The 3 A’s – Analytics, Audiences, and Advertising

This is an extract from the Tom Ferry Podcast Experience with Jason Pantana and me, where we discussed the 3 A’s and how Digital Plumbing stitches them all together.

The 3 A’s – Analytics-Audiences-Advertising, and Digital Plumbing

What does it mean to build out everything so I can start making good decisions based on the math?

Let’s say you want to hit a golf ball but are blindfolded. How well would you do?

You hear all these experts say you should do this, you should do that, here’s this other topic, and so on. But how do you know what’s working? You put money into advertising and hire an agency. You do these various things. People are like, you should do stuff on Yelp now.

Digital plumbing is tying together all that you’re tracking; your audiences and your advertising so you can see what’s working; to amplify more of what’s driving more customers.

It’s similar to a pilot who has to go to a flight school to learn how to fly a plane or a doctor who has to go to medical school. They’re following checklists.

It is not voodoo. It’s not magic. You can pray if you like. But it would be best if you still had a checklist. And so, digital plumbing is one of many checklists that we believe people should follow. And instead of making it a secret, we want everyone to know. So you don’t go to a surgeon who says, “I’ve got a special heart surgery for you. But it’s a secret. I can’t tell you how it is.” You want to know. That it’s well documented, that it’s routine.

So digital marketing should be routine, and it starts with digital plumbing. It’s not the sexiest thing, but it’s something that, if you think making money is sexy and growing from six to seven figures is sexy, you need to start with digital plumbing.

So how do we tie all those three As together

So you first start with your audiences that are on the web. Now with the iOS 14 and Google Chrome changes that are happening, you want to have your Google Tag manager be the tag that rules all the tags.

A tag is a pixel. It is a one-by-one JavaScript piece of code that sits on the site and tells Google, Facebook, HubSpot, some analytics tools, some popup, and what to do with the user. The modern web is run on JavaScript. Thus, if you use Built With or any of these pixel sorts of tools, you know that everything’s governed by data being passed back and forth by cookies.

Now the beauty is if you’re using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or Quora, you will be implementing their pixel. Furthermore, you will implement it as a first-party pixel and bypass the things happening with Google Chrome.

Basically, you want to tie all your web stuff together so that wherever people go, you can do remarketing, which is following people around. So if they came to your site and they filled out a form, or they did this or didn’t do that, they consume three pages, all that’s going to sit inside your Google tag manager, and it’s going to run all those pixels.

Then you have another world, which is messaging. You have email, you have Facebook Messenger, you have text messenger, and you have SMS. There are all these different ways. So you want to be able to tie that. And there’s a whole world of tying all that stuff together – your databases, your CRM, your marketing automation systems, whatever tools you like.

So there’re three worlds – the first world is the web, which JavaScript and pixels drive; the second world is messaging, which goes through some unified CRM, like a BoomTown, and the third world is social.

And social is the most significant, hottest, sexiest world because you have what’s called native interactions – things that are happening on Facebook and you’re filling out forms, things that are happening inside Instagram – and being able to drive leads and re-engagement and video views and all this kind of stuff.

So, when you can tie all three of those worlds together, you can track people as they go between them.

Can you imagine? If you were engaging with someone on Facebook, you’d want to send them a DM or message. If they came to your website and you know that they’re a Facebook fan or engaged with you on Twitter, wouldn’t you want to change the conversation for that? Would you not want to build automation around that? If they’re on your website but don’t have their email address yet, don’t you want to treat them differently because of that?

Conclusion

So digital plumbing is tying all those together, not just from an analytics-reporting standpoint, but driving actions based on your data. And that’s almost magical. But the beauty is, it’s not software that you buy. No. It’s tying together these three worlds. So there is a software element to tying the three together, but the social element is where most agents miss the mark.

Listen to the full episode here: