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Tom Shapiro Wants You To Rethink Your Marketing Metrics

Tom Shapiro woke us up after a big lunch with his tips for taking marketing metrics a step further to better reach our goals. He is the CEO of Stratabeat, a branding and marketing group in the Boston area, and the founder of Boston Neuromarketing Group. Plus, he’s a published author! His new book, Rethink Your Marketing is on sale now.

Shapiro opens his speech by asking, “How many of you rely on marketing metrics in day-to-day marketing tasks?” He tells us that marketing metrics are critical to our success.

Tom Shapiro speaking at Confluence Conference

What if the best processes we follow actually aren’t best?

What do you do when a company wants you to drive more organic search traffic for them? Imagine a company that measures success by driving the most search traffic as possible.

As an agency, what would you do?

Shapiro tells us 99.999% of the time, the agency is going to propose an SEO proposal. Instead he urges us to ask, “What would I do as the CMO of the brand?” We should go outside of the box and think holistically.

Everyone goes to more than one website when traveling through the customer journey. Our job is to make the user choose our company to fulfill their need. Ask “What would provide the ultimate customer experience?” and work on that.

How can we bring more people into the conversation?

We need to discover how to make everything as sharable as possible. Reshape the brand and then you can do SEO. Always think “What is the end experience we want to achieve and how are we going to measure that experience?” That mentality should drive every decision in your process.

Look at what people are talking about, competitor’s websites, industry websites, etc. Immerse yourself in the world of your product to see what the conversations are. What are people talking about? What gets them excited, engaged, and into a brand? Next, evaluate keywords and social shares to see what sticks.

He urges us to 10x everything across the board. Anyone can increase traffic. Instead, practice big picture thinking to drive the strategy.

Practice Fulcrum and Lever Marketing

If there’s a big boulder and you try to push it over, there’s a big possibility that you can’t. You aren’t strong enough. But if you use a lever, it’s easier to move. Then, you realize that the longer the lever, the easier it gets. When you find the metric that works, try to use the fulcrum and lever approach to see how far you can utilize it.

How do you optimize your paid ads to convert to their best ability?

Shapiro shared an experience with us where he found that by optimizing on a daily basis (looking at a week and seeing where conversions occurred),  he was able to see what days people didn’t interact with his ads. He decided to target his paid search campaign to only run on days where people engaged. It worked!

Continuing his story, he warned us not to stop at initial success. He urged us to go one step further. So, in this story, he looked at hourly optimization and funneled the budget to the higher performing hours. Guess what? It worked again!

Look at what can derail a metric

Even if it’s successful, discover what can undercut a metric at the knees. No matter what single metric you might be prioritizing, always find an inverse. Take the metric to the next level by layering in the opposite.

Behavioral Analysis

Look at where people are falling off the buyer’s journey. Pageviews only tell you how many people visit the page. Shapiro says pageviews are irrelevant. Look at blog posts to see how far down the page a user scrolled–see what actions they took, or didn’t take.

Look at what people were most engaged with in the blog post. He urges us to use as much behavioral data as we can. Whether it’s heat mapping, scroll data, cursor mapping, etc. it’s important to see what is truly resonating and what’s not.

He left us with the call-to-action to rethink all of our marketing.

Now, to wait until tomorrow to see if Tom Shapiro and Paul Shapiro are actually the same person. Erik Deckers seems to think they might be…