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My founder story is, in some ways, like many others. I saw a problem that needed solving: Men don’t have as many instant fixes for acne as women do. I met my co-founder Nick Bunn who had experienced the problem firsthand and believed in the same vision of faster acne care, while providing complimentary skills: he brought an excitement for marketing and operations, whereas I had knowledge of branding and design. Together, we saw an opportunity to reimagine the acne experience, and FRONTMAN was born.The unusual part of my story? All of this happened during my junior year of college. Maybe it would have made more sense to wait until after graduation to dive into our idea, focusing on our studies and daydreaming about our future company in moments between classes instead of working on it in earnest. But I was ready to work on something real, so we dove right in—and I’m so glad we did. Because we got started early, we were able to launch within a year after I graduated, hit six figures within a year after that, and triple that number the following year. Not to mention we’ve grown from one product to ten, expanded to Amazon, and landed our first retail partnership with Urban Outfitters. All within two years of officially putting our brand into the world.Here are some of the reasons that starting a business in college helped us, and how we used our unique position to set ourselves up for success after graduating.Annelise and her co-founder NickWe had the benefit of timeThis likely isn’t news to anyone, but starting a company takes time. This is especially true for product-based companies like ours. It took us nearly two years to finalize our products because of how much effort went into iterating (plus the notoriously slow speed of the CPG industry).Before we could start marketing and selling, we had to work with scientists and dermatologists (including my mom!) to create product formulas. We had to find product manufacturers to work with, and then get samples to test for feedback and start the process all over again. We had to get money to pay for said samples. And, having never worked in this industry before, we had to learn as we went at every step. Luckily, we had time to spare until we really needed this to support us. I recognize that this isn’t the case for every student. While I was fortunate to have a lot of financial support through college, my co-founder Nick did not. Prior to starting FRONTMAN, he and I had worked with a student-run company and launched a small agency that offered on-campus brand activation, which gave us each some income, and Nick also picked up a bunch of flexible part-time jobs like rideshare driving to support his needs while having time to work on the company.We were also able to create more flexible schedules than most working adults can. Again, this may be different for other students, but I was less focused on classroom learning at that point and ready to work toward my professional interests after graduation. So I looked for less demanding classes that would give me the time and brain space to focus on the company. That’s not to say it was always easy. For instance, I remember one particularly hectic month my senior year where I was going back and forth from Boston to New York every weekend to take meetings for FRONTMAN. But I found that schedule easier to juggle than the six months after I graduated when my founder and I were both working other jobs while finalizing our product for launch.We took advantage of any school resource we couldIn an ideal world, we would have filled our class schedules with business courses that could give us the knowledge to support our growing idea. Unfortunately, our school didn’t have a business major and historically hasn’t been very supportive of student startups, so we had to get creative. We did find one class in the engineering department that focused on research and development (R&D) and gave us credit for spending time working on our idea. That class also had a pitch competition at the end of the semester, which we won, giving us around $10,000 for our development budget. For us, unfortunately, that’s about where the official school resources tapped out, but there are many schools that offer much more support for student entrepreneurs, and I recommend that college founders take advantage of as much as they can.We had a vast network who were excited to help usThat’s not to say our school gave us nothing. The biggest unofficial resource available to us was a network of incredibly smart and accomplished alumni, who gave us some much-needed perspective from people a little farther ahead in their careers. Some even became our early advisors and investors.Whenever I learned about an alum who may have been able to support our goals, I’d reach out saying: “I’m really interested in starting a skincare line. This is where we’re at. You have great experience in [subject area]—could I have a few minutes of your time to get your advice?”People are surprisingly motivated to help college students out, especially when they’re alumni of your university. They think it’s cute that you’re trying to start something, and they want to pay it forward. It could have felt belittling, but instead I was able to use it to my advantage to learn from experienced contacts who might not have been as eager to help any working professional.We used our peers to brainstorm, to product test, and moreThe other network we had access to at school was our fellow students. First and foremost, I met my founder at school and would not have been able to start this business without him.Being in that R&D class also surrounded us with other students who were working through the same challenges we were—almost like a mini (and much less competitive) accelerator. We were able to help each other navigate different processes and approaches, bounce ideas off each other so we didn’t feel like we were making decisions alone, and share our connections to make our networks even broader. Outside of class, we also found it helpful to tap into students who were just excited to work on something real. For every hurdle we faced or need we had, we realized there was probably someone on campus who knew more about it than we did. We worked with a lot of student marketers who were excited to work for free on projects they could add to their resume. We had a lot of really good conversations with other students about parts of the business we were stuck on. Plus, we were able to use our peers as guinea pigs to get real-time feedback as we developed our products, which really shaped the direction of our final offerings.Frontman skintone acne treatmentWe had a really safe testing groundPerhaps more than anything, I appreciated having a safe testing ground for both developing our product and learning how to be a founder. It felt like there was very little risk to giving our idea a go while we were still in college, that there was so much less to lose than later in life when we might have more obligations. It also felt like we were given more leeway to mess up along the way and that the bar was lower than it is for more experienced founders. For instance, when we first started, I was such a nervous public speaker. My first pitches weren’t nearly as good as they are today, but I still got some early interest from advisors, investors, and partners simply because I was energetic and compelling. Meanwhile, through practice, I was able to learn how to present my ideas more concisely, how to capture people emotionally, and how to come across as competent despite my age. I feel much more confident now having had the time to experiment and learn in that college environment. It laid the foundation for me to be a good entrepreneur now. Do I think every student who has dreams of being a founder should get started in college? Not necessarily. I was surrounded by many who just “wanted to start something,” which I don’t believe is a good recipe for creating a long-lasting and successful company. You need to have an idea that you physically can’t stop thinking about.It’s also by no means easy, but starting a business is never going to be easy. If you think you’ve identified a real problem that you’re excited to work on a solution for, why not get started now? It just might become a reality, too.

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If you want to generate leads, it’s important that you bring in a lot of traffic to your site. To make the most of your website, you need to identify the top traffic sources that provide your business with the leads it needs. In this blog post, we’ll break down the most important lead sources:…
The post Where Are Your Leads Coming From? Breaking Down Lead Sources appeared first on Benchmark Email.

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Heyoo ✌🏼! Our website’s landing page just got a facelift, and I was in charge of the messaging. It’s my first time leading the charge on a landing page, so I’d love to get some very honest feedback to see how we did. I’m most interested in the clarity of our messaging. Is it clear what problem we solve, why it matters, and how we do it? After reading through the landing page, what do you understand Beyond is offering? I would really appreciate your feedback so that we can improve and iterate. Thanks a ton in advance! Here’s the landing page: https://beyond.so/ submitted by /u/drniklas [link] [comments]

 

 

Successful development of any activity requires effective and precise performance measurement. Surprisingly various researches and surveys point out that eCommerce marketers find their abilities in this matter lacking. In this article we will explore 4 problems and trends related to performance measurement – and point to solutions that will make your marketing stack futureproof.

 

The confusing lack of abilities

 

Marketing teams in eCommerce need various datasets to effectively track the performance of their stores.  Sadly, the toolset providing this data is fragmented and, as a result, cannot provide the marketers with a complete performance overview. This results in problems, diagnosed by many analysts: 

89% of marketers ranked improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact as a top priority (Responsify), Only 58% of marketers say they are often successful in achieving their marketing goals (Responsify), Only 29% of marketers said they had no issues or delays in getting results from automated campaigns (VentureBeat). By 2025, data stories will be the most common way to use analytics, with 75% of data stories automatically generated rather than made by data analysts. (Gartner) 

 

4 Statistics That Will Prove The Importance Of The Performance Measurement

 

These problems and challenges require immediate addressing. We took a closer at the research behind the statistics, pinpointed its most important aspects from the marketers point of view and – last but not least – provided some hint about how to futureproof your marketing.

 

89% of marketers ranked improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact as a top priority

 

Receiving analytics is not all complicated. Registering the impact from your analytics and being able to set forth and become proactive in capitalizing on those insights is an important factor that is generally looked over.

 

The Research

 

In 2017 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey Report “Increased Pipeline Influence Ups The Ante On Attribution, Reporting and Measurement” conducted by Demand Gen, indicated that 89% of marketers perceive improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact as a top priority. In the survey “Tapping Multichannel Marketing & Data As Key Engines for Growth” conducted a year later by the same company, 61% of respondents ranked improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact as top priority.

 

The Importance

 

The fact marketers need to measure impact of their efforts is by no means any wonder. After all it is absolutely fundamental to prove the revenue contribution to the CEO, not to mention that any improvement requires data to scale. What surprises, is the fact, that in the apparent abundance of measurement tools marketers still feel the need to improve. This indicates marketers need a single source of unified, viable information. 

 

How to future-proof your marketing?

 

This can easily be solved with the feature integrating data representing online store performance in a similar way Customer Data Platform integrates all the customer data into a unified 360 customer profile. In such a case, data like transaction value, number of items purchased or average order value must be easily accessible for the marketer. Another information you will absolutely need to be presented by the feature is contact and visit analytics as well as centralized view on KPI’s. However, what will really enable you to get a grip on the business on the fly is top-tier revenue attribution, for both channels and tools. Such a view will clearly show you which channels are excelling and which you should drop, or on the contrary – invest more effort to make them effective. This is what we live Omnichannel Growth Intelligence.

 

marketing revenue attribution

 

Only 58% of marketers say they are often successful in achieving their marketing goals

 

The Research

 

CoSchedule’s 2022 Trend Report on Marketing Strategy uncovers how successful marketers around the world work. There can be many factors and reasons for this, but when put into the context of the statistic analyzed above, one may wonder, how it happened, that this many marketers are actually often successful.

 

The Importance

 

Marketers struggle with lack of insight into the effects of their own actions. These actions very often bring immediate results, but, in the absence of relevant monitoring tools, most of them slip under the radar, leaving marketers clueless and confused.

 

How to future-proof your marketing?

 

The effective solution would require at-a-glance, live overview of online store’s performance, accessible 24/7. This would allow them to: 

Immediately identify hot areas Locate the most critical performance indicators Gain an in-depth analysis of eCommerce environment. Efficiently streamline workflows, re-allocate resources and make more informed strategic decisions.

 

Store’s performance overview

 

So minimizing delays and errors seems crucial – which leads to the next statistic.

 

Only 29% of marketers said they had no issues or delays in getting results from automated campaigns

 

The Research

 

In 2015, Venturebeat decided to answer a trubling question. In their recent report on marketing automation they found out that companies adopting Marketing Automation tools are generating outsized leads, conversions, and revenue — so why have only 5 percent of businesses done so?

 

The Importance

 

Turns out that such tools are often complicated to implement. Data provided by eCommerce platforms and Marketing software can be disjointed and cause a gap in understanding customer behavior and their journey. Without real-time comprehensive data, there’s a lack of insight that would allow businesses to make smart decisions. To bridge this gap and gain a holistic view, marketers often use Google Tag Manager as a popular choice. Another popular choice is Digital Marketing Platforms. They have the advantage over GA that they also measure not only website visits, but also email OR, CTR, offline transactions and more. These differences are especially noticeable with the free version of Google Analytics.

 

How to future-proof your marketing?

 

Using dashboards with clearly visualized data from both eCommerce and Marketing platforms helps you bridge the gap between the two and minimize the risk of incorrectly linking events in the store. This makes it easier to gain a better grip on business activities, giving you the ability to access your data live 24/7. As a result, with this more comprehensive view of the store and its operations, you can make better decisions while optimizing marketing strategies, leading to greater ROI.

 

Events on the website in real time, at-a-glance

 

Integrated data from various sources

 

Did I mention “beautifully visualized”? Let’s move a bit into the future.

 

By 2025, data stories will be the most common way to use analytics, with 75% of data stories automatically generated rather than made by data analysts

 

The Research

 

According to Gartner, data storytelling will become a prevalent method of consuming analytics by 2025. They go even further, claiming that by then a full 75% of data stories will be automatically generated using augmented intelligence and machine learning rather than generated by data analysts.

James Richardson, a research director at Gartner who spoke on Feb. 24 2021 during a virtual conference hosted by data storytelling vendor Narrative Science, claimed that “It is an inevitability that we move to far higher levels of automation in analytics and that we move away from the current dominant self-service model,”. He also said that “The self-service and visual paradigm that now dominates BI is a limiting factor. It’s only as good as the individual’s ability to serve themselves.”

 

The Importance

 

And why is it really, really important to marketers? Because, as Gartner states, you probably don’t use analytics enough. As they claim “Depending on the source, it’s estimated that only about 30% of employees in most organizations use analytics as part of their jobs. And despite advances in augmented intelligence and vendors’ emphasis on ease of use to try to make analytics accessible to more users, that percentage has become stalled.”

 

How to future-proof your marketing?

 

Now, clearly visualized data is not exactly data storytelling yet. But this is a step in the same direction; to make data digestible to the point of being actually usable by someone other than data scientists. And on a daily basis, at-a-glance, 24/7.

So take all the kinds, types and sources of data we mentioned in this article and visualize them in a compact, easy to grasp overview and you have your almost perfect dashboard for eCommerce. Almost, because to reach perfection, a few steps towards data storytelling are needed.

Take the example of loyalty building. The term seems too complex to be be simply put on the screen. However, if treated as a derivative of crucial KPI’s, it is perfectly possible not only to visualize, but to monitor in real time. Paired with omnichannel revenue attribution and other data, this will enable you to work on customer loyalty, and even Customer Intimacy, live, on the fly.

 

Loyalty building dashboard

 

Wrap up data analysis and performance measurement

 

The problem surfaces, as more and more agencies research the topic of data analysis and performance. When it comes to efficiency, data-based decision making is crucial, and abundance – as well as disjointment – of data becomes more curse than blessing.

While data storytelling will find its way to the average marketers desktop eventually, what you need now, is a direct answer to the presented findings that:

delivers unified, relevant performance datamakes it accessible at-a-glance, live, 24/7visualizes them, so they can be usable by all company’s employeesenables to track and enhance even detailed data like omnichannel revenue attribution or the effects of loyalty building efforts.

Which is exactly what modern martech software, specifically Customer Data Platform, with comprehensive eCommerce Dashboard, is being created for.  If you check such an actual release for yourself  read this article.