. In 2003, for example, several traditional media outlets were encouraging staff writers and columnists to double as “cyberjournalists,” as Matt Welch called them in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. It reflected a growing number of political bloggers, with many seasoned reporters looking to blogging for opinion and beat outlets.

That climate primed the blogosphere for what would follow in the latter half of the decade, when the perspectives and analyses of political bloggers began to be preferred sources of information on current events. The line between traditional media and the blogosphere would start to bend, as bloggers were fated to become members of the press.

2004 – 2005: Video and the press

Despite the earliest video blogs being recorded in 2000, it wasn’t until the middle part of the decade that visual content really had the opportunity to take root. In February 2004, videographer Steve Garfield — who went on to be one of the Web’s first video bloggers declared it to be the “year of the video blog.”

As fate would have it, YouTube launched only a year later in February 2005, shortly thereafter inviting the public to upload their own videos. But it wasn’t always what people associate it with now — it actually began as a short-lived dating site, where singles could use videos to introduce themselves and state their romantic criteria.

YouTube, c. 2005. Source: Wayback Machine

But once YouTube turned its focus to general video uploads (which seemed to take effect by June 2005), it was part of a series of developments that showed the growing credibility of the online user. With ample resources already built for writers, developers were starting to address other content creators.

And it wasn’t just developers who were lending credibility these online users. In March 2005, blogger Garrett Graff was the first to be granted White House press credentials.

That might have been when the line between news reporting and blogging began to diminish, which some attribute to the launch of the Huffington Post that May. It began as what one case study a “political forum” — and the Washington Post called it a “group blog” in a 2007 profile — but is today one of the highest-profile content aggregators.

Huffington Post is largely a mix of syndicated material and original content from staffers, columnists, and unpaid bloggers. Visit the website, though, and you’ll land on a page of global headlines, lending the visual impression that it’s a news outlet.

It comes as no surprise that one of Huffington Post‘s co-founders, Jonah Peretti, went on to co-found BuzzFeed. Though BuzzFeed wouldn’t refer to itself as a content aggregator — it instead identifies as “a cross-platform, global network for news and entertainment” — it contains a similar vast range of content and, despite having an editorial staff, anyone can post to the site.

These newer platforms raised the question: “Is it a newspaper, or is it a blog?” And as the 21st century progressed, the answer to that question wouldn’t become any clearer.

2006-2007: The rise of microblogging and rules

The start of life in 140 characters (or less) began in March 2006, when Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey sent out the world’s first tweet.

just setting up my twttr

— 🚶🏽jack (@jack)
March 21, 2006

It was the introduction of microblogging — sharing stories, news, and other types of content in the smallest format possible. (And these 140 characters will soon look different — check out Twitter’s looming changes.)

Microblogging continued to gain momentum in February 2007 with the launch of Tumblr — yet another blogging platform that encouraged users to be brief. It was built, wrote former CNET reporter Josh Lowensohn, for those “who feel they may not have enough content or time to write a full blog, yet still want to write and share links and media.”

But with the introduction of short-form, real-time information sharing also came increasingly visceral communication. There would be countless mean tweets, as well as harmful comments left on blogs. It got to a point where, in March 2007, new media mogul Tim O’Reilly proposed a Blogger’s Code of Conduct in response to threatening comments that a friend had received on her blog. The rules were as follows:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

It showed that the blogosphere had come a long way since the 1998 introduction of Open Diary. Being able to comment on blogs was becoming less of a novelty, and more a point of contention. Several years later — in 2013 — the Huffington Post finally took a cue from rule #3 on the code of conduct, banning anonymous comments on its content and requiring commenters to link their feedback to a Facebook profile.

2008-2011: Blogging Dark Ages

During this period of four years, there weren’t many major events that propelled how or why people blogged.

There were a few developments of note, however. In January 2009, the White House blog debuted.

Later that year, the film Julie & Julia premiered, which followed the success of one food blogger whose online work eventually became a book. It was one of the first pop cultural references to the professional success of bloggers, and stood to inspire others — by 2010, 11% of bloggers reported earning their primary income from blogging.

Google also made some changes that would impact bloggers in 2011 with its rollout of the “Panda” algorithm change. Its purpose was to lower the rank of sites with what Moz called “thin content,” which hurt bloggers producing content that Google deemed to be of lower quality. A lot of that had to do with bloggers having a lack of inbound links — a link to your website that comes from another one. (My colleague, Lindsay Kolowich, wrote more about that here.) Without many sites linking to these blogs, Google’s algorithm would begin to interpret them as less relevant.

2012: Medium is founded

In August 2012, a co-founder of Pyra Labs — the creators of Blogger — Evan Williams, created Medium: One of the newest blogging platforms.

Today, Medium is more than that. People can use it to write and publish original content, like most other blogging platforms. But Medium is continuing to blur the line between news reporting and blogging. In fact, on its website, the company describes itself as serving up “daily news reimagined, straight from the people who are making and living it.”

It was a notable introduction of decentralized content: A concept that allows users to share their work that has been published elsewhere on a content creation platform. That’s different than sharing links on social media, for example, where limited content is displayed. Instead, the full text and images of the work are shared, with the original author and source credited, on a site different from its origin.

It might sound kind of confusing and pointless. But my colleague, Sam Mallikarjunan, explains the benefits of doing something like that in his article, “Why Medium Works.” In sum: Medium has roughly three million viewers, all sharing and reading content. Does your blog have that kind of reach? If it doesn’t, you can reach Medium’s vast audience by syndicating your own content on their platform, drawing more attention to your work.

The same year that Medium launched, LinkedIn introduced its Influencers program, which recruited notable business figures to guest blog on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. Eventually, that platform became open to all LinkedIn members in 2014 — HubSpot’s Ginny Mineo discussed that development here, and how it fit into the “self-publishing pie.”

Though LinkedIn’s platform worked a bit differently than Medium’s — users can’t re-post full bodies of work in the same seamless way on the former — it does provide another outlet for people to share original content with an audience much larger than they may have received on their own domains. HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, Meghan Anderson, writes more about the positive outcomes of that kind of strategy here.

Last month saw the latest development of the blogging realm — the creators of WordPress announced they would be rolling out the .blog domain. Until November 9, users have to apply for one of the highly-coveted domains. I tried applying for one, and found out that it’ll cost me $250 for a combined application and renewal fee. If for some reason I don’t get it, I’m told I’ll get my money back, or if other people apply for it, we’ll all have to bid for it in an auction.

But here’s the cool thing about .blog — even though it was made by the creators of WordPress, you don’t have to use the WordPress platform in order to build a blog on that domain.

“The domain registrations are open to anyone,” wrote Adario Strange of Mashable, “regardless of publishing platform.”

We’ll be watching this domain unfolds, and are eager to see how it contributes to the evolution of content.

What’s Next?

I don’t know about you, but after diving into the history of blogging, I’m pretty excited to see what its future looks like.

Of course, it probably helps that blogging is my line of work. But I’m certainly not alone. Here at HubSpot, our content team has at least three full-time bloggers, and there are an increasing number of job titles that either indicate or include a blogging as a major function.

It makes sense, when you look at the state of blogging now. It’s an integral part of marketing and content strategy, and has even shown to increase lead flow up to 700% for some businesses.

How blogging continues to change will determine what our careers look like, and I encourage all marketers — corporate or otherwise — to blog on behalf of their respective brands. It might seem like a lot of work, but if the evolution of blogging has indicated nothing else, it’s that the sphere will only continue to expand.

And that’s something marketers should continue to pay attention to — not just the growth of blogging, but how many different interpretations of it exist. Just look at Facebook Live, Facebook Instant Articles, and Snapchat Stories against the context of the dictionary definition of a blog from above: “a web site on which someone writes about personal opinions, activities, and experiences.” Replace “writes about” with “shares,” and you could make the case that most of today’s content platforms — including social media networks — are their very own versions of blogs.

Want to learn more about the future of blogging and marketing as a whole? Check out the latest edition of our State of Inbound report here. 

(Image Credit: 1998-2001, 2002, 2003, 2004-2005, 2006-2007, 2008-2011, 2012.)

How do you envision the future of blogging? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.  

Like many other marketing strategies, inbound marketing transcends B2B, B2C, and nonprofit marketing. Inbound marketing isn’t just about closing sales. It’s about identifying and building trust with people in your target market. Its principles and tactics apply whether you’re a business trying to acquire customers or an organization trying to acquire new members and inspiring a more engaged membership.

The first main principle of inbound marketing is that your marketing has to be all about your member (and potential members). It’s not about you. It’s a little bit about you, but in the sense that your organization needs to publish content and engage with your prospects and members on their terms. Talking to them about the what matters to them, and through the communication channels they prefer, establishes your organization as a trusted authority. Building on that relationship as a trusted authority is how you gain the credibility to inspire them to act later on.

It’s so easy for people to screen phone calls, throw out snail mail, and ignore emails that don’t stand out in their inboxes. The old strategies of sending out expensive, high-gloss reports or paying for on-air ad buys don’t return the same number of prospects as inbound marketing. And let’s not even get started on the fallacies of buying lists.

If you want to bring in new members and keep them active and inspired, delighted members who donate, volunteer, and spread the good word – your organization needs to align its marketing strategies and tactics to HubSpot’s custom inbound methodology.

Using your content and offers to gently push prospects through each phase of the inbound methodology is the second main principle: Every marketing action your team takes, every piece of content it publishes – you should know exactly which persona is targeted, which phase they’re currently in, and where you want them to go. 

As you can see, the inbound methodology has four distinct phases:

• Attract: Gaining the attention of the right kind of people, people who fit your personas and align with your organization’s mission.
• Connect: Encouraging those people to identify themselves to your organization as people interested in hearing more from you.
• Engage: Bringing people into the fold where they do more than consume your content, but become active members or donors.
• Inspire: Continuing to motivate action from prospect and members who’ve already “raised their hand,” showing interest in your organization.

Let’s take a closer look into the goals and common tactics used in each phase. For a more complete deep dive into each of these, take a look at our free guide, Growing and Engaging Your Membership Base.  

Attracting Potential Members

The whole premise of inbound marketing is doing away with the interruptive marketing tactics of the past in favor of attracting your target audience to you. In the digital world, this requires publishing online content that your prospect can’t resist in to attract traffic to your website.

Your starting point is specifying what kinds of information, causes, and concerns interest your potential members. Then determine what resources your organization has to meet those concerns. Are potential members most interested in professional development or business development? Networking? The answers to these questions shape what topics your write about, as well the keywords you focus on in your SEO strategy.

Blogging, paired with a relevant, targeted SEO strategy, is key to getting found in search results and driving traffic to your website. Your social media strategy, such as which sites you’re on and how you interact with your audience there, is also part of the attracting step. You use your social media channels to promote your blog content and participate in relevant (hashtag) conversations, also driving traffic back to your website. 

The attraction phase is all about driving those traffic numbers to your website, where you can then move these prospects into the next phase.

Forging Connections with Your People

Your attraction strategies are working. People are visiting your website and blog. Now you want to know who they are. You want them to identify themselves to you and subscribe to your email list. As you know, once you get their email address into your database, a whole new world of engagement opens up.

But first – you need to give them a good reason and opportunity to share their email with you.

In this inbound step, you want to offer some premium content that they can’t resist. Your premium content could be a report providing in-depth analysis forecasting the future state of your industry, or access to expanded video content of a recent trip by members advocating for one of your group’s policy positions.  Asking them to sign up for your newsletter is also an effective option. 

You pique their interest in your premium content through compelling calls-to-action (CTA) that you place on sign-up forms throughout your site or on landing pages exclusively dedicated to moving visitors to click that CTA and offer their email address to you.

Some of your website visitors will be ready to make a stronger commitment to your organization other than simply sharing an email. It may be their first visit to your website or their 100^th. Either way, you want other CTAs providing them that opportunity. That’s part of the next phase.

Engaging with Prospects so They Become Members

The engagement phase is where you start to grow your membership numbers, where you move people from email subscribers to active members. 

Part of it is including the right action CTAs on your website. You’ll always want a “Join Now” and “Donate Now” type CTA in the right spots on your website, but you can get creative with them. Say a major members-only event is coming up, you can update your membership CTA copy to reflect that. Has there been something major happened in the news, or perhaps it’s time for your annual donation drive?

Of course the purpose of getting prospects into your database in the first place was so you could push out more content that interests and entices them. Email campaigns personalized to subscribers based on how they engage with your website, social media, and other emails, deepen their trust in your organization and strengthen that relationship.

Assessing their online behavior and level of engagement with your earlier content, you can determine when to send an email series that ends with a request for real action, whether becoming a member, making a donation, or volunteering. 

Inspiring an Active Membership

The inbound process doesn’t end when someone actively engages with your organization online. You want to keep them inspired, to continue donating and volunteering. To remain active members who will become some of your organization’s best ambassadors as they share your content and work on and offline to their communities, attracting more people.

In order to inspire, you want to send them the content and CTAs that engage their hearts and souls, that evoke their emotions. As a tech-based methodology, inbound marketing provides a constant stream of digital intel you can gather about your members and prospects. What blog posts they read and share, which ones they ignore, and even what social media channels they engage with. This is all information you can use to personalize the content you send them, increasing the odds it will inspire them to stay engaged with you.

An integral part of being able to inspire your audience is staying on top of what’s moving your prospects and members. So re-assessing your personas, conducting surveys, taking a meta-analysis of what kind of content performs well – these are all tactics that will help you continue to give your audience the content they seek and reinforce your organization’s position as the trusted authority in your area.

Measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing is one of the greatest challenges facing organizations. According to HubSpot’s 2016 State of Inbound report, 46% of marketers cited “proving the ROI of our marketing activities” as one of the biggest challenge they face within their company.

The trouble is, when most marketers hear ‘digital marketing analytics,’ they tend to think of the metrics you’d typically associate with a web analytics tool like Google Analytics — traffic, bounce rate, unique visitors, etc.

While web analytics can provide you with a wealth of insight and data into the performance of your website, marketers really need much richer data to understand the impact of their marketing campaigns on conversion rates and a person’s journey through the marketing and sales funnel. Looking at top-level web analytics metrics like traffic is only part of the puzzle.

Enter digital marketing analytics, which offers a much more comprehensive view of what’s working, and what isn’t.

Why Digital Marketing Analytics Matter More Than Web Analytics

So why exactly do digital marketing analytics matter? Quite simply, because web analytics (like traffic and website performance) just isn’t enough. The data web analytics provides just don’t cut it for marketers who need to understand how their work makes an impact throughout the entire marketing and sales funnel.

Let’s face it: Today’s marketing goes well beyond the bounds of your website. It’s the intersection of what happens between your marketing channels and the outcome on the other side that provides the most marketing insight, and your reporting needs to reflect this.

Web analytics measure things a webmaster or technical SEO specialist cares about, like page load speed, page views per visit, and time on site. Digital marketing analytics, on the other hand, measure business metrics like traffic, leads, and sales, and which online events influence whether leads become customers. Digital marketing analytics includes data not only from your website, but also from other sources like email, social media, and online PR.

With digital marketing analytics, marketers can understand the effectiveness of their marketing, not just the effectiveness of their website. Using marketing analytics allows marketers to identify how each of their marketing initiatives (e.g., social media vs. blogging vs. email marketing, etc.) stack up against one another, determine the true ROI of their activities, and understand how well they’re achieving their business goals.

As a result of the information they can gather from full-stack digital marketing analytics, marketers can also diagnose deficiencies in specific channels in their marketing mix, and make adjustments to strategies and tactics to improve their overall marketing activity.

You can spend hours and hours slicing and dicing data in web analytics tools, comparing new vs. repeat visitors month over month, but when it comes down to it, you’ll never have a comprehensive understanding of how your marketing is doing. Marketers have known this for a long time (check out the explosion of people searching for the term ‘digital marketing analytics’ taken from Google Trends below).

There’s no doubt that marketers are aware there’s a deficiency in how they’re able to measure the effectiveness of what they do; here’s how full-stack digital marketing analytics makes up for that deficiency.

Why Digital Marketing Analytics Gives You the ‘Full Picture’

There are lots of things that digital marketing analytics achieves where basic website analytics falls short. Let’s highlight three of the main differentiators:

1. Integration across different marketing channels.

With digital marketing analytics, you have a good, solid look into the direct relationships between your marketing channels. It’s great to be able to see how each of your individual channels (e.g., social media, blogging, email marketing, SEO, etc.) are performing, but the true power of analytics comes into play when you can easily tie the effect of multiple channels’ performances together.

For instance, let’s say you did an email send to a segment of your database. Digital marketing analytics not only tells you how many people clicked through from your email to your website, but also how many of those people actually converted into leads for your business when they got there. Furthermore, you can compare the impact of that individual email send with other marketing initiatives. Did that email generate more leads than the blog post you published yesterday? Or was the content you shared via Twitter more effective?

2. People-centric data on the buyer’s journey.

As we mentioned earlier, a key differentiator between web analytics and digital marketing analytics is that the latter uses the person — not the page view — as the focal point.

This enables you to track how your individual prospects and leads are interacting with your various marketing initiatives and channels over time. How did an individual lead first come to find your website? From Google? Via Facebook? From direct traffic? Is that lead an active part of your email subscriber base, often clicking and converting on marketing offers presented via email? Do they read your blog?

Full-stack digital marketing analytics can tell you all of this and more, providing you with extremely valuable lead intelligence that can help inform the direction of your future campaigns.

Looking at all of this information in aggregate can help you understand trends among your prospects and leads and which marketing activities are valuable at different stages in the buyer’s journey.

Perhaps you find that many customers’ last point of conversion was on a certain ebook or whitepaper. Having this data makes it possible to implement an effective lead management process, enabling you to score and prioritize your leads and identify which activities contribute to a marketing qualified lead for your business.

3. Closed-loop data.

One of the most useful functions of marketing analytics is its ability to tie marketing activities to sales. Sure, your blog may be effective in generating leads, but are those leads actually turning into customers and making your business money? Closed-loop marketing analytics can tell you.

The only dependency here is that your digital marketing analytics system is hooked up with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform like the free HubSpot CRM, for example.

Having this closed-loop data can help you determine whether your individual marketing initiatives are actually contributing to your business’ bottom line. Through it, you can determine which channels are most critical for driving sales. Perhaps you find that your blog is your most effective channel for generating customers, or conversely, you find that social media is really only powerful as an engagement mechanism, not a source of sales.

The Digital Marketer’s Measurement Challenge

Most marketers know they need to be looking at more than just traffic and website performance to get the insights we’ve talked about so far, but why do so many of us still struggle to measure the impact and prove the ROI of our online marketing activities?

Probably because:

• A) We don’t have solid goals in place for our campaigns.
• B) We don’t have the means to successfully measure our success.

Quite often, you’ll find it’s a combination of the two.

The fact is, most marketers need to have a number of different digital marketing analytics platforms in place in order to get all the insights they need to understand their marketing performance and make sound decisions. They gather data about their email marketing through the analytics provided by their email service provider, information about their social media performance through their social media monitoring tool, blog analytics from their blogging platform, and the list goes on.

This fragmented approach to reporting makes it really difficult to connect the dots and make informed decisions about the future of your strategy. The ideal solution is to implement an all-in-one marketing and reporting platform that offers end-to-end visibility on your marketing activities, allowing you to measure everything in one place.

How Digital Marketing Analytics Impacts Your Business

All of the insights, information, and data you can gather from your digital marketing analytics tool(s) is really only useful if you do something with it. The true value of analytics isn’t just to prove the value of marketing to your boss; it’s also to help you improve and optimize your marketing performance — on both an individual channel-by-channel basis as well as an overall, cross-channel machine.

As mentioned above, you’ll also be able to implement closed-loop reporting, making it easier to prove how your marketing efforts are positively impacting your sales team, who are being fed much higher quality leads.

The important thing to realize here is, if you’re relying solely on top-level web analytics, you’re missing out on a lot of powerful data that can help inform your marketing strategy. So when evaluating digital marketing analytics tools for your business, be sure you’re looking for evidence of digital marketing analytics, not just website analytics.

How are you faring in terms of digital marketing measurement? Are your analytics sophisticated enough to effectively measure your marketing performance?

Society has sensationalized the idea that our children need to be gifted athletes with superstar careers in order to be truly successful. As a marketer with an affinity for analytics, I have a different hope. I hope my kid becomes an analytics superstar. And thanks to recent social trends, that’s actually a cool thing to be now.

Pursuing a career in analytics has never been more accessible. Traditional data tools are becoming easier to use, which allows non-programmer types to perform even complex analyses quickly. This allows agencies to build analytics departments with varying levels of technical expertise. With today’s tools, you don’t have to be in the analytics department to analyze data.

Within agencies, the move to fully staffed analytics departments is gaining momentum. According to the 4A’s “Survey on Analytics in Agencies” in May 2015, 93% of agencies reported having staff members who perform analytics functions. And half of agencies with more than 50 employees reported having a separate analytics department. As agencies look to increase their capabilities, the competition for talent to lead these new departments will grow.

The need for data analytics talent has been a big discussion in recent years. A 2015 survey by MIT Sloan Management Review found that 43% of companies struggle with finding the analytics talent they need. And with all the competition out there for a limited pool, agencies may discover that the talent is not only hard to find, but also hard to retain.

Marketers need some analytics background to succeed 

Universities are responding to this new staffing demand. As a sitting board member of the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management, Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program, I’ve noticed that more and more universities are offering graduate programs designed to produce skilled analytics professionals with business acumen.

Undergraduate programs for analytics are also starting to take shape. These programs will likely range from concentration clusters to complete minors that can be easily added to a student’s business, marketing, or advertising curriculum. Students are starting to realize that even basic analytics skills will make them more employable.

This year, I was not only impressed by the number applications we received for our marketing analytics internship program, but also with why the students applied. They fully recognized that analytics would be an important part of their marketing career — even if they didn’t want analytics to be their full-time job.

Agencies need to seek candidates with a base of analytics knowledge — especially in the account management department

Analytics courses and graduate programs are providing agencies with a unique opportunity: What if your account department was filled with talented people who were predisposed to testing, optimizing, and using predictive behavioral algorithms?

Candidates with a background in analytics are perfect for account management roles, since they can easily translate a client’s business needs into behavioral data questions.

Such talent brings another benefit: Many clients have been strengthening their own analytics capabilities. An agency that has a solid analytics department — one that can support or augment a client’s analytics staff — will be a true business partner. In the future, agencies with strong analytics cultures will be a client requirement, not a request.

Senior staff needs to adapt to support this new wave of analytics talent

The rise in young analytics-minded talent will be the disruption that pushes senior staff to seek out resources to upgrade their own knowledge base.

Progressive and successful agencies need to offer internal programs that demystify analytics for agency leaders as part of formal training programs. This will help senior staff better understand what analytics can and can’t do. Basic knowledge makes — and will continue to make — a big difference when it comes time to sponsoring analytics initiatives and designing an appropriate organizational structure to support analytics activities.

It also helps executives ask the right questions when dealing with prospective analytics vendors. One way to provide this basic knowledge is through partnerships with local universities and industry organizations. Such collaboration will aid this process by allowing on-site classes, which should maximize attendance.

Analytic thinking will improve creative executions

With more agency staff thinking about how to test, learn, and optimize based on customer behavior, the integration of analytics with the creative staff will be a major factor in agency success.

The reality is that integration is simple. The new analytics mindset will improve creative evolution over time because it’s rooted in customer behavior. This ability to evolve a campaign quickly will help ensure an unfair advantage for any client. To do this quickly and effectively, the analytics team has to be well integrated into the creative culture of the agency.

The fact is that analytics isn’t just about dashboards, crazy math, or predictive algorithms. It’s about using data to understand human behavior.

The creative product is then commissioned to alter these human behaviors. An agency that has demystified and embraced analytics for its staff will have a natural flow of conceptual evolution on core creative ideas — one based on a feedback loop of customer behavior to the creative.

Agencies need to start planning today

Integrated analytics thinking will soon be the expectation in business, not the exception. Attracting and retaining the top talent will require an environment that fosters the skills of newly minted talent entering the workplace.

This analytics talent will thrive in agencies that have an interdepartmental group of analytics-minded individuals — especially in the account department — who can help communicate complex analytics in simple ways.

Start planning today how to improve your agency’s analytics practice, as well as your own personal knowledge. You’ll be glad you did.

How is your agency taking part in the analytics revolution?