Almost Timely News, 15 August 2021: Account-Based Experience, You Can’t Count on Timing, Bounce Rates

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Almost Timely News: Account-Based Experience, You Can’t Count on Timing, Bounce Rates

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Trying something new this week; I’ve shortened the subject line from Almost Timely News: to [ATN]. Let me know what you think.

What’s On My Mind: You Can’t Count on Unowned Timing

Some food for thought. This past week, I was working with my friends at Demandbase (who also kindly sponsored this issue of the newsletter) to publish some content promoting their new DBTV platform, and I had queued up social posts on Twitter and LinkedIn in advance of the launch on Tuesday. All the posts went out in sync with their launch on Tuesday…

Launch day statistics

… and yet, the posts got the most attention in terms of views and interactions… the next day.

Why? Because the underlying models that power the newsfeeds on these social networks don’t especially care about our timing. They don’t care when we, the marketers, want people to see our stuff. They serve up our content – if at all – when they think people want to see it. And that’s based on the architecture of the models themselves and what they’re designed to value.

For example, both Twitter and LinkedIn have published extensive technical data and research on how their models work. This 2017 post by Twitter goes into highly technical detail about how their deep learning models work to evaluate tweets for recommendation in near-real-time. Likewise, this 2018 post by LinkedIn shares insights into how their model works for recommending content.

When we unpack the technical language, we can boil down the technical factors into a few major buckets: interaction strength, relevancy of topic, and probability of engagement.

Interaction strength is how engaged you and your network are. If you just blindly post into the ether, and you don’t have real conversations with other people, you have no interaction strength with others and thus your content won’t be seen by them. Interaction strength is the origin of the popular tactic of tagging as many people in your posts as you possibly can.

Relevancy of topic uses the state of the art natural language processing models to determine how topically relevant your content is to your audience’s interests. LinkedIn in particular has trained its own version of the BERT language model specifically on LinkedIn member interactions, and tries to show topically relevant content to members.

Probability of engagement is the predictive aspect of these feed models, the set of algorithms attempting to guess what will keep people most engaged, most interested. Recommendations are shown based on these probability estimates.

What’s not in here? Yup, you guessed it: timeliness. These models are all looking at how relevant and engaging our content is, and if we’re not as strong as other entities competing for our audience’s eyeballs, then our stuff will get shown later, after the better-scoring content has been consumed by our audience.

In practice, that means that while I may publish my content on a specific day, it won’t necessarily be seen or recommended on that day. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of publishing something on a social network and suddenly seeing interaction on it days later, long after you’ve forgotten about it.

So, what does this mean for us? When we’re designing our marketing campaigns, we cannot count on the timing of marketing channels we don’t own. We can count on emails to go out on a specific day. We can count on text messages to be broadcast at our design. We can count on publishing a post to our blog when we want.

We cannot count on social networks showing our content at a specific time. We cannot even necessarily count on ad campaigns being delivered when we want, if our targeting and spend isn’t optimum.

In short, if you don’t own it, you can’t count on timing it. If you need to show results on a specific time, focus on the channels you own and invest most heavily in those.

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ICYMI: In Case You Missed it

If I had to suggest only one of these articles to read from this week on the blog, it would be the piece on bounce rates in Google Analytics. There are lots of reasons for a high bounce rate; this post walks you through diagnosing many of them.

Also, a side note – this past week, my link shortener had some serious issues, so links from previous issues might not work. Sorry about that.

Skill Up With Free Classes

These are just a few of the free classes I have available over at the Trust Insights website that you can take.

Thank You Notes

These are the places you’ve had or mentioned me – on your podcast, on your blog, in your newsletter. Thank you!

What I’m Reading: Your Stuff

Let’s look at the most interesting content from around the web on topics you care about, some of which you might have even written.

Social Media Marketing

Media and Content

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Ad: Demandbase TV

I’m happy to partner with my friends and colleagues at Demandbase for the launch of Demandbase TV, an on-demand video streaming service for B2B marketers, sales professionals, and customer experience folks. Hop on over to hear and see content from folks like Kipp Bodnar of Hubspot, Sandy Carter of Amazon AWS, Brian Clevenger of Blackberry, and many more folks about their perspectives on the future of marketing.

Tune in to Demandbase TV here »

Want to guest star on Demandbase TV? (I will be) [Email Justin Levy here](mailto: [email protected]?subject=DBTV%20Inquiry%20from%20Almost%20Timely%20News) to make your pitch!

Plus, dig into what’s new with account-based experience, the logical extension of account-based marketing practices to the entire customer journey. My friend Jon Miller wrote The Clear & Complete Guide to Account-Based Experience, which includes the 5-step process you need to extend ABM best practices across your customer experience. Remember, marketing is only a third to a quarter of the whole customer journey – and there’s much, much more revenue to be had by applying ABM principles everywhere.

Grab your copy of The Clear & Complete Guide to Account-Based Experience here »

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

All Things IBM

Ad: Make Better Videos with Techsmith Camtasia

If you enjoy my videos, like You Ask, I Answer, Do Something With Your Marketing, Saturday Night Data Party, and many others, then consider using the platform I use to edit and publish them: Techsmith Camtasia. Camtasia is just the right balance between too easy and inflexible, like iMovie, and absurdly complex and expensive, like Adobe Premiere. It’s got just the right features, from subtitle editing to all the usual transitions and special effects, and it’s a desktop app, so there’s none of this crazy trying to “edit in the cloud” (which is insane for video production). If you need to produce videos, screencasts, and even animations, give Camtasia a try.

Learn more about Techsmith Camtasia >>

Good Reads, Long Reads, Interesting Stuff

Fun, Games, and Entertainment

Economics, Politics, Environment, and Society

Ad: How to Prove the ROI of your Marketing Agency

I put together a brand new talk on how agencies could use data-driven marketing as a way to showcase their value and real results they obtain. In it, you’ll learn the 5 steps agencies must take to be more valuable to its clients. For folks on the client side, these are the things you should expect of your agencies, things you should ask for when agencies are pitching you. Agencies not doing these things will not serve you as well as they could. There’s obviously a lot more detail, so go ahead and watch the talk now.

Watch the talk now by filling out this form »

How to Stay in Touch

Let’s make sure we’re connected in the places it suits you best. Here’s where you can find different content:

My blog – daily videos, blog posts, and podcast episodes
My YouTube channel – daily videos, conference talks, and all things video
My company, Trust Insights – marketing analytics help
My podcast, Marketing over Coffee – weekly episodes of what’s worth noting in marketing
My second podcast, In-Ear Insights – the Trust Insights weekly podcast focused on data and analytics
On Twitter – multiple daily updates of marketing news
On LinkedIn – daily videos and news
On Instagram – personal photos and travels
My free Slack discussion forum, Analytics for Marketers – open conversations about marketing and analytics

Events I’ll Be At

Here’s where I’m speaking and attending. Say hi if you’re at an event also:

MAICON, September 2021, virtual
MarTech East, September 2021, virtual
Content Marketing World, September 2021, Cleveland, OH
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2021, virtual
HELLO Conference, October 2021, New Jersey

Events marked with a physical location may become virtual if conditions and safety warrant it.

If you’re an event organizer, let me help your event shine. Visit my speaking page for more details.

Can’t be at an event? Stop by my private Slack group instead, Analytics for Marketers.

Required Disclosures

Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.

Advertisements in this newsletter have paid to be promoted, and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.

My company, Trust Insights, maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Cisco Systems, Amazon, Talkwalker, MarketingProfs, MarketMuse, Agorapulse, Hubspot, Informa, Demandbase, The Marketing AI Institute, and others. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which Trust Insights may receive indirect financial benefit, and thus I may receive indirect financial benefit from them as well.

Thank You!

Thanks for subscribing and reading this far. I appreciate it. As always, thank you for your support, your attention, and your kindness.

See you next week,

Christopher S. Penn