So What? Analytics Ask Us Anything – part 2

Well, hey there. Happy Thursday, everyone. Um, if you don't know, this is our last live stream of 2021. Uh so next Thursday is the day before Christmas Eve, and so we will be off. The week after that is the week after Christmas, and we will be off.

Um, and so this is our last show until 2022 when we come back all re-energized and full of ideas and all the good stuff that happens when you get to actually take a break. So, on today's episode of So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show, we're doing a part two of our analytics ask me anything. So unsurprisingly, we had so many questions about analytics that we couldn't cover them all in one episode. So we're doing a part two and continuing that into this week. If you have questions that you want to ask, feel free to ask us in the comments.

Um otherwise, you can definitely pop into our uh free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers, um, and join us there and ask us questions. Uh John's pointing to the banner as as Vanna does. You have to do it in reverse though. It takes a little bit of work to get that. It's I've, you know, and so I would have initially like, oh, I finally got it right.

So John've got our Brady down. And and Chris, Chris, as the only sane one, perhaps, where should we start with questions about analytics today? Here's an easy one. We got in from Brian. What are our thoughts?

What are your thoughts on Google Analytics 4 and guessing on how long we'll be able to keep using Google Analytics 3 since there's so many major things that can't be done in GA4 yet. And that Google releases similar academy classes that they did for Google Analytics for Google Analytics 4 and gives people an opportunity to get skilled up. If the opposite happens and they just shut off Google Analytics 3 and say, hey, here's four, then you know, to be not quite so nice. That's a dick move. That's how I feel about that.

John. That actually is a fantastic question, really, because there's so many different ways it could go. I think you know, one thing that comes to mind is that there's really no incentive for them to shut it off and piss everybody off. You know, there's no upside there. But what I could see happening, I think the big driver will be at some point there will be something in Google Ads that they'll say, well, if you want this data, you only get it in four, it doesn't go in three.

And then there'll be a mass exodus at that point, you know, because people need that, you know, want the ad tracking and ROI on what they're spending and so that will force the line share people over. And then yeah, I can see him just leaving it on life support like only half effective forever, just so that they never have to deal with the complaints of actually shutting it off. Yeah. We saw the GA.js um tracking script. Uh Google announces retirement, and then I think it took seven years for them to actually get around to turning it off.

And the part that's important to remember is that the analytics.js script and Google Analytics 3 is a massive data collection mechanism that powers things like double click uh and Google ads and stuff like that. So it's it's not going away anytime soon. Because if Google were to simply turn it off, they would essentially be cutting off millions of websites from uh the data that the ad systems can calibrate on on the back end. You know, it's not perfect, but um, you got it right though, that they're already saying the new privacy-safe ad controls and the privacy safe data will only be in Google Analytics 4. So if you want to maximize this, you know, it's not even coming, it's it is the case today.

If you want the best of the best, you gotta be using those two systems uh in concert. And the reason for that is they've changed the underlying model of how they measure things, it's events top to bottom in both systems. Okay, let's move on. Um this is a one from uh oh we covered that one last week. Uh see.

This is a good one. Hannah asks, what are the biggest mistakes you see people make when measuring content marketing performance? So this is just one person's opinion. The biggest the biggest mistakes that I see is not having a clear purpose to your content marketing. And so a lot of times, you know, and this is more of a broad stroke, a lot of times I see companies get swept up in what everybody else is doing versus really focusing on why they are doing content marketing in the first place.

So for us, it's an awareness tool, it's an education tool. Um it's sometimes an engagement tool. But and so we need to keep those things in mind as we're creating that content. And so we would measure on, you know, scroll depth. We would measure on how many times the thing was shared, how many times it was viewed, et cetera, et cetera.

So I feel like that's the biggest mistake is not having a clear purpose for why you're doing content marketing in the first place. And it can be multi-layered, you can have different purposes, but you should have metrics, different metrics for each of those purposes. Yeah, I think you hit that. The the only mistake people make is not doing any tracking at all. You know, there's orgs that throw stuff out there and never and it doesn't even have to be up front.

Like it's okay if you just throw it out there and sit around for six months, but at the end of six months, go back and look. And did it get downloaded? Did we get any clicks? You know, at least get yes or no on it. Because yeah, I think the biggest mistake is people that just spray stuff out there and never even look back.

Yep. Yeah, wouldn't it? I mean, there's so many things you can do with with measurement wrong, but the the obvious one is you forgot to set it up or it's just not working. I we are not blameless when you look in our Google Analytics account and you look at the company's you know, three year history, there are gaps every so often when a tracking script went missing or something. Um and you know that happens to everybody, but it gets bad when you go into like we've been in a a couple of clients' Google Analytics accounts, and it just says, you know, it's like June 2021 and then we nothing.

Flat lines like, well and you say, what happened then? Like, oh we updated the website. Like ah did and and you only know now no notice now six months later that your analytics are not working. So what happened there? I think that's probably the other thing too uh is you measuring stuff, you're collecting the data for stuff and then you just don't use it.

Like you you got all this data and you never look at Google Analytics. And it takes you six months to realize it stopped working. I mean I think whether it's Google Analytics or any other system, collecting the data and then not doing anything with it is it's such a waste of everybody's time. Yep, it really is. Okay, next Kathy asks how do you choose which digital platforms and channels are best for each piece of content, especially when it comes to atomizing content.

Um it's related to a question Don asked you know how do you know um where to put the different types of content like blog posts, ebooks, videos, etc. So how do you make those decisions about where to put stuff? Oh yeah that's a you know we do a lot of work on traction framework like figuring out where stuff should go. But the short answer is like why don't you know why not put it everywhere? I mean I don't see any reason you know what nobody's gonna complain about one more Twitter post or one more LinkedIn post.

Um but it is up to you to know which channels are working best and you can reach a point where you know you decide that some channels just aren't even worth doing. In fact, yeah, I'd be interested in you guys too, as far as we've been working harder on Twitter for the past couple weeks, and I've this has kind of made me think I'm wasting my time on that channel entirely. But um yeah I you know go everywhere and then use your analytics to figure out where it should be I feel like I feel like it depends on what the purpose of the content is. And so is it educational? Is it salesy?

Is it awareness? And so aligning that with your digital customer journey of which channels fall into which of those buckets um and so maybe you save your original research for your newsletter it's a little bit more exclusive because you don't want to use that as an awareness tool but maybe the blog post that you wrote about what's coming with GA4 is more of an awareness and that can go across all socials. So I think I would say the couple of things are what what is the purpose of the content? Is it you know sort of that hero hub help is it awareness is it educational whatever and then aligning that with how your digital marketing falls into a customer journey. Yeah I like I like the approach that that John mentioned put everything everywhere for 30 days and look at your data.

Like if you've if you've put up all these different stories and images and movies and ebooks and you find out that nobody on LinkedIn clicks on your videos probably don't put videos on LinkedIn anymore. I mean I I would assume that would be uh fairly straightforward the the challenge there is you do really should probably write down a testing plan. Probably. I mean, that's that would be good. That would be good.

Uh so a couple uh questions coming in live. Uh this one's from Brian. Uh GA4 has a setting to save historical data for two or fourteen months. Do you think this is going to force people to learn BigQuery to store all the historical data? Will it remain free?

I have a I have a lot of thoughts. Um trying, I'm just trying to organize them in my head. I think that you people will not learn big query. They will panic. They will say, hey, what happened to my data?

And I think that's about how it's gonna go. Um BigQuery isn't free. I mean, that I that's that's I think the the important thing is that you are billed for usage on it. So um it is not free to begin with. And and obviously, if you are running a site with millions of visitors a month, uh that could get very, very expensive very quickly.

For us, like the bill we get from Google on a monthly basis for our BigQuery usage is something around like two and a half to three cents a month. So we're we're not exactly uh endangering the company coffers, uh, but it is definitely not free. But it is a good point, I think. And certainly when we set up uh GA4 for ourselves, we turned on that integration as quickly as we possibly could to make sure that we were capturing all the historical data. Um we have another one from Brian, who's uh I think getting all of his uh content in for the uh end of the year here.

How do you suggest content creators and entrepreneurs start using their content data to find insights? And can you quote you in a blog article? Okay, so you're on the record now. Uh say something good. Dang it.

The pressure's on, Brian. How do you suggest individual content creators and on Twitter start using their content data to find insights? You know, again, I always go back to the same starting place of what was the purpose of the content, you know, from the get go. And so, you know, if you're using the Chris and John approach of posting it everywhere as a testing plan, um, I think that's a good place to start. Um, especially if you're, you know, a brand new setting up a brand new content marketing plan, you know, you can use the data from that test to figure out what content is working.

Um, how long should the content be? You know, you can look at all of the best practices in the world, but until you do it for yourself, you won't really know what's working because your audience is going to be unique to just you. It's going to be comprised of people who are not necessarily in Chris's audience, who are not necessarily in John's audience or my audience. And so we're each gonna have a different experience as we're posting our content. So I I think the 30-day test plan is a great place to start, and then you can start pulling out insights.

Um, with that, I would say you definitely need to be creating different kinds of content, uh, long form content, short form content, video content. So that way you're sort of testing a variety of things. You're not just putting out six blog posts for 30 days and saying, well, that didn't work. Yep. John, what do you suggest?

Yeah, we've got our most valuable pages report is you know, classic canned data that we run. Take a look at what's actually working on the website, what's converting. I mean, that's the quickest and easiest way to get to stuff. Um, and then you know, we have our digital customer journey reports too. If you want to take it further beyond just which pages on your site are doing action, but looking across the board at all your programs.

So yeah, this section of the program sponsored by Trust Insights, who can provide you with actionable data. Um most valuable pages or attribution. Uh if you have data problems that last more than four hours, contact your physician or trust insights and uh DM me to learn more. Wow. Okay, it's hard of all the things.

You know that you know Brian's gonna quote you on that now. We want to make the article. That's the only that's all the links are good links. Um the thing that a lot of people don't do is take into account what is in the content itself from the format. Like, is it an image?

Is it a uh piece of text? Is it a video? And then the topics that it's about, you know, is it about analytics? Is it about you know machine learning? Is it about organizational change?

Um, and then doing some analysis, you know, even just in an Excel spreadsheet, just with you know, your basic correlation function inside of Excel to say do any of these things matter? Right? Do any of these things matter specific to the the audience that we're after? So I'll give you an example. This week uh in our 12 days of data series, uh on day four, we looked at TikTok's trending videos.

What things um what were sort of the the characteristics of trending videos, the things that the TikTok algorithm had selected to show users? And then we looked on day five at marketing uh videos. So videos with using the marketing and sales hashtags on TikTok. And on day four, there was not a single unifying element of content that said this predicts trending, right? It wasn't a certain type of music or a certain theme or a certain hashtag.

Really, it was there was no clear thing that said, yeah, this is what's going to cause something to trend. But on day five, there was, right? So using you know the digital marketing hashtag and stuff had a correlation to the video view counts. And so as we look at our data and as we're trying to figure out like what types of content resonate, we need to be doing that analysis. And you don't need to use machine learning for that.

I mean, you can literally just again do it in Excel spreadsheet, just count things by hand if necessary. It will take a longer, but you can do it. And that will then tell you like there's specific types of content that are actually important that that the themes that resonate with your audience. And the other thing that again would really encourage people to do is talk to your audience. If you are just getting started out and you've only got like two or three super fans, folks like Brian who show up for you know a lot of the different content, talk to them.

Ask them what do you want more of? What resonated, what let landed for you, what didn't, right? Hey, I we just put up this blog post. Did anybody like it? And if everyone's like, eh, it was okay, you know, they were trying to be polite.

Um, you know it missed the mark. And you can say, okay, well, what would have made it better? What could we have done differently? What would be more valuable to you? When you're just getting started out, this is something that we hear a lot around you know, entrepreneurs and startups.

Do things that don't scale. It's okay to you know talk to a customer for half an hour. When you're the CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation, it's a lot harder to talk to an individual customer. Um, you know, you won't ever talk to every customer one by one, but when you just start out, there's no harm in that because you may find a whole bunch of things that you didn't realize were were actually the case. Okay.

Next question in the pile. Alan asks, how do you tell which keyword searches drove to specific content? Well, why don't you kick us off, Chris? Okay. Um, let's do this.

Actually, you know what? Let's do it in Data Studio. That'd be fun. Uh, because Data Studio uh lets you actually do this. So let's go to Google Data Studio and connect to Search Console.

So if you have not connected your Search Console account, you should, because it's important. Um let's add in a table. I like tables with heat maps because colors are fun. And so Alan's asking which keyword searches drove to specific content. Well, what specific content we have?

We have landing pages, right? We want to know what page did somebody come in on. And we have keywords, uh, which is the query term. And we have our clicks. And so very quickly looking here, let's resize this to fit the data.

And best practice, just slap a uh date control on here so that we can look over more periods of time. And let's choose uh this year to date. Let's see what happened in 2021, the the little year that could. This query, this search term, trust insights, which maps to this landing page, uh, got 591 clicks. IGTV stats got 100 clicks and land but went to uh this this post from last October.

Um AI project lifecycle, 66 clicks went to this page. So, in relatively short order, with a few clicks in inside of Data Studio and your Search Console data, you can figure out exactly which keyword searches drove to which page. And if you want to get fancy, you can also add in the click-through rate to understand. You know, we showed up a lot. Now let's put the impressions in there as well.

And let's just resize this to make it fit nicely again. And so this term down here, IGTV Stats 2020, got 50 50% of the time when we showed up in search, we got the click for it, right? So we were very, very relevant for that. AI project life project cycle, we showed up 16,000 times, we got 66 clicks. So Google thinks we did the thing, but the customer doesn't.

Google customers like, yeah, I'm not gonna click on this link. So that's what I would say is the easiest way to get at this particular information. I don't think we can have a more solid answer than that. How about so that all comes through Search Console, right? Because none of that's available over on your GA, right?

That's what we've lost over the past couple years. So yeah, you can turn on the Google Analytics uh integration, but we have seen cases where what comes into GA is not it's not as flexible, right? So and the same is true of the Search Console web interface itself. You can't put query and page together in the same report. You can look at queries, you can look at pages, but you can't put them side by side.

And only when you're using the API can you do that, which is why you kind of have to do it in Data Studio. Uh one fun thing that you can do, I like to sort uh by the different columns to see what we get the most impressions for because impressions are Google says you did a good job with this term, right? Clicks are the user says you did a good job with this term. So I'd like to see what does Google think we're doing a good job with, right? So what is data quality?

This data quality here. Google says, good job. We think that this page is about data quality, and so we're going to show this page a lot in search. Um Google thinks we did okay with you know a project lifecycle, Google Postmaster Tools, and so on and so forth. So from an SEO perspective, from a technical perspective, we're doing okay.

Then when we look at the click perspective, it's like okay, well, not as good here. So obviously we have some uh some work to do. Uh and there are some things where clearly there's there's a a mismatch, like you know, is minus one elastic or inelastic, which is is more of computational stuff and not not related to uh the marketing. Any other things you want to toss in on this? I mean, I just I think it's interesting, you know, it's you can answer questions like that so easily using the data that you already have, and then when you see things like, well, Google thinks we're doing well, but the people don't think we're doing well, just starting to think through how you bridge that gap of meeting the needs of Google so that your content is shown, and then meeting the needs of the consumer so that they're getting something on it, and that's you know, the magic of really good content marketing.

It is, but the other thing that again, a lot of marketers don't do this. We've been running it forever. We just forget to look at the data because you know, cobbler's kids have no shoes, is um running on-site surveys, saying, you know, there's the 4C survey that Google uh gives you in Google surveys, uh Google Webmaster surveys, which is it asks questions like, did you find what you were looking for today? Were you able to complete it? Uh and so on and so forth.

Basic customer satisfaction stuff, and then it gives you a running score of is your site actually doing the thing that the user asked it, wanted it to. And if your customer satisfaction scores are zero, then clearly, you know, you you've you've got an experience problem there in terms of content. And the other thing is just asking people. So when we do our one question surveys every quarter, we we do like to ask people like, hey, what could we be doing more of or doing better and so on and so forth? And it is uh always revelatory to go, oh, didn't think about that.

But it's it takes a lot of confidence and self-awareness to ask for that feedback, but not only ask for it, hear it and then do something about it so that you kind of take your ego out of it to say, okay, just because I think that article that I spent, you know, six days writing and tweaking and editing is amazing, nobody else does. Well, they're wrong, and my content's right. It that's not how that works. Because unless you're writing it for you and nobody else will ever see it, that is not how that works. That that is unfortunately true, and unfortunately, um the hippo problem at work.

The highest individually paid person's opinion in the room saying, No, no, this is real, this really is what the thing is. Very, very few people can actually do that. Like Steve Jobs is probably was probably the only person who's ever successfully uh managed to pull that off. Okay. Um just as an example, uh, we can show this too.

Um, if you've not tried Google Surveys, uh, when you deploy it, it costs you a penny per uh response. And you know, it that's not super bad. This is from my personal website. Um, you know, people saying, Are you sat how satisfied are you? What if anything do you find frustrated or unappealing?

What's your me your main reason? And did you complete were you're complete uh able to complete it? So again, this is stuff that's the questions are already baked. You don't have to do anything to make this work. You just install the widget inside of Google Tag Manager, let it do its thing, and then you come back and go, well, either our site's doing the job or the site's not doing the job.

Okay. Next one from Allison. Um, we are legit starting from scratch. What analytics resources would you recommend for someone who's brand new to learn from just to get up to speed on digital marketing analytics? Hmm.

This is where I should have a I should have a page from our website that rattles off my tongue and I don't. That's a fail for me, right here. You know, I think that's a that's a tough question because you know the the basics of digital marketing. It it I mean you could go on forever. It really depends.

Are you trying to just understand the landscape? Are you specializing in one of the channels? But you know, I think you know, sort of our tried and true is you know, the Google Analytics Academy is a great place to start because it gives you the foundation of tracking your website, and so these days very few companies don't have a website, and you need to be able to track who's coming in, what they're doing on the site, and Google Analytics Academy gives you a really good foundation for what to expect, how to set it up, how to think about the data. So I would say that's a great place to start. Um I also really like HubSpot Academy because it gives you a wide variety of topics that you can cover.

And so you can kind of pick and choose and you know the the classes, the courses themselves, they're not long. Um, you know, so you can get through you know quite a few of them. They're they're on email marketing, CRM, um, you know, lead magnets. You sort of they cover they're a really good resource for covering the broad spectrum of digital marketing. So I would say those if you had nothing else to start with, those would be two really good places to start.

Yeah, I think it's solid advice. Um other thing is read you know some of the industry blogs and stuff. There's some there's some decent blogs out there that do a good job. Um Simo Ahava's blog if you want or if you want to learn tag manager like he is the guy to follow on all things tag manager. His his content is fantastic.

Sometimes it gets very very technical so being be aware of that. There's usually good marketing and analytics content uh what used to be called marketing landups now Martech.org uh Scott Brinker's blog uh Chief Martech also uh has some interesting stuff from time to time and you know selfishly if you're not part of the Dust Russian sites uh analytics for marketers Slack group it's free uh pop on over there and you can uh have conversations and ask a lot of these uh thanks man a lot of these questions um to other folks and see what uh stuff other people are following but yeah there are definitely analytics specific um content for individual channels uh one of the hidden secrets that I think is is useful are developer blogs uh when you read like Facebook's developer blog or twitter's developer blog you can get a sense of what the back end folks are working on if you you know if you're interested in search and how search works uh Google's got a huge amount of of content around search um their search off the record podcast is phenomenal and so there's so many there's so much good analytics content out there it's more question can you find the time to consume it all okay uh dawn asks is there a reason my Facebook analytics tracking is so wildly different than my Google analytics tracking for the exact same post um the short answer is yes the the longer answer is Facebook and Google are in a lot of ways rival companies and so if you think about it from that standpoint Facebook is not necessarily going to share all of its data with Google and vice versa and so this is actually uh one of my clients uh is a roster of ads managers um and they have their own set of clients and this is a question that comes up a lot and so to get down to sort of like some of the technical things um depending on how your ads are set up, the tracking might be stripped off of your URLs and not passed to Google correctly. Um, you know, so you know, making sure that you're shortening, you're adding your UTM tracking, but then shortening the links so that you can preserve the quality of the link and the tracking information. Um, that's just sort of one thing that I'm aware of. But in general, you know, the not so diplomatic answer is that Facebook and Google don't get along.

So they're sys their systems, quite honestly, are incompatible. And so the information Facebook is always gonna make itself look better, and it's gonna say, okay, Google, you can I'll give you my table scraps of what I think you're allowed to have, so that way I can keep people coming back natively to my platform so that they can only get their data from me. And that's the not technical answer. The have you seen stuff change as far as with the clients that you're working with? I the rule of thumb that I've always gone with that we've heard echoed is you know, if you're within 20%, you're doing well.

Like that's that's the most you can expect because it's just yeah, everybody wants themselves to look great. So surprisingly, each platform you know looks better in their own analytics, which um is the way it is. But yeah, I mean, it's I can understand the frustration because theoretically the data should be the data should be the data, and it shouldn't vary from platform to platform. But because you're passing data from one platform to another that is just not compatible, then you're gonna lose some of that data in the transition. It's gonna say, This is the data that I want you to see.

I want to give you just enough to feel like you're doing something, but really come back to us. We're the only ones who can give you the full picture. Yep. The other thing that is at play, especially on mobile devices, is who's blocked. So Facebook, as of you know, uh now uh one entire iteration of uh Apple's iOS uh operating system, Facebook's tracking pixels blocked on a substantial number of iPhones to the point where you can't tell whether a conversion happened.

And Facebook has tried to build some work arounds, but they are very technical work arounds that a lot of people, frankly, just are not willing to do. And so, yeah, your data is probably gonna get be way off and get even worse off uh as time goes by. If you want to spend some time getting trying to resolve this to some degree, you can implement what's called server-side tracking. Uh, this is a fairly complex thing to do. Uh, you could do it in Google Tag Manager, you can also do it with Facebook.

Facebook now calls conversions API. Um, and it can try and unify some of that data. But yeah, the at the end of the day, the only reliable number you have is how much money uh somebody actually spent. Like if it once it hits your bank account, that's when you know that that the results are good because we have seen cases where you know Google Analytics said, hey, this page had no traffic, and yet that's the conversion page, and you know, there's money in the bank. So it's like, okay, well, I'll take the money.

Um, all right. And let's do one more here. Uh Drew asks an interesting one. How do we know if we are attracting the right target audience in the B2B world by looking at our analytics? Well, I think it depends on what you're collecting.

Um, you know, so if you're just purely looking at website traffic, you may not be able to tell if it's the right audience or not. Um, you can look at the sources that they're coming from, but again, that's not going to give you a whole lot of information. And so for this one, I would say it definitely you need the support from your CRM. And your CRM needs to be set up in such a way that you're collecting demographic information that you care about. So just sort of like a little bit of a you know, side rant.

I used to work for a company that had a four-page contact form. Um, and this, like it, as the person who was not the decision maker at the time, it may be crazy because the completion rate was so low for this page, and they were not making decisions with every single data point on that contact form. So that's sort of my little side rant is only collect data that you will be making decisions with. Um, and so I would say that's really gonna be your best bet for understanding are you attracting the right kind of audience? And so, you know, maybe you care about industry, maybe you care about uh role and title and level.

Then make sure you're collecting that information on your forms into your CRM so that you can look at that and go, okay, our ideal customer is comprised of this, and these are the types of people that we are attracting. So where's the gap or where's the you know mismatch? So that would be my advice on that particular thing. John. Yeah, you know, CRM is definitely a much better take.

And yeah, bless you for saying that about contact forms. It's just if I had a dollar for like every CRM field that you know, you go back three years later and they're empty. It's just horrifying. Um But yeah, I didn't I'd have to have to go with that because there's really there's just not enough in web analytics now to know you really have to go further down the chain to conversions or appointments set or something like that, because you that's the only way to to get that more detailed info. And it's so tough for B2B because you tend to be shooting at such a limited universe of contacts.

And they get CRM could give you interesting stuff like it, well, not as much now that with so much work from home, but it used to be you could be able to pick out which you know companies were banging on the website because the IP addresses were mapped in the CRM system, stuff like that. And again, a lot of that stuff now has now failed, but yeah, that's beyond just um web analytics. One of the things that I think is a caution there uh for Drew is you assuming that you know what the target audience is, because even for B2B, the buyer may not STB the buyer you think. The classic example is with account-based marketing, right? Where you say, uh, you know, we're targeting CEOs of these companies.

Well, the CEO is not the one putting together the vendor list. That's the intern, right? So uh even though someone's title might be, you know, intern, you know, marketing intern, they may be the one who has to put together the short list of vendors. And if you influence that person, by default you have influenced the rest of the process. So uh to what Katie was saying, make sure you're looking in your CRM, but also look at your data and make sure that what you think is your target audience is in fact actually the target audience of people who buy, or at least the people whose sales says, yes, this is a sales qualified lead.

We are happy to receive from you, Mark, and here's a cookie. Well, and so there's a there's a pre a prequel, if you want to call it, to looking in your CRM and collecting that data. And that is that market research of talking with people. If I created this thing, would this solve your problem? What problems are you having so that I can try to, you know, create something that will help you?

And then, you know, collecting information from them about like who are you? What do you do? What is your day look like? So there's an upfront market research, customer research piece that goes ahead of setting up those forms on your website to collect that demographic information. Because Chris's point, if you don't know who that target audience is and you're letting the data just kind of inform you, there may be a mismatch of, well, we thought we were selling to you know B2B in this vertical, but really we're a B2C company.

Whoopsie. Exactly. So we'll finish we'll close out with a question that's not on the list here, but I think is a fun one to close out the last show of the year, uh, which is Katie, what are you looking forward to in the year to come? I mean, that's such a loaded question. Um more sleep, uh, better coffee.

I don't know. No, what I'm looking forward to in the year to come is really getting an opportunity to focus in on the value propositions of trust insights. And so using our existing data, um, reaching out to our Slack community and our customers to really make sure that we're not only solving the their existing problems, but trying to get ahead of future problems. And so, you know, when more people are bringing AI into their organization, it opens up a new can of worms and opens up a whole bunch of new problems that we want to be prepared to solve. So that's I I really like that piece of it.

So that's what I'm looking forward to is really, you know, revising and re energizing our values, our value propositions, I should say. Our values were good. We know we know who we are. More of our value propositions. John, what about you?

What are you looking forward to in the year to come? Yeah, March 3rd. I'll be at the TD North Center with Bell Biv DeVoe, new edition, Bobby Brown, uh Charlie Wilson and Jodice for an evening of old school 80s RB. Dude, I am not holding my breath for for all of those people to be on stage. That's half the fun is will they make it?

That it's like that's like 15 dates into the tour. Yeah, I would be astounded if it's the original roster within weeks. Um yeah, that sadly that's the only thing I have on the list because I'm one of these people too. I don't know if I how many other people can relate to this, but it's like I'm giving so much like making it to that last day before a year-end wrap up and everything. Like I literally have no idea even what I'm gonna do next week.

Never mind like what I'm looking forward to for next year. I literally will have to take next week and take and set a day aside to like make a map, uh, do the annual plan of like, okay, what do I want to happen next year? I I'll on the short list. I would love it if we get to a point where live events do come back. You know, it would be great if we could, you know, both on the social side of concerts and things like that, but also on the business side of being able to, you know, meet with some of the folks we haven't seen in a couple years that we normally have dinner with after events and stuff like that, where we can, you know, especially because that's where a lot of the real learning comes from in these conferences and trade events, you know.

Like you really don't learn. We've proven that you know, Zoom meetings are not the way to to learn about what's going on in the industry. In fact, that they're even a challenge to staying awake most of the time. Um so yeah, but that's where I'm at. Yeah, and I hope everybody has a great and safe, happy holiday.

And uh yeah, get recharged and ready for 2022. Exactly. What are you looking forward to, Chris? Um, publishing a new work. I'm not sure if it's gonna be a paper or a book yet.

That's about 30-ish thousand words uh on private social media communities going to be talking about that actually at the Marketing Profits B2B forum in the fall of next year in Boston in person. Uh, you know, conditions permitting. Um I'm just finishing up, you know, going through a lot of the tutorials and stuff on like after effects and stuff. And so I'm looking forward to putting some of that knowledge to use for the business and for marketing next year of trying new and different ways of making content. Um we just upgraded machines, so we now have this you know absurd like Death Star of a laptop to work on.

Um so I would like to see what interesting stuff kinds of content we can create uh with all these new capabilities. The the the tools are there, the ingredients are there, just gotta just gotta get the chef skilled up here. I thought you were gonna say I have this new machine, so I want to see how long it takes before I can break it. No, no, I'm gonna try to take good care of it. But you know, that's that's what I'm looking forward to next year.

It's more creative stuff to go along with a lot of the uh the the heavier uh machine learning stuff and uh you know new new book, new stuff to uh to share with folks. That's why we buy Apple Care. Well, thanks uh to everyone who has watched and listened and commented and joined our communities and stuff over the past year. Uh 2021 would not have been the year it was without you. So we thank you for that.

And we hope you do have a great, safe, healthy holiday season. And uh we will see you uh in the first week of January. Take care. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it.

For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See ya next time.