Category: Analytics Consulting

Start With People Who Already Believe That They Have A Problem You Can Solve

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/12/this-or-that-vs-yes-or-no.html

Sharing another post from my blogging idol, Seth Godin.

“It’s much easier to persuade a philanthropist to fund your project than it is to persuade a rich person to become a philanthropist.

Encouraging someone to shift slightly, to pick this instead of that, is a totally different endeavor than working to turn a no into a yes, to change an entire pattern of behavior.

When looking to grow, start with people who already believe that they have a problem you can help them solve.”

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To me the most important point is the last one. I see so many business leaders and decision-makers not really understand their customers. Having a solid grasp on the the challenges your customers face and how you can solve them is a key to success.

For all my network marketing friends this is especially true, you really need to make sure your product is something your potential customers really want and need. if not, you either need a new product or a new network of prospects.

If you need help, let us know. DMAI can show you how to optimize your business strategy to offer the right product to the right people.

Social Media Analytics > Don’t Have It? Then You Are Missing Out!

Came across this interesting article on LinkedIn today about how few companies are seeing social media lead to direct revenue. Tying return on investment to social media is really not all that hard, but a lot of us don’t have an idea of where to start.

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The conclusion of the article by Richard Meyer (no relation) pretty much sums up the current status of most companies using social media to market and/or sell. “Even brands that have a long track record of success are beginning to realize that when it comes to social media, a business as usual approach doesn’t cut it. While 86% of companies today maintain a Facebook page, many have discovered that simply following the herd isn’t much of a strategy. The fans and likes may roll in, but meaningful results like improved customer satisfaction and increased sales revenue remain elusive.”

Why? Because the real power of social media lies in its ability to engage and enlist, not just tally. We must deliver social customer experiences that entice customers to interact with us, share their passions, their insights, and their ideas.

It’s so much more than just assigning someone to post articles, to share a page with friends or to just stand ready to reply to comments.

DMAI specializes is helping small businesses, entrepreneurs and network marketers bring some analytics into their social media efforts.

Using a combination of free or inexpensive online tools and our own data management and analysis methodologies, DMAI can help you get the most out of your social media efforts.

Don’t be like everyone else who is starting to think of social media marketing and online business as a black hole. It’s a lot easier than you might think. Let us show you how!

Five Tips For Motivating Your Team In 2015

As the New Year approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to keep the team motivated. We’ve come so far so quickly, there are bound to be some instances where things start to normalize and perhaps even get a bit stale.

So here are some things the management will be making a focus in 2015 to keep engagement high:

1. Say Thank You – A timely, specific and public thank you often generates a sense of engagement even greater then a small monetary reward. Simply put, we can strive to do a lot more thank yous in the coming year.

2. Looking Ahead – Ambition and career progression are two of the key staff motivators, no matter what level an employee is working at. In 2014, we promoted over dozen team members from entry level to leadership positions. We will constantly look to optimize skills and interest as we continue to grow.

3. Showing Up Matters – We have been talking about an attendance based incentive, perhaps something along the lines of offering employees who have 100 percent attendance with some kind of recognition gift? This is one I think can really let the team know it matters a lot to the business when they are present and on-time.

4. Follow The Leader – A sense of competition can be a great way to motivate and pitching teams against each other in terms of productivity or quality often has many positive side effects. We’ve had some success with this in 2014, but I think with some fine tuning and polish, we can make it a staple of 2015.

5. Share The Love – Sharing pictures of the team on social media is one way to show your team how much they truly are valued. It’s more then just work. It’s a family.

These ideas are just the tip of the ice berg. When we have the next leadership meeting in January, we will figure out how better to empower, engage and motivate the team for the coming year.

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Start With A Simple Market Assessment

Assessing growth potential in existing or new markets requires some common sense, critical thinking, the right data and solid analysis.

To get started you need to consider if you are asking the right questions when assessing market growth opportunities?

This simple assessment will help a company determine whether to invest time and resources in a new initiative:

• What is the current size of the market?
• What is the potential size of the market?
• How much of the market share do you have now and how much do you want?
• How well does our product fit into the current market?
• Can we create a new market for our product?
• If we are in the market already, what has made us successful and/or what has made us unsuccessful?
• What are the different segments of the market?
• Do we want to compete in all of them or only some of them?
• Who are the competitors in the market and why do customers buy from them?
• What do we need to do to get customers to buy from us?

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Understanding the demographics of your customers and the marketplace, having a clear picture of the competitive landscape around you and having insight into current and potential customers are all things you need before you expand.

DMAI Analysts are available to help you gain a strategic perspective on your market. Let us know what we can do to help.

Social Intelligence Is A Competitive Advantage

Just came across a Tableau white paper and one of the top 10 business intelligence trends they talk about is how Social Intelligence is increasingly becoming a distinct competitive advantage.

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“In 2014 we saw organizations begin to analyze social data in earnest. In 2015, the leading edge will start to take advantage of their capabilities. Tracking conversations at scale via social will let companies find out when a topic is starting to trend and what their customers are talking about. Social analytics will open the door to responsive product optimization.”

Per Wikipedia, “Social intelligence is the capacity to effectively negotiate complex social relationships and environments…[ it is social intelligence, rather than quantitative intelligence, that defines humans… social intelligence is an aggregated measure of self- and social-awareness, evolved social beliefs and attitudes, and a capacity and appetite to manage complex social change.”

So what is the social intelligence of your business? Are you managers and decision-makers looking at data to help them understand the social intelligence of your business? How do you measure social intelligence and start calibrating data?

These questions are exactly the kinds of things DMAI can help you with.

Right Now I’m Thinking About Engagement

http://blog.sfgate.com/storystudio/sponsoredarticles/adv/?prx_t=x6ABAAfoBApB8LA

This article is full of interesting viewpoints and could easily lead to a half dozen blog posts.

However, right now I am really thinking about employee engagement.

Engagement is a tricky emotion. When someone is truly engaged in their work its special. Most of the time most of us are mostly engaged, but not really feeling it all the time. And sometimes our engagement is on a mostly negative level.

So how does a company keep the majority (if not all) of its employees engaged most of (if not all of) the time? Well, based on my own experience, nothing makes me feel more engaged then more work than I can handle, but not so much that it’s impossible. The sense of always having something to do, coupled with a consistent sense of accomplishment is what drives me towards engagement.

During my 15 years with Wells Fargo, I had some years where I was fully engaged and a few where I was not.
By far, my most accomplished years where there ones where I felt vital to the success of the business. So how to replicate that with everyone around me today?

I’ve got a team of over 60 people, most working independently from home. Only a handful have been with me for just over a year, the rest all less than a year. Our jobs are very much an ebb and flow kind of work, where we seem to have periods of too much and periods of not enough work to do to keep everyone engaged. So that’s what I think about a lot.

Starting in January, we are going to kick off a few new side projects to give team members more opportunities to feel productive during the slow times and we are going to institute a more structured incentive plan to reward hard work in the fast times.

Let’s see how that goes towards upping the engagement level. Given I’m one who rarely feels completely satisfied and is always looking for ways to adapt, enhance and improve… I optimistically wonder where this will take us.

2014 was all about building the foundation. 2015 will be all about putting up the house so that it comfortably fits us all.

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Instruction for Social Media Marketing Tracker

Today I’m gonna give away some free advice on how to set up a social media tracker. If you are using social media to promote your business, then you really need to be using something like this to help you maintain a consistent schedule of pushing out content.

This was prepared by our Business Development and Training expert, Jenifer Caliwag, so she gets most of the props for this blog post.

Here at DMAI, we use our SMMT (Social Media Marketing Tracker) to help us to monitor or track how much traffic and attention we gain through our website and Social Media and help us understand and analyze the right content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it across their social networks.
You can also use applications like HootSuite to do this, but for the sake of our own analytics training and skill building, we do it manually to build a data set.

Our tracker has 15 columns: Date, Time, Posted By, Network, Categories, Sub- Categories, Target, Calls to Action, Posts, comments (replies), Likes (favorites), Share (retweets), Clicks, Reached and Total Engagement, these are the categories will help us to incorporate all of the information we need on our social media updates and posts.

As we track our social media efforts we will meet 5 important goals:

1. Keep the content updated and current
2. Track, test and measure the posts we put in social media
3. Know and understand exactly what content attracts attention
4. Increase engagement among our key influencers
5. Transform statistics in to profit

So, that’s the kind of thing we do and something we can easily help you set up and/or administer.

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Social Media Marketing > Who Are Your Influencers?

There is a new buzzword making its way around the internet… influencer marketing. The concept has been around awhile, but I’m seeing it pop up a lot with small business and network marketing in particular.

Wikipedia defines Influencer marketing as a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

In a lot of ways, DMAI is more into influencer marketing then traditional marketing. It’s a given that our niche, analytics outsourcing and training, and our client mode, work being done in the Philippines for US and Philippines based business, is not something you will see on billboards and primetime TV commercials.

The majority of new clients and business opportunities have come to us because of a referral or someone we have targeted directly because they are an influencer.

Influencers can be clients, business partners, industry connections or just about anyone who can speak about you and your business in a positive and knowledgeable way. They also have to be credible. And it helps if they like to talk about things they like.

So who are your influencers and are they being correctly targeted with your social media marketing?

Big questions with important answers.

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Sharing My Analytics Solution

Seasons Greetings To All My Connections,

With the global analytics talent shortage causing many of us nightmares when it comes to recruiting, training and retaining talent, I can offer a solution.

My company, DMAI, specializes in setting up analytics centric teams in the Philippines to add additional resources for clients in the U.S.

If you are interested in learning more about our high quality and cost effective solutions, please check out my blog: http://www.dmaiph.wordpress.com

Thanks for your time and may you have a Happy Holiday season.

Dan Meyer
President & Founder of DMAI
danmeyer@dmaiph.com
925-595-4079

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Introduce Analytics Into Your Networking Marketing Strategy

When it comes to sales, one of the most important lessons I learned while with Wells Fargo is that you should only sell something to someone if they both want it and need it. There was this one story that sticks out in my mind, its form a sales trainer whose class I attended 20 years ago.

He said, “You can only sell a red car to a person who wants to buy a red car.” The point being that you can’t see blue cars to people who want red cars, because if you do they will end up not being happy with what they bought and therefore not happy with you. In fact in order to sell a product, you need to only offer it to the people who want and need it. Trying to sell the wrong product to the wrong person is a huge time waster and network killer.

Having this mindset, I’ve continually been baffled by the sales tactics I see with so many network marketers I know. I mean I hate coffee, never had a taste for it. But having that key piece of insight hasn’t stopped almost a dozen of my friends from trying to get me to be part of their coffee sales MLM.

If you sell coffee, then the first thing you do is go down your list of friends and eliminate anyone who doesn’t drink coffee. Now I know, there is always a chance they might be a source of new leads, but honestly trying to get someone to sell something they don’t use themselves if really just another waste of time.

SO if you take an analytical approach, you would eliminate the long shots. Not just non-coffee drinkers, but also one who cant afford to buy the coffee. It doesn’t do much good to hard sell someone who cant afford your product.

You would be better off seeking out new network connections by joining groups and forums where your target market is. If you are trying to sell red cars, look where red car owners end up online. Where do the go to talk about their red cars and share photos of their red cars. Or maybe you sell vitamin supplements… then you should be marketing to health care professional, people who exercise regularly or are health conscious. Selling vitamins to someone who doesn’t care about their health is another uphill battle.

So the key starting point for using more analytics in your sales strategy starts with building a demographic profile to define your target market and exclude people who will more likely than not be a waste of your precious time.

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