3. Target Audiences / Customer Segments.
4. Business Goals / Targets / Important KPIs.
5. Tactics They Currently Employ.
6. How They Market on Social Networks
8. Paid Search
Let's see what the findings are. Does the business website have enough traffic and are there issues to address?
The company (name not disclosed) is a start-up with ten employees located somewhere in the States and founded two years ago. Its industry is the Software as a Service (SaaS-seo.html">SaaS). The company offers cloud services and connectivity products for the Internet of Things (IoT). They advertise that their products help users to connect, manage, and control devices and services on a global or local scale.
Skip to the contents
They offer 3 main products or services:
- SIM cards that follow a Pay-As-You-Grow pricing model
- IoT software solutions
- Network components
Skip to the contents
The business focus is B2B with customers spun over 40 countries. Here are some customer segments:
- Companies using IoT connectivity services i.e. cloud services or buy licenses for connectivity software.
- Companies using hardware products i.e. network components.
- Resellers of their Pay-As-You-Grow SIM cards to their customers.
- Resellers of all products/services mentioned in points 1-2.
Skip to the contents
What does this business need to grow its revenue? What are the main KPIs?
- Increase online leads (a % of them will sooner or later convert into customers).
- Generate more sales (New Customer Acquisition). Leads p.1 help to increase the client base.
- Keep the customers (Customer Retention).
Skip to the contents
Let’s take a look at the current status of their online marketing. This view will not include networking, traditional PR, display or other off-line marketing.
- Releasing company news (PR) and publishing on industry sites. Good point.
- Regularly blog posting explaining the services and promoting new products. Good point.
Conclusion: PR is helping with raising brand awareness. Blog posting creates engagement, shows that the business is interested in helping the customers know more about their products/services before they buy and raises consumer trust.
But there are little gains from the content marketing effort as not integrated with a marketing plan.
Studying the needs of the customers will guide into building a content marketing plan with performance tracking.
- What are the Social Networks they use?
- How big is the follower base? Do they monitor their followers and have insights on the demographics/behavior?
- How optimized is their content for each audience segment?
- What is the performance for each social media/network?
- Do social readers interact with the posts?
- Do social readers visit the landing pages?
- Do website visitors convert?
- What are the channels that drive more conversions?
- What is the Cost-Per-Conversion or Registration (CPR) for each network?
Here is the data: Only Facebook shows little traction; the other networks don’t show much data.
- Facebook: 25 followers not regular posts.
- Twitter: 246 followers but not frequent tweets.
- Linkedin: 530 company followers but no frequent updates.
- YouTube: 1 video posted, 16 subscribers to the channel.
Conclusion: There are not any gains from using the social media channels.
Suggestion: The business needs to study its audiences, i.e., behavior, networks they live online, what the competitors are doing. Then plan outreach actions with accurate tracking in place to test the performance of each social network and decide next steps.
- Search traffic (both channels): 58%.
- Direct (Typed) traffic: 42%.
- Social channels: 0% (confirms our earlier point, needs to grow).
- Referral traffic: 0% (needs to grow).
Page views from all channels are not performing well. There is no MoM growth; traffic looks flat.
Unique Visits, similar trends with Page Views. No MoM growth, flat traffic line.
Average Visit Duration, last month of the report around 30 seconds (too low).
Visitors leave the website thus increasing the Bounce Rate (negative signal to Google). Conversions are undoubtedly affected.
As the Avg. Visits are ~30 seconds; the Bounce Rate is too high >60%. Visitors seem to find no interest in the website content, and they drop off. Conversions will suffer.
Suggestion: The website needs a content audit and conversion optimization.
The Paid channel looks like there is a lot of experimentation but overall the monthly paid performance is close to zero.
Skip to the contents
Suggestion: Research for more opportunities, adopt the competition best practices, optimize bids for better placements.
Quality and Power metrics show normal development.
There are no apparent issues with its link profile nor over-optimization of anchor texts.
The keyword volume is either too high (competitive) or too low (long-tail or low-traffic terms).
Suggestion: Competition Research and Keyword mapping needed to grow the organic traffic.
Their rankings are not the best for the keyword terms they wish to rank. Remember that their keywords were not high-volume either.
The website suffers in terms of traffic. It is not a single channel that’s performing bad. Their marketing plan is inefficient. To get online leads the business needs a marketing plan that offers a channel mix testing and tracking channel performance. Then working with only those channels that make sense because they deliver.
Namely, they need to optimize and grow in Organic and Paid Search, Social Media and maybe explore more traffic opportunities from other channels, i.e., Display Advertising, Affiliate marketing, etc.
Not all channels are delivering leads, but they are useful for raising brand awareness a KPI that is valuable to every startup business.
-- According to Gartner, a massive 21 billion connected devices are collecting data. Most of these Things are consumer devices, from smart speakers to watches to door locks. The rest are medical devices, engine sensors, industrial robots, HVAC controllers. Almost every company now relies on IoT devices in one form or another. The critical nature of IoT medical devices raises the security stakes. IoT devices open new attack ways that software programmers are not prepared to deal with. Enterprises need to develop corporate-wide frameworks for IoT procurement, deployment, security, and monitoring to minimize that exposure.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an umbrella term that encompasses all types of devices that connect to the internet (most of them wirelessly) to perform a set of operations by sending and receiving data. Their applications are unlimited from home-devices, to gadgets, to sensors and enterprise solutions. All those types of devices are continuously online with minimal or no human intervention. Their main goal is to share data. With data sharing, questions rise about lack of user privacy (read the story on thousands Amazon employees listening on Alexa conversations), intrusion in personal life and medical history, lack of security, easing spying (the hilarious story where Strava heat map revealed secret military installations) etc. Proportionate to the IoT expansion in enterprises, questions arise about the reduction of human jobs and intrusion opportunities. WiFi systems add more security flaws to the system with more IPs online, and IoT devices are still immature. A new device type does not mean that it offers advanced security compared to older devices, as developers don't learn from past experiences.
There's a lot of hype with reported device numbers. Gartner reports 21 billion, Priceonomics 50 billion. Obviously a jump from 21 to 50 billion is quite a leap. Actual numbers don't matter as every device we use in our daily lives, economy, industry, health, transportation, education, fitness, entertainment will eventually take part in IoT and we will use more of them. If you are wondering, yes, the Skynet from SciFi movies is making its first baby steps though it won't be so dramatic and exaggerated as in the pictures.
From simple to sophisticated devices, all are connected to the internet, gather and share data with their peers or controllers depending on the type and use, i.e., home systems, industrial systems, or online services. Most of them are connected wirelessly. The data gathering takes place in data centers or cloud services. In an enterprise or industrial systems, there are intermittent controllers (computers, servers called edge computing) that analyze the gathered data before sending them to storage and further analysis. They do so to prevent small problems from getting bigger (reduce latency detection) and crash the system. Imagine a supply chain where one machine presents a flaw and could shut down the production if not taken care of early. The applications are many and can become unlimited with the evolution of AI systems. Home devices and assistants, wearables, fitness, transportation, medical applications, industrial production, utilities, defense, etc. IoT devices use different standards and protocols to communicate with their peers, presenting a lack of standardization, no software updates, and many security flaws.