Dreamforce, Salesforce’s enormous, annual conference, happened last week, bringing together more than 150,000 professionals from several different industries, with millions more viewing live via the Internet. The event took place from September 15–18 across several venues in downtown San Francisco and included approximately 1,600 sessions and keynote addresses.
97th Floor’s CEO Chris Bennett spoke at the conference on Wednesday, September 16. Salesforce is one of 97th Floor’s clients, and Chris attends Dreamforce regularly. His presentation, “Building Content that Grows Your Business,” marked the third time Chris has been invited to speak at Dreamforce, having spoken previously in 2013 and 2014.
.@chrisbennett Content marketing and seo works for B2B, too. #cmseo #df15 #seo pic.twitter.com/9ku7FxhXlS
— Stuart (@steuwart) September 16, 2015
This year, Chris focused on fundamental principles to ensure success in digital marketing. While the tactics he presented seemed simple, he showed several case studies demonstrating impressive results. Tactics included baking promo into content, and basing content on sound research. Chris especially emphasized keyword research, recommending marketers “add three hours to the five minutes you currently spend.” People responded well to his presentation and provided lots of positive feedback:
@chrisbennett really liked your presentation, super tactical. Thanks for the tips!! #df15
— Jason Bilog (@JasonBilog) September 16, 2015
Your content must provide value and prioritize the customer's needs over your company's needs. via @chrisbennett #DF15 #contentmarketing
— Mike Koyle (@mikekoyle) September 20, 2015
My boy @chrisbennett killing it @Dreamforce #DF15! You NEED to follow this guy! @crowdmics @97thFloor #seo #marketing pic.twitter.com/V0IX0O60SA
— Sean Holladay (@seanholladay) September 16, 2015
View the full deck from Chris’s presentation below:
Last Thursday, September 10th, 97th Floor’s CEO Chris Bennett spoke at the SearchLove Conference in San Diego. SearchLove SD is an especially great conference for those who are really interested in learning about good tactics. This was the fourth SearchLove conference at which Chris has spoken. In the past, he has also given presentations at SearchLove conferences in Boston, London, and New Orleans.
Chris was a bit hesitant to speak on the topic he presented because the tactics were not earth shattering, but that was the point he wanted to make. His presentation, “How to Never Lose at Content Strategy,” emphasized that you don’t have to chase the newest tactics to succeed in content marketing. In fact, sometimes by just working a little harder and longer during the preparation stages, you can gather insights and data that will dramatically increase your chances for success. Particularly, he recommended not skimping when it comes to keyword research—SEO 101.
In the end, focusing on results is what really matters. Chris gave several examples of different campaigns that reaffirm this, including some that did not end up going viral and garnered very few social media shares, but which still significantly improved organic traffic to the site—which directly translated to revenue. Meanwhile, another campaign seemingly had all the right ingredients for success but only resulted in a brief spike in traffic. This focus on results shows through not only in 97th Floor’s work for its clients, but also in the company’s culture. It trickled down to the company’s employees when 97th Floor became a Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE.
While each of these concepts seems very intuitive, it proved to be exactly what the audience needed to hear. Overall, the presentation was very well received.
SEO 101: Remember the keywords! Do real keyword research, not 5 minutes, 3 hours. @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Julien Brandt (@Julienbrandt) September 11, 2015
Ohh boy! >> "Add 3 hours to the 5 mins of keyword research you usually do" - @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Megan Cynaumon (@MeganCynaumon) September 11, 2015
The 90s called: they want their keyword research back. @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Marli Mesibov (@marsinthestars) September 11, 2015
Sometimes, the best presentations remind you to just do basics #notshiny #searchlove @chrisbennett
— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) September 11, 2015
Not only that, Chris’s presentation was featured as one of the top decks on SlideShare a few days later.
The final takeaway is that no matter your resources, everyone can work a little harder and focus more on the details. This is exciting, because it means that anyone can can compete when it comes to content.
View the full deck from Chris’s presentation below:
We’re excited and proud to announce that 97th Floor is now officially a ROWE™ Certified Organization!
ROWE stands for Results Only-Work Environment, and is a human resource management strategy that was created by Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler. The idea behind ROWE is to give employees 100% autonomy in exchange for 100% accountability. Employees are judged only on the work that they accomplish, rather than on irrelevant issues such as the hours that they spend in the office. Since creating ROWE, Jody and Cali have founded CultureRx™ to train, assess, and certify organizations in the use of their results-only approach to employee management.
To prepare for our transition into a ROWE workplace, all employees of 97th Floor completed an in-depth series of courses and discussions provided by CultureRx. Each employee was then given a test to ensure that as an organization we’d be successful at implementing this new—and very important—aspect of our culture. We passed with flying colors, and are now operating as a fully certified ROWE company!
If you want to learn more about ROWE, I invite you to read about it in Slate, Inc., or HuffPost. Better yet, check out the CultureRx website, GoROWE.com. However, the basic idea behind ROWE is found in this slogan:
“Work whenever you want, wherever you want, as long as the work gets done.”
At 97th Floor, we charge our clients based on the results we deliver them, not on the amount of time we work (other than consulting projects). Our clients couldn’t care less if we spent 100 combined hours or 1,000 combined hours during the term of the contract—as long as the agreed upon goals in the contract are met. As such, it seemed inappropriate to judge our own employees based upon the hours that they work, rather than the work that is being accomplished. This was a wake up call for us.
Despite the obvious benefits associated with ROWE, this isn’t a decision that we made lightly. In fact, we’ve been weighing the pros and cons since the beginning of 2014. It all kept coming back to one fear: How can we know that an employee is working, if they aren’t in the office? This is a valid question, but it is one that is rendered moot by a second question: How can we know that an employee is working even when they are in the office?
It’s normal for management to want to exert some form of control over those on the company’s payroll. After all, employees are expected to earn their pay, and when they choose instead to ignore their duties, it can cause serious problems for the business in question. However, the reality is that a bad employee will find ways to avoid responsibility, even while sitting at his or her desk surrounded by coworkers. In fact, by giving employees a standard of measurement based upon something other than accomplishments, leaders enable low-productivity. In essence, they tell workers that they don’t have to work; they just have to show up.
Well, after more than a year of discussion, we decided that we weren’t content with sticking with a flawed strategy. We wanted employees to be adults. We wanted them to be respected. We wanted them to be in control of their work and their lives. We’ve believed for a long time that our agency has the best talent in the industry. Now we are letting our employees decide how to provide the best work possible for our clients—which, in reality, is what we’ve expected of our people all along. Traditional HR tools such as time clocks, office hours, limited vacation/sick days, and mandatory meetings all just get in the way, and distract employee focus from what is really important. ROWE puts everything back into perspective, making it possible for employees to work at the times and in the locations that are best suited to their own talents, and it helps management improve as well, by freeing it from the need to constantly supervise and ‘hand-hold’ those who work below them. When all is said and done, the only viable measure of success is success itself. ROWE allows us to release control over a number of things that we are now realizing that we never wanted to control in the first place.
Being giving the freedom to work on my own terms has been absolutely amazing. Today I went to see Disney Pixar’s Inside Out with my wife and daughter at 3:30pm, and now that my daughter is in bed and my wife is out with a friend, I’m able to get back to work... albeit in my backyard with my dogs while I enjoy this warm summer evening! And I’m not the only one enjoying ROWE. One of our Senior Graphic Designers, Maggie Call, recently travelled through India for a month with her husband (and yeah, she represented 97th Floor at The Taj Mahal). And while she was traveling, she still produced amazing work and met on-going project deadlines. One of our Team Lead’s, Cole Rieben, just had gorgeous twin girls. Complications kept them in the hospital for a few weeks, and Cole was able to be there for his family as a husband and a father, while still providing exceptional work for the company. Think about what type of work Cole would have produced if he had had to neglect his responsibilities at home in favor of arbitrarily putting in eight hours a day at the office resulting in him being stressed out. What kind of quality would Maggie’s work be if she were burned-out from being forced to choose between occupying a desk and following her dreams? How effective would I be in my position if I was depressed from missing this time in my daughter’s life? The sad truth is that when freedom is restricted, results suffer. According to Gallup, over half of U.S. employees were not engaged in their jobs in 2014. I wonder how many employees would be happier and more engaged if they had more autonomy.
Success doesn’t breed happiness; happiness breeds success—that’s the happiness advantage (read Shawn Achor’s book). If we’re tired, stressed, burned out, or just having a crappy day, we don’t need to just sit at the office anymore and fake it. We can do something else and get back to work at a better time. Now our clients are getting work from happy people who are ready to share their own excitement and heart in everything that they produce. Our work in the past has been amazing—just look at our retention rate and the awards that we win. With this improvement to our culture, we can’t wait to see just how much better our work will be!
While one purpose is to attract and retain the best talent, another purpose is to increase productivity. Leaders at 97th Floor no longer have subjective conversations about how hard their team members are working. Now, they only focus on the results. This gives 97th Floor 100% accountability from all employees. To put it simply: No results, no job. That’s how clients treat us, so that’s how we need to treat employees. Does this mean that if an employee has a bad month, we simply fire them? Probably not. Clients usually don’t cancel on us if we have one bad month, or if one campaign fails to perform as expected; they look at the overall track record of our work. 97th Floor will do the same with employees. So while we’re not absolutely cutthroat, we are completely serious about maintaining an A-Player culture. This requires fast firing, regardless of how hard an employee is working. Our clients deserve the best talent working on their accounts, and our employees deserve to be surrounded by the best individuals. ROWE helps us recognize those individuals, and to offer them the best possible environment for them to be able to reach their full potential. In the end, it is the employee who achieves the best results that is recognized and rewarded, regardless of how many hours he or she has spent in the office.
We’re excited about this as a company! If you are a client or a prospective client, you should be excited as well. 97th Floor will be even better than what we’ve been in the past! If you’re a prospective employee, you should be excited as well. Come join us, and see for yourself just how great of results you can achieve!
There is obviously much more to be said about ROWE and what it means to us here at 97th Floor. I’ve talked enough though, so I’ll now let our work and our culture speak for themselves.
Here at 97th Floor, we believe that the best gifts are the ones that provide the recipient with an opportunity to help others. This is why for our holiday card this past December, we created the #20helps campaign. We wanted to be able use our success as a company and as individuals to help others. More than that, we wanted to inspire our clients, partners, friends, and anyone else who might be interested, to join in the spirit of charity, and to give back a little something to help those in need. You can read more about our holiday card here.
The holiday card was also a hint at some of our big plans as a company for 2015. Last year was the year that our company really came into its own. To accommodate our extraordinary growth, we moved into a new and better office. We upgraded our equipment to take better advantage of recent technological advances. We created and filled several new positions in order to further improve our overall performance. However, for 2015, we feel as though we need to mature as a company and start helping others. So, at our company holiday celebration last month, we announced our plans to become much more heavily involved with charitable organizations in 2015.
The first aspect of our plan is to donate 1% of our gross revenue to charity. Based on our projections, we estimate that this will mean $65,000 donated by our company to charities in 2015. Each employee of 97th Floor will be able to select a charity of their choice, and 97th Floor will donate a portion of the 1% to that charity. The 1% pledge was inspired by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce. To learn more about The Salesforce Foundation and their 1% model, go here.
Charitable organizations are always happy to accept monetary donations, but sometimes the donation that does the most good, is a donation of service. The second phase of our 2015 charity plan is to provide a substantial amount of pro bono work for these organizations. We’ll be doing this by bringing on charities as we would normal clients, however, the work that we do for them will be done completely free of charge. We’ll have two charities as clients at all times, and we’ve already built a team at 97th Floor dedicated to service these charities. Our first two charity clients are both local organizations headquartered here in Utah: The Road Home (helping people step out of homelessness and back into the community) and United Way of Utah County Women’s Leadership Council (promoting programs that empower children). 
We have a great deal of respect and admiration for both organizations and for what they do for the communities in which we live and work, and we look forward to a long and fruitful relationship. We are just getting started, but over the next few months, expect to see some great things coming from these partnerships! The work itself that we’ll be donating in 2015 is equivalent to $360,000.
Above all, we realize that it’s our amazing clients that keep us in business and allow us to give back to the world that has given us so much. To quote President John F. Kennedy, "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." We believe that brands work with us because of the results we’re able to help them achieve. However, we also believe that people do business with people. Through our ongoing charity efforts, we intend to focus on the human side of digital marketing, and to improve not only our clients’ businesses, but also the lives of those with whom we come into contact. Thank you for partnering with us on your digital marketing efforts!
never do anything just to make money. only do those things you’re passionate about.
In this episode of 97th Floor Radio, Chris Bennett, CEO and Founder of 97th Floor discusses his start in graphic design and computer technology and all things digital long before design, web development and online technology were part of the mainstream workflow. A fascination with traditional marketing and digital marketing, namely the idea of being able to create something that compels action on the part of consumers, whether it be to purchase a product or sign up for a course or subscribe for more information. His move to online marketing came as he learned more about the competitive marketplace and the great equalizer that is digital, where a solopreneur can compete with big name brands by applying best practices in content and testing.
You will learn:
do more than you read - continue your education but remember to test everything and find out what’s true for you.
Links and Resources Mentioned:
Learn more and connect with Chris Bennett | LinkedIn | Twitter
10 Coolest Entrepreneurs in Utah by Utah Valley BusinessQ.
Agency of the Year - 2014 Gold Stevie Winner
Connect with 97th Floor on YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn
What’d you think of today’s show? The conversation continues in the comments below. Be sure to leave your insights.
If you like this episode, subscribe to our YouTube channel and get notifications - we’ll drop a new episode every week.
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97th Floor was presented with a Gold Stevie® Award for Marketing or Advertising Agency of the Year in the 12th Annual American Business Awards in Chicago on June 13th. They also received Silver Stevie® Awards in the Viral Marketing Campaign of the Year category and Brand Experience of the Year -- Business-to-Business category.
97th Floor is a finalist at the new products & tech awards for Best Home/Welcome Page.
More than 3,300 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories, including Most Innovative Company of the Year, Management Team of the Year, Best New Product or Service of the Year, Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year, and Executive of the Year, among others. Stevie Award winners were selected by more than 240 executives worldwide who participated in the judging process this year.
“It’s an honor for us to recognize and celebrate such an outstanding class of organizations and individuals,” said Michael Gallagher, president and founder of the Stevie Awards. “The judges were especially discerning this year. All of this year’s Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie winners should be proud that the judges recognized their achievements and their ability to express those achievements in a way that captured the judges’ hearts and imaginations.”
Details about The American Business Awards and the lists of Stevie winners who were announced on June 13 are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.
Found below is the video of Chris Bennett accepting the Gold Stevie Award for Agency of the Year.
The most valuable metrics are the ones that impact the bottom line. The right numbers shape the future of your business by showing where to focus, how to improve, and when to adjust.
Choosing which metrics to track isn’t always easy. Marketing performance indicators must be set before meaningful progress can happen.
For a campaign to prove its viability, it needs data specific to its business’s purpose and goals. Clear measurement starts with understanding the language of performance. Metrics, KPIs, and goals may sound similar, but each plays a different role in shaping strategy.
Metric: A metric is essentially any signal that can be tracked. It’s an objective system of measurement, which means that you might have an entire dashboard of metrics that you’ve set up to be tracked. But dashboards only serve as directionless numbers without goals and KPI.
KPI: KPIs (key performance indicators; often called marketing performance indicators) are the metrics that you’ve decided to use in tracking how efficiently your business is meeting its objectives. It’s a little tricky to get down the difference, but just remember that while all KPIs are metrics, not all metrics are KPIs.
Goal: A goal is a metric-driven objective, defined by a clear timetable and tactics, that you are trying to reach. The best goals are SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound). Goals set a bar for the future of certain KPIs that you then strive to achieve. Goals should move your marketing department and business forward.
Let’s put them together. For example, you may decide that next quarter your business should work to earn more site conversions via organic traffic. Your KPI will be organic traffic. Supporting metrics might include keyword rankings and landing page conversion rates. Finally, your goal could be to reach 100 conversions via organic traffic.
The metrics that you choose for your KPIs will determine what your business will achieve. Keep in mind that there’s no comprehensive list of metrics that you “must be tracking” that will work for every business. The following is a list of metrics we’ve compiled from our own experience at 97th Floor for you to consider as you develop your individualized marketing strategy.
Revenue is something every marketing leader should have in their sight. Of course, tracking this is sometimes easier said than done. A good marketing leader will make every effort to get good data that associates revenue with your various efforts. If done correctly, all other metrics will fall under this single metric.
Conversions are the closest metric to revenue that you can track. What conversions look like varies based on the business. For an e-commerce site, that could be a checkout; for a B2B site, it could be a lead or closed deal. Marketers need to ensure that the conversions they track have monetary attachments. For e-commerce businesses, that can be quite easy; however, B2B companies that work through leads with a sales team will need to be intentional about gathering data and insight from marketing and sales to assign values to things like leads, MQLs, and SQLs.
While knowing the amount of conversions your site brings in is important, knowing the rate at which your site converts traffic to conversions is critical. Paying attention to historical and trending conversion rates will help you know where to focus your attention.
For example, if you see that one month shows a conversion rate that is only 50% of the month prior, you might dig further and see that was the month you launched a new ad campaign. This would tell you that this ad campaign likely wasn’t fruitful.
The close rate is the rate at which leads are closed into actual business and revenue. This metric can be useful in judging both sales and marketing team performance. Lower close rates could mean that the sales team needs additional training, or that the marketing department isn’t providing quality leads. Tracking the close rate will help keep both sales and marketing professionals accountable.
This metric is exclusively for businesses that are running paid ads across the web. Most major advertising platforms (i.e., Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn) have snippets of code called pixels that you can put directly on your site that allow the ad platform and advertisers to track the ad’s performance — including conversions that take place on your site. When ad spend is coupled with conversion data (that has an assigned marketing value) you’ll be able to see the rate of return on your ad spend.
CPL is the total cost to acquire a lead. This is typically used as a long-term benchmark, even though this number may change. For example, a business may find that it costs an average of $42 to acquire a lead over the past year. Assuming budgets have stayed the same, this business can assume that any figure under $42/per lead is a good investment.
As its name implies, CLV is the expected return during the life of an average customer. Marketing leaders at SaaS organizations will benefit the most from this metric. It’s powerful because it can encompass smaller metrics like customer retention rate, customer add-ons, and average length of customer retention. This metric is especially powerful when filtered across a qualifier.
Virtually all businesses utilize some kind of website for their marketing efforts. Knowing how many people visit the site in a given time is essential to knowing the impact of your online marketing efforts. Many metrics could be even more specific than total traffic, such as page visits, sessions, and unique visitors. And, while total traffic might not be incredibly insightful by itself, it’s critical in keeping other traffic-related metrics in context.
There are many traffic sources you can measure, likes ad channels, referrals, social, direct, and organic. Many businesses will benefit from measuring many of these channels. However, organic will make sense for virtually all businesses.
Organic search accounts for over 50% of all web traffic, and unlike other channels, SEO has the potential to attract customers at every stage of the funnel. This could include top funnel conversions like email capture or lead capture, or bottom funnel conversions like demo requests or purchases.
Blogging has proven its worth in the business world, as the most recent numbers say that businesses that blog regularly earn 67% more leads. It has pulled ahead as one of the best ways to participate in both SEO and content marketing. Content will draw users to your site and provide you with unique opportunities to meet their needs. Not to mention the tremendous work that a blog can have on your SEO strategy.
In addition to net blog traffic, consider tracking blog-specific conversions. Conversions on a blog are generally micro conversions, such as newsletter subscriptions, lead magnet downloads, or landing page visits. However, these contacts often move farther along the funnel as they are delighted with your brand and content, and can often turn into leads.
Subscribers are the highest top funnel contacts. They are the ones who know about your business and have opted in to hear more from you. Often, this looks like signing up to be notified of new blog posts or receive a newsletter. These contacts may or may not move farther down the funnel, but that’s okay. Growing your subscribers means growing your audience, which allows you to amplify your content and reach even more new contacts.
Leads are contacts in your database that have indicated some signal that they are willing to learn more than surface-level information about your company, and they’ve given you information to make that happen. Examples of this might come from a PDF lead magnet or a free trial signup.
Are you trying to increase trial sign-ups, improve customer retention, or get more traffic to your website? What are your targeted marketing performance indicators?
MQLs are leads that the marketing team has determined are more qualified than a standard lead based on their action. MQL structure might vary depending on the company, but generally, they are defined as the contacts that have shown enough interest to qualify them as ready to talk to sales. Marketing determines readiness based on either lead scoring or the contacts themselves requesting to talk with sales via a form on the marketing page.
An MQL becomes an SQL after the sales team has determined this lead’s qualifications. Many organizations have their own iterations on this, but SQLs are generally MQLs that are confirmed promising enough to be pursued by the sales team. Sales then takes the reins in nurturing them and aiding them in their journey to becoming a customer.
Email has one of the most positive ROIs of any channel. It’s believed to be as high as $42 for every $1 spent. It’s also one of the most used channels today, despite years of naysayers predicting its demise. This metric measures the effectiveness of subject lines in real-time. However, this metric also tracks much deeper issues, like a company’s reputation. If you have a history of providing good content within your emails, you’ll have a higher open rate.
Email click-through rates (and net clicks) measure the effectiveness of the content inside your email. Having a contact open and read your email is great, but having them follow through on what you asked them to do is even more important. Emails lose much of their usefulness unless contacts take action, so measuring click-through rate is worthwhile.
Social is a set of micro metrics (likes, shares, comments, social traffic, impressions, etc.) from which you can choose what makes sense to track for your company. Some businesses will choose not to intentionally track any of these metrics and put social media on the back burner. For some, social metrics will be a large part of their overall marketing strategy.
The social channels businesses focus on will also largely depend on the company.
Clients and managers may approach agencies and employees with incredibly bad KPIs in mind. KPIs like “increase rankings” or “get more followers” are bound to leave your site barren. Vanity metrics like followers, impressions, or raw traffic can be misleading if they don’t tie back to conversions or revenue.
Healthy KPIs are the ones that connect marketing activity to real business outcomes. Instead of tracking numbers for their own sake, make sure your chosen indicators tie back to revenue, growth, or long-term customer value. When KPIs are aligned with profit, they provide a clear picture of whether your marketing is moving the business forward.
That clarity gets even sharper when you remove the boundary between marketing and sales entirely. Marketer Sterling Snow argues that the highest-performing companies don't have a marketing team at all — they have a revenue team. When marketing owns outcomes alongside sales, both teams stop optimizing for metrics that feel good and start optimizing for the ones that actually drive the business. This short video breaks down why collapsing the line between marketing and sales is one of the most important structural shifts a B2B company can make.
The success of storytelling strategiescan be measured through marketing performance indicators like engagement rates, time spent on page, click-through rates, and conversions.
We’ll close out with a story. In the 1950s, the young biologist Allan Savory was working to set up natural parks in Zambia, Africa. National parks teeming with wildlife are much more appealing than parks devoid of animals; therefore, Savory’s first plan of action was to move the indigenous hunters from the land to boost the wildlife population.
Unfortunately, shortly after Savory removed the hunters, the terrain began to deteriorate and enter a period of desertification. The land was growing barren and becoming increasingly unable to support the growing herds of grazing animals.
As things began to get worse, Savory turned to the data. He discovered that the desertification problem stemmed mainly from the large number of elephants growing unchecked. According to Savory’s findings, the only way out was the extermination of thousands of elephants.
Convincing the Central African politicians to slaughter herds of elephants was no small task. The Zambian government called in a small task force to check and re-check Savory’s numbers. Finally, the team concluded that Savory was correct and his calculations were sound. Shortly thereafter, Savory (aided by the Zambian government) began shooting thousands of elephants, measuring their success based on how many elephants they killed. Fueled by the self-established metric of elephant population, Savory and his team killed over 40,000 elephants in an attempt to save the land. In the end, the land degradation intensified, and Savory had to live with what he still calls the “saddest and the greatest blunder of [his] life.”
The lesson for marketers? Choosing the wrong marketing key performance indicators can have devastating long-term consequences. Just like Savory’s faulty KPI (elephant population), selecting vanity or misaligned KPIs can lead businesses down destructive paths.
We use a combination of analytics tools and marketing performance indic ators (KPIs) to measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns.
Allan Savory’s tragic pursuit of an ineffective KPI has caused him to spend the rest of his life trying to correct his theory. When looking for success in digital marketing, let’s not make the mistake of pursuing unhealthy KPIs only to end up spending much more time cleaning up our mistakes.
With the right marketing performance indicators in place, you’re ready to design a marketing strategy backed by insight, select marketing KPIs that drive results, and make smarter decisions.
At 97th Floor, we help brands focus on the right marketing performance indicators so their strategies lead to real growth. Our team specializes in aligning KPIs with revenue goals, building dashboards that provide clarity, and creating campaigns that move the needle.
Every brand is unique. Success comes from identifying the signals that matter most to your business and using them to guide your marketing forward.
97th Floor was named a finalist in four categories in The 2014 American Business Awards, and will ultimately be a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie Award winner in each category.
The American Business Awards are the nation’s premier business awards program. Past winners include Proctor & Gamble, Sony, American Express, Tropicana, Wynn Las Vegas, AT&T, Domino’s and Aflac.
97th Floor is proud to be honored for the following awards:
Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards will be announced at the 2014 awards banquet in Chicago on June 13th.
Click here to see a list of all the finalist in each category.
97th Floor also recently received an Honorable Mention Webby Award for the www.pixartheory.com
O.K. before you keep reading I have to apologize, I hate case studies and examples of sites that don't show the sites involved. One of the things that I try to do to set us apart from a lot of blogs is to give specific ideas on how to do things, but in the case study below I can't. We are growing and have a lot of clientele that just won't let us share their info, or even mention them as a client. That is fine, I guess if I was a 100 million a year plus company with very intelligent competitors I wouldn't want our service providers giving away our secrets either.
With that said this will still be really cool to share and I will show you (doctored) screen shots from their analytics.
We helped a friend/client launch a blog in October and it has been some of the most successful blog marketing we have done to date in the realms of blog optimization and social media saturation to a brand new domain and website.
The blog is general and covers a lot of different topics mostly internet and advertising related, which helps. If you have a niche blog you can still have tremendous success in blog promotion, especially in terms of links and subscribers which is the most import aspect of a blogs success in my opinion.
The Stats: The blog is exactly 39 days old it has a total of 21 pages, it has received over 165,000 uniques, over 3,000 links and over 1,117 subscribers. The subscribers and the amount of branding we have seen (see below) are what we are most exited about.
We have had campaigns that generate more traffic and links then this blog (I am working on another case study where I will actually show you an example of an article that had over 150k visits in one day, and has had over 3k links just to the article), but what is different about this site is the vast amount of subscribers and the consistent traffic. Barely any of this traffic is from Digg, the blog is receiving thousands of visitors a day on a consistent basis. So it has been a combined effort on behalf of the posts instead of one home run submitted to Digg with one traffic spike and virtually no traffic a week later. The lowest day so far as been over 1,600 visitors and the highest has been 14,922 with several days over 10k.
Graph screen shot of the blogs entire life so far: 
Page Views to some of the URL's: 
Traffic Sources: (what is best about this is Direct Traffic to the domain, is over 14% which is over 24,000 visitors. Remember this blog is only 39 days, that is some sweet branding) 
The majority of the initial traffic came from StumbleUpon, I think that is why the subscriber rate has been so good. We also get a tremendous amount of traffic from other hub sites picking up our stories and linking to them.
How to do it: I would credit a handful of things the the sites success.
1.) The site owner has fallen in love with marketing and has done a great job with generating outstanding content. He has engulfed himself in Social Media and in his competing blogs and really understands how to generate good content for his audience.
2.) We mapped out and understood our audience prior to launch. We actually had a good amount of posts ready before launch so that we wouldn't lose steam. After the first few pages being submitted to social sites we let the sites subscribers and community promote the rest of our content as it was created.
3.) The Domain is easy to remember, easy to spell and all that. By watching the direct traffic to the homepage and branded search terms in Google we are really seeing that a good domain can go a long way.
Again I apologize for not being able to give away more. I'm working on about 3 posts that all give away the farm with specific examples. Also remember this site/company did not exist before the last week in October, there wasn't a huge brand name to piggy back off of or any prior marketing or advertising to build off of. This was brand new, raw straight out of the gates marketing.
