Flip The Switch Episode 59: 2019 Predictions

PAT: Today on Flip the Switch, we are wrapping up 2018 with a conversation about what’s to come for 2019 for us as marketers and you as business owners. We talk about futuristic website development, the direction importance of having impactful design, and how to measure your multi-channel efforts in a way that actually informs you about your bottom line. If you want to gear up for a big 2019 this is the episode for you. Let’s get into it.

01:00 AUSTIN: Welcome to Flip the Switch presented by Power Digital Marketing. This is episode number 59.

01:04 PAT: 59 our Magic Johnson episode.

01:07 AUSTIN: Yes, and why are we doing Magic Johnson, Pat?

01:09 PAT: Because there’s no good athletes that are number 59, and he’s 59 years old so we figured bring him right back around the horn!

01:15 AUSTIN: That’s right!

01:15 PAT: Number two

01:16 AUSTIN: We’ve brought… this is the second time we’ve used Magic Johnson, but this is also the second time for greatness! I don’t know…

01:23 PAT: I… we’re having a hard time reaching this gap.

01:25 JOHN: This is a Lakers podcast.

01:26 AUSTIN: Yeah, I typically have a joke there, but that was bad. We’re just gonna move on from that.

01:31 PAT: Yeah let’s just pretend that that was a smooth transition, and we’ve got a great show for you guys today. We have business news and trends we’re gonna go through and what we want to hit on for our main topic is a little bit of a look forward into 2019. So, from a digital perspective, like what can you expect as a business owner and how should you potentially be accounting for that in your digital strategy to maximize the amount of online revenue that you can drive.

01:50 AUSTIN: And we’re gonna be talking about… some of its technical/digital and some of it is more just all encompassing marketing, right? And how to tie your whole business together… stuff like that that we think is really important that businesses are becoming savvy in, in this time of year and then also moving into next year. Very important for your business to make sure you’re there as well.

02:10 PAT: Exactly. But before that, let’s hop into a couple of quick business news and trends. So the very first thing that I wanted to talk about… this is a pretty funny one: Floyd “Money” Mayweather and DJ Khaled… oh my god… they have to pay the SEC fines for vlogging garbage I see, oh.

02:26 AUSTIN: That is a fantastic headline.

02:27 PAT: What a headline. So this is on TechCrunch right now. I never thought that I would see DJ Khaled and Floyd “Money” Mayweather together in a business article, but here we are. Basically they have agreed to pay fines… they’re like their penalties for disgorgement basically. They were failing to disclose that they were… they were promoted… they were paid to promote a couple of ICOs including Centric Tech and we’ve talked about the ICO issue before.

02:51 AUSTIN: Yeah, so ICO is initial coin offering unlike the IPO which you’re used to with stocks. ICO’s are essentially the same thing. It’s when a coin becomes able to be purchased, you can buy them and what they were doing is using Mayweather and DJ Khaled… this one company to promote the ICO which was upcoming. So, think of it it’s just pretty much a billboard saying that you could buy it but it was on Instagram and my understanding with Instagram is that you have to disclose when you’re doing an ad. So you have to hashtag ad or you have to put the partnership in the top corner, I believe it is, next year… next to the actual post so that people are aware that you’re paid for it. They did not do this. They acted like they were just excited to be a part of the ICO and buy into it, which is false advertising.

03:35 PAT: Yeah, yeah there was even a quote that Floyd Mayweather had. He said “You could call me Floyd “Crypto” Mayweather from now on”. The SEC also ruled that he can’t use that nickname anymore. But I think that this is a little bit… it’s kind of indicative of a bigger trend that we see with the rise of like influencer marketing and people that are using their local… their following to drive business for companies. It can be tough to tell whether or not it’s genuine or not. And that’s the whole reason that Instagram has those rules and regulations like saying that you have a paid partnership with whoever is saying that this is an ad. It’s so that you don’t mislead people. Because I’d venture to say a large portion of people that bought into this ICO did so as a result of the fact that they thought that Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled we’re doing it for real.

04:21 AUSTIN: Yes!

04:22 PAT: Because that’s exactly how it was positioned. It’s almost like misleading the shareholders, if you were in a publicly held company.

04:28 AUSTIN: Yeah that’s a great analogy, Pat, and you nailed that one right there. These guys… well, whether or not the ICO world was a pretty big gray area, which in some cases it was, this is still the same thing as any other product that they would have promoted, right?

04:42 PAT: Right.

04:42 AUSTIN: They know better than to promote a product without disclosing that it’s an act… that they got paid for it. And they were just trying to make a quick buck. No surprise there for Mr. Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled so, these guys are gonna pay for it and also that company went to under. So the actual company that they were promoting is no longer a Crypto company. It’s been a very rough year for Cryptos.

05:05 PAT: Yep, exactly. So obviously DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather are not immune to that either. Okay, cool. Moving into something else here. Salesforce. Obviously we talked about CRM’s and the use of like sales enablement things a little bit on this show a good amount, and we always kind of talk about Salesforce as that pinnacle company, right? Kind of like that aspirational influencer within the CRM space.

05:29 AUSTIN: Yes.

05:30 PAT: Salesforce actually just increased its sales the most in the last two years. Very recently.

05:36 AUSTIN: They had a… I believe it was a twenty seven percent growth in their fiscal third quarter this year as well, which brings really the full year to a pretty substantial increase in it to your day like you’re saying they are expected to pull in about two point six eight billion, I believe, but that’s that twenty seven percent we’re talking about. So they’ve had a substantial increases per quarter for the last two years and they’ve had almost a nine and a half percent raise in their share price this last quarter which was the most since February 2016 is our understanding as well. So they’re seeing that flow back into their company. The shareholders are very confident in the company itself and there’s a lot of reasons why. I think one of the big reasons why is they’re actually pulling in a substantial amount of top-line revenue on a quarterly basis, growth wise, because they’ve opted into a subscription-based model.

06:33 PAT: Yeah, yeah and so basically what happens with Salesforce, or any other CRM for that matter, you get locked in to a contract basically. It’s like a year-long contract. You pay recurring monthly, or you can pay for the year up front. So it is that MRR model, right?

06:47 AUSTIN: Right.

06:47 PAT: Which I think is super interesting. Also, if you look at the way that they’ve been spending their money, they had a 32% increase in their op ex, so their operating expenses, in the third quarter meaning that they’re actively trying to scale up. They’re taking measures to continue to increase the rate of their growth. There’s a lot of factors that kind of go into this. I think another thing that gets not considered a ton is how many people are using the platform because of the demand that there is for it. Like everything needs to have data attributable to it now. To be able to justify costs in today’s business world, you need to be able to drive data-driven decisions.

07:28 AUSTIN: And from a product level perspective, as Pat uses Salesforce all the time and inside the business that’s a pretty big part of our day to day as well, what are some things that you’ve noticed that make it maybe better than the competition, then maybe let’s say HubSpot CRM?

07:44 PAT: It’s just… so as far as… I mean from my perspective it’s just like, if it’s set up correctly, it just shows the lead nurturing path way, way better.

07:52 AUSTIN: Right.

07:52 PAT: So you can see when a prospect comes in, if you have like if you’re using a Salesforce marketing cloud like par dot you can see on top of that, like what interactions people have had since they’ve come to the site, what sales person is assigned to them… it derives right back to a sales opportunity within par dot too. It has like a dollar amount associated with it. It’s really quantifiable success that you can see within it and it makes the decision making process way, way easier. And also it’s really comprehensive in terms of lead scoring, so based on the actions that people have taken previously, you can tell how qualified they are based on their score. So then you don’t even need to like look back for each individual prospects history. You can just say like oh their score is high we know how we have our lead scoring set up so I’m gonna spend more time going after that prospect as opposed to one with a lower score. So it also saves time for your team and it also saves time for… just it saves money in that instance for your business in general because people aren’t spending time on leads that aren’t gonna close or have a lower propensity to close than other ones.

08:49 AUSTIN: This has had a substantial impact on the way that we market for… for these leech end clients that Pat’s talking about, because we have the ability to know if the person that we got to the front door of the company was good or not, and that in the past hasn’t been the case. Attributing our actual clickable ads all the way down to the person who ends up either signing or doesn’t sign with this company has been a little bit of a gray area and the way that Salesforce has basically created clarity in and streamlined our ability to see the entire process and understand the person down to everything about them… how much how big their business is, how much they spend, what their plans are as a business… this has just really opened up the door to us marketing better for these people and it’s a really big part of our business and that’s what makes Salesforce this ultra-giant in the world of CRM since their ability to provide companies with data that we’ve never had before.

09:41 PAT: Yeah, and if you think about it in terms of like company longevity too – they were kind of that first mover… or not even like a first mover, but they were the first real powerhouse to be in the CRM space to the level that they are. And it’s just interesting to see how they’ve sustained that growth and that market dominance. I have friends or colleagues that work at competitor companies that have… that offers CRM’s that on the surface level have a pretty similar offering to Salesforce but there’s just that brand notoriety behind Salesforce now. Like they have the tallest building in the San Francisco skyline. They’re not going anywhere. They continue to grow at an incredible clip and the reason for that isn’t just because internally they’re doing a good job of scaling it and spending on op X and then the right places to continue to bolster their offering and make it better than the competition in some regards, but they’re also doing a good job of building up the brand. Like, when people think of Salesforce they immediately picture a comprehensive data-driven CRM. It’s the very first thing that people think of. Whereas if you hear some of these other names like let’s say like Copper or like a Hub spot or like sales dot IO… like whatever it might be it doesn’t derive that same feeling. And I think that goes back to kind of just… you have to invest in your company and scale your company within your market but you need to invest in your brand, because that’s eventually how people are going to associate the offering that you have.

11:04 AUSTIN: And they’ve associated themselves with almost an elite quality, or maybe almost luxury or best?

11:11 PAT: I’d say almost like luxury.

11:12 AUSTIN: It’s like… I think a good comparison would maybe be Nike to shoes in itself in basketball shoes, so to speak… is they’re seen as kind of that pinnacle of shoes and of course everybody owns them but it’s associated with just high quality and that’s what Salesforce has done a great job out of, as they’ve said people think, excuse me, that if you’re purchasing Salesforce, you’re purchasing the best.

11:35 PAT: Yeah exactly, it’s Cadillac… It’s kind of like of CRM.

11:38 AUSTIN: Oh yes.

11:39 [Music]

11:43 AUSTIN: Main topic for today: We’re gonna be talking about 2019 trends in marketing and what your company needs to do to make sure you don’t fall behind. These are things that you should be thinking about right now in December that you would like to set as goals for your company and your marketing team. We’ve got a few things to cover here. We want to talk about attribution, we want to talk about what’s considered omni-channel marketing, but first, I want to talk to John about user experience and how important… and I know that this year is important too but we’ve seen Google and it’s volatility from an algorithmic standpoint put a lot of emphasis on the way a website looks and functions.

12:22 JOHN: It’s been a while also.

12:24 PAT: Hey John, good to have you back. A quick question, is this gonna be the year of mobile, finally, that we have been hearing about for five and a half years?

12:30 JOHN: It always is, it always is the year mobile, right? But seriously, I said it last year on the trends that we were doing for 2018…

12:39PAT: It was big though.

12:40 JOHN: It was. Mobile was huge this year, mobile speed and the way that mobile is laid out for sure. So, you can throw mobile into the mix for pretty much everything. But the actual UX side of things that’s gonna happen in 2019, everything is going to be changing more towards almost like an AI perspective or personalized perspective, so some of the things that I’ve seen that are gonna be huge… I’ll start with some of the more boring ones…

13:07 PAT: Nice, good. Get ’em hooked early.

13:10 JOHN: The personalized experiences for people, so tracking people through email and social and then giving them personalized experiences based off what they did on those channels, that’s gonna be huge. It’s gonna be really difficult for developers and designers to use. Yeah…

13:25 PAT: You’re stoked.

13:26 JOHN: Yeah, that’s one that I’m really looking forward to have to work out the logic on that, but essentially it’s personalizing the experience somebody gets when they get to the site based off what they’ve done before.

13:38 PAT: Before on the site or before across other properties that you have control over like… so because you said like email or whatever but is that like they have to have interacted like with your ESP to be able to personalize the experience or is it just like are you gonna have insight into just how they behave in general on the internet.

13:56 JOHN: It’s gonna be like… kind of like email sequencing, how you send certain emails to be pulled based off of actions that they’ve taken before.

14:03 PAT: Got it.

14:04 JOE: Kind of like retargeting.

14:06 JOHN: They’re gonna start tailoring website design for users and how they’ve interacted with the business before. So that’s a super difficult one if you’re a developer and designer to start looking towards but that’s gonna be a big one in 2019. Another one is content so, just like the mobile side of things, content is gonna continue to be a giant thing for design and websites as a whole. Some of the cooler ones that are…

14:33 PAT: Do it.

14:33 JOHN: Some of the cooler ones that are gonna be happening: voice-activated interfaces, which is something that we’re actually doing for a client right now, where they can press a button on the website and it records a voicemail that gets sent straight to the client. So that’s gonna be something that’s gonna be coming through as well. Some of the things that I’ve seen is like getting to the home page and you record what you want to do and then it registers what you say and takes you to the place that you want to go to.

14:58 AUSTIN: Wow.

14:59 PAT: Nice.

14:59 JOHN: So that’s something that’s coming down. No idea how that’s gonna roll out either so that should be pretty difficult.

15:04 PAT: Yep, got your work cut out for you next year, it sounds like.

15:07 JOHN: Exactly! Another one is working augmented reality into websites as well. So going to a web page seeing whatever the QR code… this is the most basic instance of that, but using augmented reality in a website design that’s gonna be a lot more in apps but it’s gonna cross over into websites as well. And then on more of the production side of things, design is gonna get easier and easier to pump out with different tools. Like we switched to Adobe XD this year.

15:39 PAT: Nice.

15:39 JOHN: And that has made things a lot quicker, but it’s only gonna get quicker and quicker and quicker. The other side of that is taking designs and turning it into development is gonna be way quicker. Like you’re gonna at some point in the future we’re gonna be able to just upload designs and then it’s going to turn that into an actual website.

15:59 PAT: So cool.

16:00 AUSTIN: Well cause, like if I’m a business owner too and I’m trying to make landing pages or build out stuff for my website, like the longest… like the biggest not bottleneck but the most biggest time investment I guess, unless I’m wrong, has always been taking design and programming it. Like actually developing that design into the site. So if I can mitigate that by even half as much, I might have to pay a little bit of a premium to get whatever service will allow me to do that, but in terms of time cost and like using my dev resources, it’s gonna pay itself off quick.

16:27 JOHN: Yeah, the midpoint for that right now is things like Unbounce or Wix website, Squarespace where people can develop websites really fast. But what the future is gonna be is actual quality, like hand-coded websites that are generated based off of design. So these design programs are taking their designs and then making that easier so…

16:47 PAT: What do you think that says about the level of importance that people put on the design, as opposed to the functionality of a web site?

16:55 JOHN: In terms of like, how easy it’s gonna be to develop it?

16:59 PAT: Because the way that I hear that is kind of like, it’s almost like the design is gonna drive the functionality of the website.

17:06 JOHN: Yeah, so it’s really the biggest thing that that’s gonna offer is allowing for different designs. So kind of breaking out of a conventional website design, so it’ll affect it in that way. But the biggest thing for this is, it’s gonna be a slow rollout, but it’s gonna make developers lives easier in the long run and then ultimately developers aren’t gonna be needed… hopefully not but…

17:33 AUSTIN: Does this mean our good friend Joe Hollerup’s gonna be out of a job or what?

17:37 JOE: I’m not a developer.

17:39 AUSTIN: No, we just got done talking about how designs are gonna just be, you know…

17:43 JOE: Easily uploaded into an interface, so the design is gonna be driven, it’s gonna be driving the development. Well, you have to do… drive the design and then the developments taken care of.

17:52 JOHN: Yeah, it’s actually the opposite of what you’re saying. Joe would actually come out on top of this situation.

17:58 PAT: It’s just John’s voice. I tuned out for a little bit.

18:00 JOHN: Yeah, sorry, I’m very monotone.

18:02 JOE: Is this a good segue into my trends for the year?

18:05 PAT: Sure, Joe. Yeah, so Joe go ahead and talk about it then.

18:08 JOE: Parallax.

18:10 AUSTIN: What is that?

18:10 JOE: I’m kidding. Roomful of squares. For me, on the design and marketing side of things, there’s a couple things that I’ve been seeing coming about and I think it’s building off of the trends of this year. One of the biggest ones, and I think this has kind of been happening and everyone’s very aware of it, is Instagram is going to be king. I think a lot of the younger generations are starting to move away from Facebook and the Facebook advertising is going to go where that used to just be the end-all be-all… that’s going to be switching over to Instagram and through that process you should be using your Instagram to its fullest capacity when it comes to your branding, your style, your content creation, your marketing, things like that, whether it’s on the organic or paid side. And so there’s gonna be a lot more Instagram advertising and you need to be strategic about that and one big thing that I’ve kind of noticed over the last year is that less is more. You don’t have to have these crazy designed ads, unless it is more of like an illustration based type ad and everything like that but the motion graphics, video, things like that, high quality photography, if you look you can… I mean, if you have a high quality photography or a bank of high-quality assets like that you can pretty much do whatever you want with them, make it look good, throw some simple text over and somehow the photo does all that work for you and catches people’s attention.

19:39 PAT: Yeah.

19:40 JOE: But we were just… I was just talking with a photographer that we work with for one of our clients and we were just kind of discussing how crazy it is that all the work and examples that we send back to each other are all from Instagram profiles and we share Instagram profiles to show the directions of things that we’re looking for…

19:56 PAT: Yeah it’s like using a mood board type stuff.

19:58 JOE: Yeah, exactly, and I think that is going to be the big thing, a big focus and focusing on doing simple things where… like All birds is a really good example, where they do an ad where it’s just their shoe on a bright monochromatic type background, and they do simple text animation that just kind of show the features, show just little interacting things like a little sheep sleeping on the shoe that’s kind of moving around…

20:25 PAT: Yeah, and the motion is what catches people’s attention, right?

20:28 JOE: Yeah, and it allows you to beat the text rule generators. I know Instagram kind of got rid of theirs or they never had one. Facebook, same thing. It’s a good workaround where you’re getting caught in a 20% text rule and they’re disallowing all of your ads. You could turn it into a video and work your way around that and put as much text as you want in those ads and as long as your frame that you’re using to show the engine doesn’t have any text or it works within their rules, you can beat that that kind of roadblock. Because I know for me, when it comes to those things, the text a lot of times helps me get the message across.

21:03 PAT: Right.

21:03 JOE: And when I’m limiting it to a small corner of an ad… kind of ruins the purpose of it and I think that’s why Instagram is so good as well… and just all the different ways that you can get creative with your Instagram, your feed, your ads, things like that. And working in the motion graphics, in the video, and stuff like that.

21:20 AUSTIN: Yeah, and I think too it speaks, like you’re saying, to that younger demographic, like I feel like the reason the text role is prevalent on Facebook is because you have people that don’t want to be advertised to as much, yeah? A little bit of an older demographic, they don’t really trust online ads, they don’t want to be inundated with a ton of like promotional like icons and pricing and stuff on every graphic they’re seeing. Whereas on Instagram to an extent that’s almost like what you’re signing up for a little bit. You have like your feed, you have your discover, but then within your both you’re seeing sponsored content and you’re seeing like sponsored ads that are pointed at you and a lot of times I could just kind of fit the aesthetic of what you’re already interested in because the interest targeting is so good and you can see that interest so much more visually on Instagram than you can on like Facebook where there’s text and images and like whatever else and articles and stuff.

22:09 JOE: And I weirdly enough… it’s funny you say that because I get served or we all get served ads on Instagram all day but it doesn’t feel intrusive. It doesn’t feel like one of those things that is getting in the way. You kind of scroll… if anything it’s beneficial because they know what they’re targeting for.

22:24 PAT: Yeah and I couldn’t pick it out of a lineup. If I was given like five of the posts that are in my feed, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what is an ad and what isn’t.

22:33 JOE: Yeah, you would see and be kind of like, oh I like this book. I don’t remember following this account. What is this? And you see the little sponsored thing and you’re like oh, they’re doing a good job because this caught my attention and I might buy this down the road. Even on that note too is getting creative with your Instagram stories. I think that’s one of the biggest opportunities for this year and I know it’s been ramping up in 2018. Utilizing your stories, doing sequencing. It’s very simple way to do it. You can get creative with it. There’s a lot of good accounts out there that are doing it very well. And even how you can keep them on your profile at the top as just a recurring thing so if you’re having sales, you’re having a new product launches, new features, just utilizing those to your advantage and doing the interactive elements with the motion graphics and video and things like that.

23:17 PAT: Absolutely agree. And you kind of touched on something there too. You talked about kind of like sequencing and John was kind of talking about like using different channels to curate the user experience a little bit. I want to point it over to Austin really quickly, because kind of what we what we were talking about off the air a little bit too. We do see a lot more of that integration across multitude of different channels in a comprehensive strategy, more so this year than we’ve ever seen before, and we anticipate that trend only getting bigger in 2019 as more brands and companies start to adopt that.

23:46 AUSTIN: This is something that’s pretty difficult to do and a lot of companies have struggled with this as digital has become really important in a bigger part of their business, is how do I make people feel the same way about my brand regardless of where they are. Whether that’s in Target and they find a product, whether that’s online and they’re in e-commerce store or scrolling through our products, what can we do to make that pretty seamless. And that is called omni-channel marketing and that’s become an extremely big part of businesses game plan to capture customers and increase lifetime value. And I have… something we talked about even with Salesforce is creating that look and feel and so that people associate certain aspects, certain positive attributes to your brand and your product. That is great branding in that, and that alone is a good part and a big part of omni-channel marketing. And so what we’re seeing a few companies do and I’ll actually have a quote here from the VP of customer care at Time Warner Cable. He said omni-channel marketing is viewing the experience to the eyes of your customer, orchestrating the customer experience across all channels so that is seamless, integrated, and consistent. And really what this boils down to is, if someone’s coming through a paid channel they should have the same experience in a lot of ways as they do from an organic search channel, right? So whether that’s the landing page, whether that’s… if they’re landing on an actual product and their checkout experience, and maybe but what type of discounts or… you have to decide what that is for your brand to create that. But you don’t want to silo one part of your marketing effort, so you don’t want to silo the way that someone interacts with your product and target versus how they interact with your product online. That makes people uncomfortable and unfamiliar with your brand and you want to create a long lasting feeling that they’re confident in and that they’re comfortable with and that has become a massive part of not only digital marketing but the entire marketing effort.

25:39 PAT: Yeah, I agree with you, and I think it’s something that a lot of… cause there’s those buzzwords around it, like cross-channel or omni-channel marketing, like we’ve been hearing these terms for years. But like with the tools that are in place nowadays there is really no reason that you shouldn’t have a fully integrated strategy, and also with all the – just the prevalence of data that we have on consumer behavior and user experience, we know that that consistency needs to be there. Like we always say, people aren’t stupid, but you need to anticipate that there are stupid people who will see your brand and interact with your materials and you need to make it very, very clear to them who you are, what you offer and why it’s better than what somebody else may offer. Like just very simply put it in front of them, and the manner with which you do that, or I guess the medium, can differ but the core message should really be the same. You just may be hitting on different aspects of that core message, depending on the intent behind… dependent on the intent behind their initial visit, right? So like somebody that’s looking for it… like comes through a paid ad to your point, like you might want to hit them with USPS or selling differentiators like low price, first month free, like zero money down, whatever, 0% down. Whereas if they come through organically maybe they want to know more about the brand or understand who you are. Whereas if they come through social, maybe they want to understand like what type of like fun, like entertainment value, it might bring, right? Because you got to think about what head space these users are in right now and how that translates to how you basically how you can supplement that with your offer. Which I think is something that gets often overlooked, and if you’re a business owner you really need to be thinking about like, what like what’s gonna drive my usership? How can I integrate those all together and what store… pieces of the story do I want to tell on each of these touch points that there’s one big story happening overall in my digital ecosystem.

27:28 AUSTIN: Right. Yeah, that’s a great one Pat, and I think the last thing we want to talk about is a little bit more of that attribution. I think Facebook has done a good job of this and we talked about Salesforce being a really big part of our attribution, but as a paid account manager and someone that deals with budgets and that type of thing, it’s become extremely important to know which channels are performing best so… I’m interested to hear from you on what that’s gonna look like.

27:53 PAT: Yeah, I wanted to throw this in here too, just because again, we try to put ourselves in the standpoint or in the shoes of a business owner, right? And if I’m a business owner I don’t care what my engines are telling me. I’m driving in revenue. I care about my bottom line revenue and the nature of like, having the type of omni-channel or multi-channel approach that we just discussed, the nature of that is that there’s gonna be overlap in some of that reporting, because of the attribution. So, like for instance, you could have a window set up on your ads where if somebody clicks through one of your ads, doesn’t convert, and then comes back sometime in the next 30 days through any other channel and does, your ad will technically take credit for that sale. When in reality, like, organic search had the last click there, right? So the way that we always recommend kind of looking at that is you want to look at the engine for sure to see like what it’s… what kind of data it’s giving you, whether that be Facebook, email, Google Ads, whatever you’re using. It this isn’t exclusive to paid advertising at all. You want to see basically what type of interaction is happening there and then you need to just like live by your Google Analytics. You need to look at that because that basically universalizes that last click attribution. It shows you okay these are all the last click conversions that came through each of these channels.

29:16 AUSTIN: And it’s very, very important to have that integrated with a CRM.

29:21 PAT: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, especially as legion.

29:23 AUSTIN: I said that very loud but I’m not kidding.

29:24 PAT: We’re feeling passionately about this.

29:25 AUSTIN: Yeah, that’s a big part of what… we talked about this already, but what’s made us as marketers better this year is because we can actually have someone show up in their CRM and it’s not just like reporting from our client saying we got five leads this week and they’re saying no we only got two, right? In the past that’s not something that we’ve been able to look at, and now we know, we can hop into the CRM and say, yeah, I saw a couple conversions and analytics, let’s go check the CRM and see what the data is, right?

29:51 PAT: Sure!

29:51 AUSTIN: And if it’s not populating, it’s not showing up, we know that there’s either an issue with analytics or the conversion path maybe a little bit askew. A lot of times we’ll see people too…if you’ve got multiple fields that someone, say it looks like a funnel, it’ll only show up is one conversion in Salesforce but it’s two conversions in analytics because they put their email in multiple times, right?

30:11 PAT: Several times, right.

30:11 AUSTIN: And that in itself skews data and it can be something that gets lost in translation when we’re explaining this to clients. Where we’re almost over reporting and they’re looking it’s going, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about. We only got one lead. So right now we have that full integration where we can say per usual, we saw the two steps taken, that’s two conversions and analytics. That’s one lead for you guys in Salesforce.

30:32 PAT: One person did those two actions. That doesn’t change the number of opportunities there are. That’s still the same person taking that action twice, so it’s one person.

30:39 AUSTIN: Exactly and that is great attribution. And what makes us look a lot more intelligent as marketers to our clients is we’re aware of the actions being taken and also the data. So, we have to say analytics like you said, absolutely dead on cause we as marketers have to know day to day if our traffic is converting, and then also CRM data attribution. Where’s that lead? What does that lead look like? And which channel had the biggest impact to get us that lead.

31:06 PAT: For sure. And I would kind of close it out with one last thing too. As a business owner the question… Okay, so the fundamental problem that the conflicting attribution causes is you don’t know where to throw more money because you don’t actually have a sense of what is working when you’re reporting that way. Google might be taking a really generous attribution window and you think, oh it’s doing great, let’s throw thousands and thousands in here and the numbers will get better in the engine but your overall company revenue goes down. Well, that isn’t what you want and if you’re not taking the steps to kind of universalize that last click reporting and draw correlation between what you’re doing in the engines and how that’s affecting the bottom line, you’ll never throw your money at the right channels consistently. Like you’ll never be able to make that decision the right way. So, as a business owner the way that you should be looking at things: Look at your spend in Facebook, look at your spend on Amazon, look at your spend in Google, and your ESP, whatever you’re doing, look at those day over day. Look at your revenue or your lead volume day over day, in Google Analytics and what channel that came from, and then you can see alright, I increased my spend these days on Google, which then three days later, we saw an increase in our direct traffic conversions.

32:26 AUSTIN: Yes.

32:26 PAT: There is no way that those two things are not related.

32:30 AUSTIN: Absolutely.

32:30 PAT: Right? But that’s insight that you would never have been able to get and Facebook actually rolled out a really cool tool for this. The Facebook attribution tool that companies are still starting to use it, get a little bit more in touch with it, but it’ll show you after somebody interacts with a Facebook ad, what their path is like all the way down the funnel. So you can say, okay they were introduced at the top of the funnel through Facebook ad, then they did a branded search through Google Ads, signed up for an email, were hit with an email, and then converted after that email. And the reason Facebook is so good at this, is because the nature of Facebook. It has really, really good cross-device attribution reporting, which almost no other tool on the planet can do correctly.

33:08 AUSTIN: Yeah.

33:10 PAT: So, if you’re a business owner, that’s a tool you should look to leverage if possible. And the way that you should be measuring your attribution is by overall bottom line impact, driven by the amount of emphasis put in specific channels. All right, everybody. That just about wraps things up for us here on episode 59 of Flip the Switch podcast presented by Power Digital Marketing. Thank you so much for joining us today. Join our forum group on Facebook. That’s Flip the Switch podcast forum. Austin is anxiously, anxiously sitting by his computer waiting to approve you. It’s a fun group, we know we post articles, quizzes, understand what we can bring to you guys that’ll be of value. But until next week. This has been Pat Kriedler, Austin Mahaffy, John Saunders and Joe Hollerup, signing off.