Some Personal News

#17 FY23 Planning Starts w/Data Enrichment + Measuring the "ROI" of Demand & Brand for Free

Nov 28, 2022

Happy Thanksgiving weekend! A very warm welcome to the new subscribers. I’m grateful to have you all as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support. In this edition we’ll get into the following:

SEO Mindset Shift
FY23 Planning Starts w/Data Enrichment
"ROI" of Demand Creation & Brand - no additional tools required

If you find this content valuable, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)!

Let’s dig in.

News to Peruse

YouTube launched more ways for creators to engage and interact with audiences and some new options to drive more Community interactions in the App.
TikTok released a new audience insights tool. Go to the "Reporting" section of your Ads Manager to click into age demographics and gender splits, category interests, interactions, and tons more.
LinkedIn came out with several new ad formats and marketing tools to support any brand marketing efforts you’re pursuing with Corporate Partners this EOY.

Old SEO vs New SEO mindset:

Old: Go after keywords with the highest search volume.
New: Go after keywords with the highest search intent.

Old: Publish super-long “skyscraper” posts in an effort to outrank other orgs for big donation-related terms.
New: Even 300 words are enough if you’ve answered the search intent really well. + content velocity matters A LOT.

Old: Programmatic SEO is black-hat, low quality, and doesn’t serve the donor.
New: Programmatic SEO can improve donor experience and content quality by bringing consistency to posts following an expected structure e.g. listicles.

Old: Avoid zero search keywords at all costs.
New: Zero search keywords are great if they have great intent. High content velocity for niche, high-intent keywords can help you gain topical authority faster.

Old: Google Keyword Planner is gospel.
New: All keyword tools are inaccurate and should not determine whether you publish a post on a particular topic or not. Since 15% of all searches every month are new anyway, and 45% of search terms are hidden in Search Console, following keyword research tools blindly over understanding the target audience is a slippery slope.

Old: Prune content, and avoid cannibalization at all cost.
New: Having more than 1 position on a Google search page (SERPs) for the same search term with different content = more real estate you take up in Google. Aggressive pruning just to avoid cannibalization can do more harm than good unless you invest tons of time into analyzing what each post also ranks for, which makes no sense to me.

Old: Domain authority.
New: Topical authority.

Old: Build backlinks.
New: Build internal links. Pay attention to content hierarchy.

FY 23 New Approach to Planning - Start with Data Enrichment

With Turkey “Round 1” behind us in the US and Giving Tuesday right around the corner, I’m being asked to plan for FY23. Next year promises to be somewhat palatable with political ad spending gone and inflation - while limiting consumer spending - also limiting the cost of media growth. In such a climate, your ROI is ripe for improvement.

I’ve often shared that collecting donor data is essential for what it brings immediately and my excitement around some of the possibilities of “enriching” it. That latter is the process of “merging” your first-party data with outside 3rd (ideally, 2nd) party qualifiers such as credit card purchases, credit score, census data, Facebook interests, and many other dimensions. This process is vital for better prospecting. Until now, we’ve looked at foundational tactics to find new donors – using data only to find their Google interests, for instance. But by enriching the data with more dimensions, we open a whole new world of possibilities for machine learning segmentation of our donors – and will uncover patterns we wouldn’t have imagined.

So, here are three ways to take your data enrichment to the next level - from simple to medium to complex. It’s worth saying that every one of the three tactics starts with downloading emails and any other Personal Identifiable Information (PII) available from your CRM. As a reminder, detailed tracking is a must so that in the future you can enrich and look at your donors separately to segment “high-value” ones vs. “money pit” ones.

(Simple) Free tools, Minimal effort – Use Facebook

So, per the above, start by going to your CRM and downloading your recent donors’ PII. I usually use the last 12 months as a starting point. That gives you enough volume but doesn’t include those who are already irrelevant. Best practice is downloading it as a CSV file since that’s what most platforms will accept down the line.

Before jumping to enrichment, it’s worth doing some basic segmentation. We don’t want to target everybody who looks like our donors – only those who look like the best. An easy thing to do is segment them by revenue. Sort your CSV by descending donation amount and take the first 1,000 (a minimum needed number for Meta to provide insights). Now you’re ready to do some research! The upload process is relatively easy in the Audiences section of Meta Ads Manager – more details HERE. It will likely require you to rearrange some columns in the upload file, as every platform differs.

Once the audience is created and uploaded, Facebook (similar to Google) has functionality for quick enrichment called Audience IQ (formerly Audience Insights). Historically it used to have more data – now it’s “paywalled” only for those audiences you are actively spending money on, but you can still get some information for free.

While not absolutely perfect, this approach is certainly adequate and it’s entirely free. The beauty is that it’s not Facebook-unique – you can enrich your data with insights from almost every social platform, including Twitter (hmm!), Pinterest, and LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn might be the most beneficial since it adds a significant pile of employment information that no other source can access.

(Medium) Paid tools, Minimal effort – Go Programmatic

Option #1 above is free yet limited. It gives you a skewed, pre-engineered enrichment view primarily designed to get you spending on Facebook. For better enrichment, you need to switch to the agnostic platforms – the most accessible channel to do use is Programmatic Display. We’re talking Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and they aren’t as easy to register to use as, say, Google Ads. You can still quickly gain access to them just through multiple resellers (in the case of Google’s Display&Video 360) or directly on their website chatting with the sales Bot/team (TheTradeDesk).

Once done, they give you access to similar Audience Composition reports that you can use to one-by-one enrich your 1st party segments with multiple outside sources. But now, unlike in Google Analytics, Ads, or Meta, this data will come from 1,000s of data providers across the industry.

Here and below, I’ll use Google DV360 for screenshots. Once you have your advertiser account set up, head straight to the Audiences section:

In there, create the “New Audience” -> Customer Match. You’ll be asked to upload your files and select some basic settings:

Once your audience is created (it can also take a few hours/couple of days for the system to match emails to Google IDs based on the size of your file), head straight to Reports -> Offline Reporting -> Audience Composition:

I always thought of this report as one hidden in plain sight. It’s right there and extremely powerful – but very few people use it. Here is what the setup looks like:

Once your report runs, you’ll have a CSV sheet showing exactly how many of your donors belong to any and every 3rd party audience out there – giving you endless possibilities for filtering and segmentation. While I said it’s a medium-level complexity option because the tool used must be “paid,” it’s not entirely true. You don’t have to spend anything on advertising – you can learn about your donors for free. You only need to go through the hassle of getting access to the tool upfront.

(Complex) Paid tools, Significant Effort – Enrichment in the Cloud

The last option involves the Cloud – or specifically, one tool out of many available, the “Clean Room.” Clean Rooms were designed for exactly this – enriching your data with additional qualifiers in a privacy-safe way. You can read more about clean rooms HERE. The below schematics should also help explain what it is:

It'd be too much for me to explain how to use a Clean Room in one article (and I’m not superbly proficient at it myself). Still, it allows you to access most data sources and automatically pop them back into your cloud instance for further segmentation and analysis. Every major Cloud provider has their version of a clean room – Google’s, for example, is called Ads Data Hub. Amazon has been pushing their AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud) a lot recently, which means you can get them to give it to you for free and potentially have them sponsor your first project. When I got to this stage even of thinking, it made sense for us to work with a certified Google / Amazon cloud partner who specialized in marketing analytics to help us find our way around.

Why did I call this post “new approach to planning” if I spoke about Data Enrichment? I strongly believe that one is impossible without the other. In planning your marketing activities for next year, your focus needs to be Audience-first and foremost – who should be the target? Who should I spend my budget against? What is going to be the return on such spending? The answer to all those questions lies in properly segmenting your donor base for best targeting – and your first step is collecting a complete set of information, including the enrichment segments we discussed above.

Demand Creation and Brand Investment

On a call this week I was chatting about how to measure the "ROI" of demand creation and brand investment, while not having to invest additional budget into another tool or service. Here are some actionable ideas I shared:

1. Your brand search volume.

2. Your brand vs. competitor brand search volume.

3. Clicks for "your brand + Program.”

4. Direct traffic (donors type your website URL into the browser).

5. Entrances and engagement numbers on your Program pages.

6. Referral traffic - incoming website visits from other relevant websites mentioning and linking to you.

All of these things should be looked at from a LONG TERM viewpoint. Quarter over Quarter and better still, Year over Year.

None of this stuff is going to change overnight. Also, notice how these metrics are leading indicators. Why? Attribution software won't reveal the marketing activities that caused these metrics to increase.

Do we need to normalize leading indicators again? Without them, we don't really know what's working - and what's not.

Interesting Reads This Week:

I have never really understood the concept that branding and performance are somehow different. Everything a brand does has an effect on that brand and anything and everything they do can drive a response.
A dirty Lyft, a cold DoorDash and a donation form that doesn’t load in half a second are all bad for the brand. So is a boring commercial. Many years ago the world proved that performance focused banners drive brand metrics. So it should be a moot point - but the arcane architecture of our business means the debate lingers on. So, this thorough report on the work Facebook have done for fashion brand & Other Stories, (part of H&M) was a welcome read. As ever, money invested in developing more creative pays off.
Legacy Media and the Power of Web3.
The mechanics of spending on CTV are complicated by the AdTech world adapting to handle CTV ads. This LinkedIn post by an Amazon Exec points out the structural issues - subtly making the point that Amazon is well positioned.
The FT published a good piece on How retailers are reshaping the advertising industry. But the headline is interesting in itself - too often we look at the digital marketing space as something advertisers are driving, but I agree with the FT that retailers are going to reshape ads (Walmart Connect is a great example) - not the other way round.
Applicable lessons in content creation, engagement and retention from Mr Beast, one of the most successful creators in the world, with more than 113 million subscribers on his main channel.