Summary
Digital Marketing Strategies for B2B Technology, SaaS and Services organisations could be considered as just another fantasy or clever rouse dreamt up by some marketer or other. However, where the ‘rubber-hits-the-road’ is when a strategy can be monitored and measured down to the smallest detail and therefore the whole process can be managed – I think I’ve heard a mentioned of that once or twice in my lifetime, i.e., if it can be measured, it can be managed!
Using Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager for Digital Selling is perhaps the icing on the cake, you probably know both are free to use! After you have spent time creating the content and adverts to promote your business and stimulate engagement, it is essential you can visualise the fruits of your efforts. And if it’s not happening the way you want it to, you can be laser-focused in changing it.
Contents
1. Using Analytics to Drive Sales
4. Setting up UTM identifiers for your adverts
5. Setting Up Google TAG Manager
6. Essential Google Tag Manager - Tags
7. Setting up a GTM Event to work with Content Groups
11. Google Data Studio to Deliver Insights
1. Using Analytics to Drive Sales
The objective of adopting ‘digital selling’ is to create an environment whereby your prospects and customers can educate themselves about your products and services for all the statistical reasons I have mentioned on this website, from Gartner saying 83% of prospects want to research before meeting a salesperson to Forrester saying less than 1% of prospects who traverse the so-called funnel, become paying customers.
Your job as a business owner or CMO is to create content that is genuinely engaging to your prospects and to create enough of it to enable them to self-serve, all the way to placing an order - digitally and without the need for a sales person.
You would be correct in thinking this will encroach on the efforts of salespeople; however, cold calling is a 400-1 shot to find an intrested party, and this methodology exceeds any comparable effort on the part of BDR's. Call me if you’d like to discuss the employment options for certain salespeople or watch the video about the New Organisational Chart for Digital Selling.
I am sure you're already aware of Google Analytics, either Universal (GUA) or Google Analytics 4 (GA4), therefore which ever you use, it is an important tool to prove/disprove engagement at a granular level and make amendments wherever necessary, based upon actual results.
2. Preparation & Groundwork
The first stage is to ensure you have the right infrastructure in place. In the earlier pages I have explained why you need to have content segmented in such a way as to identify the mindset of the browser, therefore you are to use Primary, Secondary and General, Products and Services as descriptive explanations and, as you’ll see further in the document, they are also used as article/page tags for our analytics.
To recap, each of the categories you can uses are based upon the following category types and their respective content descriptions. I have used the salesXchange website as an example: -
Primary Content
- Thought Leadership
- Guides
- Long Form Content Articles
- Educational - Explanations
- Whitepapers
- Downloads
- Business Case Analysis
Secondary Content
- Case Studies
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Live Stream Shows
- Social Proof
- How to Articles
- Infographics
General Content
- Comments
- New Hires
- CSR
- Home
- Gallery
- About Us
- Seminars
- Exhibition Visits
- Short Blogs
- Guest Content
- Parties
- Events
Product Content
- 120 Adverts
- Analytics & Tag Manager
- Copywriting
- Live Streaming
- Photography
- Podcasting
- SEO
- Video
Services Content
- Consultancy
- Audit
- Transformation | CMO
- Speaking
- How to Buy
3. The Markup
Using the Excel document to visualise and categorise your content, you will need to markup your page/article metadata. To be clear, I mean every page on your website whether it is a blog page, product page or sales page. Every page is to be categorised.
I suggest you simply work through your content, row-by-row and decide which category it fits in to.
Click here to download a copy of our Excel Spreadsheet for Content Management
4. Setting up UTM identifiers for your adverts
For the purposes of this explanation, I am going to assume you have created a variety of different content types for your business and therefore you have articles, downloads, graphics, videos, live stream recordings and podcasts
If you have already read the Digital Selling page on 120 Adverts, then you know that the strategy is to create inhouse adverts, published four times a day automatically to promote your video, article and podcast content on LinkedIn, Facebook, or any other relevant placement. In addition, the same or similar adverts can/will also be used for pay-per-click.
With 120 adverts being repeatedly viewed it is important to keep track of them and ensure their identity when clicked. To do this Google has a platform called Google Campaign URL Builder for either Universal Analytics or GA4. https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/campaign-url-builder/
Google UTM Image
The UTM string created by the builder is appended to the URL of the link attached to the adverts. We will use this UTM coding to identify which advert was clicked and which article/page it was connected to.
I will explain about the Analytics set up, after I have explained how you are to use Tag Manager.
5. Setting Up Google TAG Manager
Background basics: Google Tag Manager (GTM) operates by placing some code in a couple of places on your website. This allows a non-developer to ‘inject’ essential scripts that help monitor and attribute activities on a per page and a per user basis.
GTM can affect the users experience by making page level changes whilst they’re browsing or will send activity data back to your Google Analytics platform enabling you to read historical data and make future decisions.
Secondly, GTM is used extensively by ecommerce sites and platforms for the simple reason that it can deliver pretty much any data information you could ever need, including groups of triggered/tagged data. This means without this level of insight to your business content, you are essentially operating blind and cannot make informed decisions based upon your data.
One of the main factors relating to marketing automation software is that your content is hidden behind an email form. As such, you are unaware if the content is considered to be any good by your readers, especially if they’re forced to reveal their contact details and then unsubscribe right after downloading.
6. Essential Google Tag Manager - Tags
Once you have set up Google Tag Manager, there are a variety of tags I recommend getting started. This is not meant to be a detailed training module, just an overview explanation you can follow and to help you evaluate your existing operations as a director.
- GUA/GA4 Base - All Pages: sends data to analytics
- GUA/GA4 Base - Exclude Local Users: Omits users from office
- GUA/GA4 Event – Content Category (Primary, Secondary etc.)
- GUA/GA4 Event - YouTube Video Start
- GUA/GA4 Event – YouTube Video Progress/Complete
- GUA/GA4 Event – Scroll Depth 25-90%
- GUA/GA4 Event – CTA Book Call
- GUA/GA4 Event – CTA Click Link
- GUA/GA4 Event – Download
- Facebook Pixel
- LinkedIn Pixel
Once the above tags are set up, they will provide useful data when certain conditions are met, by triggering the relevant tag. Let’s use an article for example. Time and effort is put into creating an article that would be approximately 1200 words and include a summary, a table of contents list, images, bullets, numbered lists and perhaps a video, finishing off with a conclusion.
7. Setting up a GTM Event to work with Content Groups
The tags ‘a. to k’. above are preconfigured within Google Tag Manager, however, I have used a specific GTM Variable javascript, courtesy of https://lynuhs.com/tracking-meta-tags-with-google-tag-manager/ for Tag ‘c’.
Your web developer, analyst or data specialist will understand what needs to be done. If you need us to sort things out for you, just let us know.
function (){
var metaName = "og:article:tag";
var metas = document.getElementsByTagName('meta');
var content = undefined;
for (i = 0; i < metas.length; i++){
if (metas[i].getAttribute("name") == metaName){
content = metas[i].getAttribute("content");
}
}
return content;
}Copy & Paste to text above to use in Tag Manager
8. Plugins for CMS websites
I use a Joomla CMS website with YooTheme Pro as the template overlay and Zoo 4 Pro as my blog/article manager. In order to customise my metadata, I have used Open Graph structured data to insert og:article:tag as a metadata field for every page. Within this field I can tag all of my content as primary, secondary, general, product or services.
Links to the respective providers and downloads are below: -
- For Joomla Metadata & Open Graph - Eorisis
- For Joomla/Zoo Metadata - Zoolanders for Yootheme Pro & Zoo Blogs
- For Wordpress - https://gtm4wp.com/
9. New Business Objectives
You want to know if the page is being searched for in the first place (that information is in the section SEO for Digital Selling) and when they land on the page, what do they do?
What do your browsers do: -
- How long have they been ‘on-page’
- How far did they Scroll down the page?
- Did they begin to watch a video?
- How long to they watch the video for?
- Did they click on any external links?
- If they reach the end of the article, did they click on the call-to-action?
- If so which one?
It is pointless having any content on your site if you don’t know how your prospects are engaging with it. Using Google Tag Manager for the above application is the most sensible way to monitor and manage your content marketing strategy.
If people are finding the article, but don’t scroll down, watch, complete or whatever they don’t do, then your marketing department and copywriters can investigate and ensure they are creating the right content for the types of customers you are attempting to attract. There is no other way to achieve this.
Now your reporting is based upon activity that matches ‘intent’. The overall strategy drives traffic via 120 adverts, however, you need to accept that Google informs you if your content is ‘good enough’ by indexing it, visible via GSC and then placing it online, and if you get on to the first 3-5 pages, then you’re probably doing pretty well, so take it from Google, that it’s a good article/page.
Now you can see exactly what browsers are doing in order to make solid business decisions.
10. Analytics Reporting
Again, I’m not going to provide a step-by-step tutorial about google Analytics, suffice to say there are some great resources freely available which I will provide links to at the bottom.
Now your content is correctly ‘tagged’ and you have triggers set up that will fire when browsers look at your content, you will now be able to see what proportion of your browsers are looking at the content categories that will have the greatest impact on your business.
By grouping content as mentioned in Section 7, you can now assess your overall content offering and then drill down to specific pages to see what is working or is not.
If you are getting long page durations, scroll depth, completed videos, and clicked call-to-actions, then you should be happy. However, if most of your browsers were looking at your general content and blogs about Christmas parties, then you know there’s a problem.
Google Analytics Image
Your strategy should now look something like this:
- Create adverts and UTM’s for social media
- Create adverts and UTM’s for pay-per-click
- Monitor Google Search Console (GSC) to review organic content
- Monitor GSC for sitemap and indexing progress
- Monitor GSC for impressions vs clicks
- Set goals inside Google Analytics and the milestones to be achieved that contribute to the goal, for example, an engagement goal could be: -
- 10 x page sessions AND
- 90% scroll depth AND
- Clicked a CTA Link
- Create analytics reports to show:
- A specific filtered view to only show UK activity (if necessary!)
- The referrer (LinkedIn, FB etc.,)
- The referrer advert UTM reference
- The article identifier (Primary, Secondary, General)
- The article names
- The browser demographics
- The browser technology (hardware & browser used)
- The browser scroll depth
- The browser video watch time
- The browser call to actions
- And whatever else is necessary to grow your business
I can’t stress enough how important it is to implement these aspects of Google Analytics and Tag Manager in your business as soon as possible. I know many businesses already have either the older (Google Analytics Universal) GUA and also some even have tag manager, however, in many cases, they’re either not set up correctly, or don’t track the necessary content that delivers meaningful content upon which a senior management team can make decisions.
11. Google Data Studio to Deliver Insights
Staying with Google, there is one final and very useful tool that you can make use of and that is their Data Studio. If you’re already Power BI, Tableau, or another, that’s great, let’s move on. However, if you’re not, it would be a good idea to get someone trained up to create weekly reports to present Google Search Console, Google Analytics and any other data source that impacts your income.
Data studio can deliver functional, automated reports every week to keep everyone on top of progress without the need for multiple marketing meetings.
12. The comparison before deciding
The above methodology beautifully illustrates every aspect of prospect and customer engagement. This is enhanced even further by implementing and setting activity related goals within Google Analytics. Let’s face it, everything operates by using KPI’s so why shouldn’t your content.
Every interaction is tracked, and if they don’t click on something you expect them to, you’re able to zero in and fix it. And it’s at this point in the process that you can consider using Google Optimize to implement A/B testing with different call-to-actions, images, page layouts and so on, enhanced using Tag Manager to dynamically change page elements depending on the user.
Now compare everything you’ve read here with cold calling!
If a four-minute call is considered a result with BDR representatives, it's not surprising, considering cold-calling is now a 400-1 shot to actually connect with the right person.
All this boils down to a 1:1 ratio process, i.e., one call, per person and about a maximum of eighty calls per day, perhaps more if you have progressive of predictive dialling connected to your CRM.
This goes some way to explain why so many businesses fail; 20% in 1st year, 30% in the 2nd year, 50% in the 3rd year and by the 10th year, 91% of all business fail, according to the FT.
If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.
Now consider the alternative approach:
- The digital selling process is ‘one-to-many’
- Operates 24/7 – 365 Days a year
- Completely measurable and manageable
- No sick days, time off or holiday pay
- Can significantly reduce headcount
- Only guaranteed strategy to scale up your business
13. Conclusion
When it comes to developing new strategies or any type of change, many people respond by saying “oh, we already have a strategy in place and we’re not about to change it.” I really urge you to consider what Digital Selling will mean to the future profitability of your business.
If you were able to start over, I would recommend you get all your content in place first before you start trading. This would mean requiring significantly less investment and indeed increase your sales to a respectable level before needing to expand and grow.
Getting people to want your products because they are attracted to your business is better than forcing your products on businesses via salespeople and then spending the rest of your business career ‘plate-spinning’ trying to make ends meet.
Mastering this approach will flip the profitability of your business, so don’t be misled by dated strategies promoted by marketing administrators who simply want to keep their jobs by telling you anything they think you want to hear.
Nothing happens overnight, so get in touch and let’s have a chat about the possibilities for your business.
Useful Links & Websites
Google Tag Manager
- Measure School - https://measureschool.com/products/
- Analytics Mania - https://www.analyticsmania.com/courses/google-tag-manager-course-for-beginners/
- LinkedIn Learning for structured courses
- YouTube for almost anything
The author and founder of salesXchange, Nigel Maine is a B2B marketing and sales expert with a proven track record in scaling up growth for Technology, SaaS, and Professional Services organisations. With 30 years hands-on experience and unique approach, Nigel has developed an effective strategy that dramatically increases exposure and profitability for B2B organizations.
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