Section I: The Fundamentals of Marketing Analytics

What is Marketing Analytics?

“What gets measured gets managed.”

~ Peter Drucker (Management Consultant and Author)

Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring and analyzing data and metrics to
understand the impact of marketing activities, maximize ROI and identify the areas of
improvement.

An effective marketing analytics practice tracks and collects data across multiple
marketing channels and consolidates it into a single view.

Why Do You Need Marketing Analytics?

“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one
begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

~ Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet” (by Arthur Conan Doyle)

As a marketer, along with your long task list, you need to be conversant with every
new marketing medium that is introduced. But how do you know which of your efforts
are making a difference? Is the new platform that you just signed-up for even bringing
in any results?

You can’t rely on guesswork or gut feeling to be successful in this era of marketing.
You need to back up the feasibility of every activity with facts and figures. Marketing
analytics reports every action a visitor takes on your digital properties or even on
social media. It helps you understand which marketing activities are bringing in
revenue.
5 Ways Marketing Analytics Helps Your Business

● Understand your target audience in greater detail

● Identify where your competitors are investing their efforts
● Measure how well your marketing campaigns are performing
● Monitor current trends and predict future trends
● Use data to decide the future course of action

What are Marketing Attribution Models?

“If you stick with one attribution model, you might not get the full picture. If you use
multiple models for one campaign, your data might conflict and it will be difficult to
understand.”

~ Chris Miglino Chairman and CEO, SRAX

Since we’re talking about justifying the ROI of your marketing activities, let’s delve a
bit more into marketing attribution. Understanding consumer behavior is a complex
phenomenon. Even though you might have laid out a sound conversion funnel, you
will not be able to easily figure out how a visitor ended up becoming your customer, as
a customer goes through multiple touchpoints along the buyer’s journey. Marketing
attribution helps us solve this mystery.

In simple terms, marketing attribution reveals the touchpoints in the conversion path
that contributed to the sale by attributing revenue credits to the touchpoint(s).

Different types of marketing attribution models can help you assign revenue credit to
various touchpoints based on their contribution to the revenue.

7 Types of Attribution Models for Marketers

1. Single Touch Attribution Models

Single touch models assign revenue credits to only one touchpoint — either the first
or the last.

2. First Touch Attribution

First touch attribution assigns all the credit to the first touch point that the customer
interacted with. For example, if the customer got to know about you through a social
media ad and then did an organic search to come to your website to make a purchase,
then all the credit is given to the social media ad.

3. Last Touch Attribution

 This attribution model is the exact opposite of first touch attribution, i.e., it attributes
a 100 percent credit to the last touchpoint. This is the easiest attribution model to
implement, but it also is the most inefficient model because it completely disregards
the previous touchpoints that may have contributed to the sale.

4. Multi-Touch Attribution Models

In these models, multiple channels get revenue credit for contributing to the final
sale.

5. Linear Attribution

This model assigns equal credit to each touchpoint that contributed to the sale. For
instance, if a customer interacted with three touchpoints, each touchpoint gets
roughly a 33 percent revenue credit.

6. Time Decay Attribution

Time decay model attributes revenue credits to touchpoints that were closer to the
conversion.

7. U-Shaped or Position Based Attribution

In the U-shaped attribution model, 40 percent credit is assigned to each — the first
and last touchpoint. The remaining 20 percent is distributed evenly among the middle
interactions (touchpoints).

Section II: The Basic Concepts of Marketing Analytics

What Are Some Commonly Used Marketing Analytics Tools?

“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.”

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Although Google Analytics is known as “The marketing analytics tool”, it tracks

primarily owned properties such as a website or mobile app, and it has some
limitations. Along with owned web properties, marketing analytics covers other
marketing channels such as social media, paid ads, etc.

Let’s look at the six most widely used categories of marketing analytics tools:

1. Web Analytics Tools

Web analytics tools track events, actions, and other demographic, behavioral,
technological and geographic characteristics and attributes of visitors within a website
or app. Most companies use at least one web analytics tool to track user activities on
their website.

Web analytics tools also track quantitative data such as page views, bounce rate,
average time on page, traffic sources, site content, site speed, and conversions.

Marketing Analytics Tools Here are five web analytics tools for you to consider:

Google Analytics

● KissMetrics
● Mixpanel
● Oribi
● Piwik

2. Visual Behavior and Testing Tools

Collecting quantitative and qualitative data is just one part of overall web analytics.
Web analytics tools have certain shortcomings – such as the fact that they can’t track
how your visitors behave on your website. Although they provide quantifiable
behavioral data, this is not enough. You need a tool that presents such behavior
visually, for easier consumption and action.

Visual behavior and testing tools do precisely that. Also known as website optimization
tools, these solutions track where users interact with individual webpages through
heatmaps and session recordings, conversion funnels, form analysis, etc.

Based on such data, you can further improve website performance with the help of
A/B testing tools.

Some of the most commonly used website optimization platforms are:

● VWO
● Hotjar
● CrazyEgg
● Optimizely
● HumCommerce

3. SEO Analytics Tools

SEO analytics platforms provide marketers with insights that help them improve their
SEO results. These tools help with queries (keyword phrases that your website ranks
for), SERP analysis, keyword insights and suggestions, competitor analysis and
backlinks, to name a few.

The following tools can help you enhance the search engine ranking for your business
website and landing pages:

● Google Search Console

● Bing Webmaster Tools
● SEMRush
● Moz Pro
 ● BrightLocal

4. Social Media Analytics Tools

You need to track how people engage with your social media content in terms of likes,
comments and shares, along with link clicks and rich media stats.

You also need to find the relevant people in your industry and start a conversation
with them. There are specific social media tools that help you find such influencers in
your field.

Let’s look at a few social media analytics tools that do exactly that:

● Facebook Insights (Native social media analytics tool)

● HootSuite (Social media management tool)
● Tweepi
● Followerwonk
● Quintly
5. Content Analytics Tools

You constantly need to stay in the know in your field to maintain your competitive
edge. Content analytics tools keep you up to date with the latest and most popular
content developed by your competitors and publications in your industry. These
platforms also help you find influencers in your niche who can amplify your content.

Here are a few content analytics tools:

● Google Alerts
● Google Trends
● Ahrefs Content Explorer
● BuzzSumo
● Scoop.It!
● Feedly

6. Email Analytics Tools

Now, there are no standalone email analytics tools. The analytics feature comes in-
built with email marketing and marketing automation suites that give you a complete
breakdown of your email and campaigns.

Here are a few email marketing tools that help you with email analytics:

● MailChimp
● Pardot
● AWeber
● Campaign Monitor
● Constant Contact
What Metrics Do You Need to Get Started with Marketing Analytics?

“You don’t need to learn what customers say they want; you need to learn how
customers behave and what they need. In other words, focus on their problem, not
their suggested solution.”

~ Cindy Alvarez, Principal Design Researcher at Microsoft in “Lean Customer

Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy” (Source)

Note: For the next section, we will primarily focus on web analytics and refer to the
terms used in Google Analytics. Although this article is platform agnostic, knowing
these terms will enable you to understand most of the platforms available in the
market.

What are Dimensions and Metrics?

Before we delve into metrics, let’s understand the difference between dimensions and
metrics. Google Analytics reports are a tabular format, each row represents
dimensions and metrics in its respective columns.

A sample geographic report in Google Analytics can be seen here:

Google Analytics Metrics

Dimensions are the qualitative properties of your data and metrics are their respective
quantitative measurement. So, in the above representation, Country is a dimension
and Users, Sessions, Bounce rate, Sessions, etc. are the metrics.

The 6 Major Categories of Metrics Used by Marketers

1. Foundational Metrics

When you log into Google Analytics, you will see a snapshot of the overall functionality
of the website:
Google Analytics Foundational Metrics

Important Foundational Metrics

Sessions: A session is a group of interactions a user performs with your website

within a fixed time frame.

Users: This is the number of visitors who initiated at least one session with your
website.

New Users: This metric shows the number of first-time users.

Page Views: Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed by users.

Average Session Duration: This is the average length of a session.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who navigate away from
the site after viewing only one page.

Conversion Rate: Conversion rate indicates the percentage of users that completed
a goal (such as submitting a form or buying a product/service).
2. SEO Metrics

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about the processes and strategies people use
to rank higher in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. to drive more organic
traffic to a website.

You can monitor the following metrics to measure the effectiveness of your SEO
activities:

Organic Traffic: This is the traffic that comes from the Search Engine Result Pages
(SERPs). You can dive deeper by segregating this traffic by location, devices, etc. to
understand the impact of each aspect.

Keyword Ranking: This is how well your website or webpages rank in SERPs for
relevant/target keyword phrases.

Branded Keyword Searches: This measures how many users search for your
offerings by product or brand name.

Organic Conversion Rate: The number of users that landed on your website through
organic search and completed a desired goal.

3. Paid Ad Metrics

Measuring paid ads is important because, well, you’re spending a ton of money
generating clicks on the link to your website.

To make sure your investment is paying off, measure the following four paid ad
metrics:

Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR is the percentage of users that clicked on your ad to
the number of times it was viewed (which is, impressions).

Cost per Click (CPC): This is the money spent to generate each click. If you are
running multiple campaigns, you need to calculate average CPC when working on a
consolidated report.

Conversion Rate for Paid Ads: This is the number of users who completed a desired
goal after clicking on your ad.

Cost per Conversion (CPC): CPC measures the money spent to complete one
conversion. It is obtained by dividing the total spend by the number of conversions.
For example, if you have five conversions after spending $100, then the cost per
conversion is $20.
4. Blogging Metrics

Tracking the following key blogging metrics will help you analyze the success of your
blog and find areas of improvement:

Blog Visits: This is the number of visits your blog gets in a given period.

Traffic Sources: This metric tracks the sources, such as organic, social media,
email, etc., that drive traffic to your website.

Comments: This displays the number of comments you get on your blog posts. You
can further see the average comments per post.

Top Viewed Articles: Top viewed articles give us the most read articles on the blog.
You can use this metric to identify future topics for your content strategy.

Average Views per Post: This metric can help you understand whether you should
focus on a few pieces of quality content or churn out content more frequently.

Blog Conversion Rate: The blog conversion rate denotes the number of users who
completed a desired goal after coming to your blog.

5. Social Media Metrics

Marketers have a tough time focusing on the right social media metrics as social
media ROI is still difficult to arrive at, unless you’re running paid ads. Let’s look at the
three key social media metrics to focus on:

Social Media Engagement: This is the foundation of all social media metrics.
Though they may be called ‘vanity metrics’, they are still important as they measure
how well your content is being received by your audience. The most important
engagement metrics are post likes, comments, and shares.

Audience Growth: This metric denotes the number of social media community
members viz. Facebook page likes, Twitter followers, etc.

Social Media Traffic: This metric is the traffic to your website generated through the
company’s social media accounts.

6. Email Marketing Metrics

Email is still one of the most important channels to acquire new customers and retain
existing ones. These five metrics will help you analyze your email marketing more
effectively:
 Delivery Rate: This is arguably the most important metric when it comes to emails.
It is the percentage of recipients who received your email.

Open Rate: Open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR is the percentage of users who clicked on at least
one link included in the body of the email.

Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the number of recipients who completed a

conversion after clicking on a link within the email body.

Unsubscribes: This metric calculates how many users chose to opt-out of your
email list.

Section III: Conclusion

How to Get Started with Marketing Analytics?

“If there’s one takeaway it’s just that it’s okay to do small wins. Small wins are good,
they will compound. If you’re doing it right the end result will be massive.”

~ Kevin Li, Former Head of Yahoo Growth (Source)

The field of marketing analytics is an intriguing one, and it requires you to have the
right balance of analytical and creative skills, just like for any other marketing
endeavor. It is not simply about extracting data from the analytics tool, you also need
to establish a process of inference that will help you in making decisions.

If you are looking to get started in the field of marketing analytics, we recommend
staying abreast of the latest news, content and thought leadership on MTA’s BI&CI
Page, Performance & Attribution Page; and Analytics Page.

Also, consider taking the following courses and learning from thought leaders in the
industry:

Recommended Courses

Google Analytics for Beginners by Google Analytics Academy: This course is perfect
to get acquainted with Google Analytics. Taught by Justin Cutroni and Krista Seiden,
this course will educate you about the fundamentals of Google Analytics, and help you
understand basic reports and set up dashboards. As you get a better understanding of
the platform, you can pursue the more advanced courses as well.

Marketing Analytics by Coursera: Offered by the University of Virginia and taught

by Rajkumar Venkatesan, this course focuses on the role of analytics, measuring
customer lifetime value and explains the basics of regression.

Learning Web Analytics by Lynda: Matt Bailey is the instructor for this course, and
he gives an excellent primer on the topic. The course runs for only over an hour. So,
you can get started with this course as soon as you finish reading this guide. LinkedIn
Premium users can readily access Lynda courses.

Thought Leaders to Follow

Avinash Kaushik: Avinash Kaushik is a digital marketing evangelist at Google and

has authored two books on the topic of web analytics. You can follow his blog Occam’s
Razor to learn more about web and marketing analytics.

Rand Fishkin: Rand Fishkin has been one of the most sought-after thought leaders
in the marketing industry. His insights into tech, marketing and startups are
illuminating. You can read his blog here.

Conclusion

Getting started with marketing analytics can be daunting, especially if you are a
beginner. The recommended path is to start with the Google Analytics for Beginners
course by Google Analytics Academy and start experimenting with the techniques you
learn

Secondary Sources

Government agencies, non-profit organizations, and non-governmental organizations

often publish freely available data that may inform marketers’ understanding of
consumers, customers, the geographies, and industry sectors where they operate. Eg.

Google Public Data Directory: A directory of publicly-available data sources from

around the world.

Google Trends: A search tool for exploring search volume for any term used in a
Google search.
World Bank Data: Economic data and economic development indicators for 100+
countries around the world.

Syndicated Marketing Research Data

A number of commercial companies provide syndicated marketing research that is well
respected and often well used by organizations that subscribe to their services. A
sampling of these services is provided below:

Acxiom: Extensive consumer datasets containing demographic, purchasing, credit,

and other information companies can map to their own customer and prospect data
for research, marketing analytics, and marketing campaign execution.

Experian: Extensive consumer datasets containing demographic, purchasing, credit,

and other information that companies can map to their own consumer and prospect
data for research, marketing analytics, and marketing campaign execution.

IRI: Point-of-sale data linked to household panel purchasing data, providing detail
around sales, pricing, promotion and market share for a variety of consumer products.

Media Audit: Audience demographics and media consumption profiles for 100+ media
markets in the U.S.

Other Useful Sources for Marketing Data

These additional sources for other types of marketing information are also warrant
attention. Whether or not marketers use them, they should be aware of these tools
and how they can be useful for a variety of marketing purposes.

Google Analytics: Detailed analytics, statistics and insights about Web site traffic,
usability and sales effectiveness. Free and premium services available.

LexisNexis: Searchable source for full-text articles from regional, national and
international newspapers, government documents, and many legal, medical and
business publications.

Statista: A subscription-based statistics portal, providing searchable access to many

original sources of market, industry, and business data.
12 Essential Customer Data Sources

Connecting these data streams and consolidating them will give you a clearer view of
your customers and their behavior. You’ll be able to see which web visitors also come
to the store, which blog browsers also buy online and more. This more comprehensive
understanding can lead to better personalized marketing that compels action.

In-Store and Online Sales Data

If your organization has brick-and-mortar locations, it’s absolutely crucial to unite

your real-world data with your online records. Both in-store and online sales data
needs to be connected to your CDP to get a comprehensive view of customer activity.

Sales data combines well with nearly every data type on this list to generate new
insights and new opportunities for personalization. And the possibilities for targeted
personalization are too good to pass up.

For example, you could use in-store purchase information to offer a personalized
newsletter featuring related items in the online store, or vice versa. The customer gets
more relevant offers, so is more likely to bring in repeat business.

Web Browsing Data

The end goal of content marketing is for our audience to make a purchase decision.
We need to connect web browsing data to sales data to prove that link and justify our
budget.

But great marketing is about more than proving your value. It’s also about ROI.
Understanding how your audience experiences your content makes it easier to suggest
more relevant next steps, offers, and experiences, including which solutions to offer
and how to position them.

Survey Data

You probably survey your customers. Maybe you track Net Promoter Score (NPS),
product and service satisfaction, and employee helpfulness in a store or over the
phone. But where does that data go? Ideally, you’d have a record of each person, the
surveys they’ve completed and their responses. Survey data, when added to the data
in your CDP, gives you a more complete picture and could help you identify your next
brand ambassadors as well as those customers who are about to churn.

Customer Service Data

Here’s where we leave the safe confines of marketing data and get into the organization
at large. Odds are you’re continuing to nurture people after they’ve made a purchase.
So, it’s crucial to know how they interact with the brand outside of marketing.

Imagine if your next email to a customer included details from their last customer
service interaction. Even a simple, “we’re glad we could solve your X problem, here’s
an article that can help you avoid it or fix it in the future” can make a difference in
how your customer feels about the brand.

Sales Department Data

The Sales Department has several useful data streams for marketers. As we discussed
in number 1, there’s sales data or the list of deals closed—incorporating that into your
CDP can help trace the buyer journey and properly credit marketing’s role in
generating revenue.

Then there are the potential prospects, which can help your department create
personalized content. Finally, there are the deals that didn’t go through for one reason
or another. Combine that information with the other data streams on the list and you
can go in for a highly-coordinated second try.

Advertising Platforms

Knowing who is looking at which ads, and which ads are the most effective, is valuable
information in itself. Combined with web browsing and online and offline sales data,
it’s indispensable. Connect your Google Ads, AdRoll, and other ad accounts to your
CDP to make both your ads and your supporting content more effective.

Web Analytics
This is another data set that’s useful on its own. But it becomes exponentially more so
when combined with the rest of the customer dataset. You can get a much greater
context for bounce rates, time-on-page, click paths, traffic sources and conversions
with Google Analytics or Adobe connected to your CDP.

Marketing Automation Platforms

Your automation platform is already a repository for a great deal of data, but it can’t
be fully comprehensive on its own. Connecting your HubSpot/Marketo/etc. platform
to your CDP helps eliminate duplicate information, round out the view of the
customer, and further personalize your nurture campaigns.

Loyalty Data

What motivates your loyalty-program customers and how can you use that data to
attract more consumers like them? It could be special discounts, gifts, or exclusive
events. It could also be interaction with your brand on social media or unique perks
like early access to much-anticipated new releases. Loyalty programs can be a source
of crucial data that allows you to target your audience in a more meaningful way.

Mobile App Data

Maybe your mobile app is part of your loyalty program but maybe it’s not. Either way,
you’ll uncover rich insights by connecting this data source to all the rest. For example,
Muji developed a mobile app after realizing website visitors often browse online and
purchase in store. By knowing online browsing history, in-store purchase history and
real-time store inventory, Muji used personalized coupons and well-targeted in-app
push notifications to boost coupon redemption by 100%.

Legacy Data

It’s highly likely your business has data that never got connected to the larger
landscape. It might be lurking on servers, in personal hard drives, even on paper in
filing cabinets.

This data can be essential for understanding your customer journey and how it
evolves. It’s worth pulling that old data in. And, of course, if you’re still storing
unconnected data, now’s the time to hook it up to your platform.
Wearables and the Internet of Things

Internet-connected devices, from smartwatches to coffeemakers, are already collecting

and transmitting massive amounts of data. The practical applications may be a work
in progress, but it’s important to understand what it is and how to collect it. This new
source of data provides one more way for businesses to understand their customers—
giving marketers who incorporate IoT data an edge

Five marketing dark data sources that will increase insight and enhance analytics.

Salesforce Data Trends Over Time – Running a Salesforce query results in a

snapshot of current data, but marketers need a bigger picture – one that lets them see
things like how marketing leads and opportunities have been converting over the
course of the quarter, or how the sales pipeline has been trending. Marketers must be
able to take a daily snapshot report and have the ability to automatically and easily
aggregate this data to see what is happening, and how marketing efforts are creating
impact.

Lead Segmentation Data – Every day, marketers ask themselves if their campaigns
are engaging target audiences and attracting new audiences for additional business
opportunities. Accessing and using web data in marketing analytics can help provide
responses to these outstanding questions.

Comprehensive Spend Analysis – As a best practice, marketers should be appending

data from financial systems to analyze marketing program spend over time with the
assurance that all costs are being counted. Bringing in prior months of reports from
financial systems and blending them with CRM data can help monitor key metric
trends like customer acquisition cost and marketing percentage of customer
acquisition cost.

Competitive Benchmarks – How does marketing spend as a percentage of revenue

compare to the competition? How does revenue growth compare over that same
period? Extracting this data from quarterly financial reports like a 10Q report from
Edgar can provide much needed added insight. This approach can also be used when
evaluating brand and influencer awareness, and audience engagement on social
media.

Market and Industry Research and Trends – Valuable data is commonly found
within reports from third-party market research firms or within tables of information
that live on websites or in PDF reports. Marketers who can unlock this data and
transform it into an analytics-ready data set for better analysis can complement their
campaigns and strategies with relevant and complementary market intelligence.

A top down analysis is calculated by determining the total market, then estimating
your share of that market. A typical top down analysis might go something like this:
"Hmm... I will sell a widget everyone can use, and since there are 300,000 people in
my area, even if I only manage to land 5 percent of that market I'll make 15,000 sales."

A top down analysis usually goes like, "2 percent of a $1 billion market is $20 million!"
It’s a sales forecast that can be heard in hundreds of pitch meetings every year.

The top-down marketing plan contains four principal sections: situation analysis,
marketing objectives, marketing strategy, and tactics. A company’s marketing
objectives should be logical deductions from an analysis of its current situation, its
prediction of future trends, and its understanding of corporate objectives. In the end, a
top down marketing approach focuses on the top executive personas most often. The
constituent who controls the purse strings. All SaaS and Enterprise technology
companies are always looking for the high and mighty inside an enterprise that has
the power to sign on the dotted line. Top down marketing focuses its message and
offers so they should relate to the needs of specific target markets and specify sales
objectives. Marketing-target objectives should be specific, quantitative, and realistic.
The messaging of a top down approach often caters to the fears and dreams of that
influential executive.

A great example of top-down marketing is the hyper growth industry of cyber-security.

Every executive fears waking up to their employer’s brand on the headlines of major
media outlets next to the word breach or hacked. Years and years of customer loyalty
and brand preference can be washed away overnight. Cyber security companies are
preying on these executives with a top down marketing approach that strikes fear into
their hearts and minds and forces them to strike the check and implement countless
solutions to help them sleep easy at night as they try to appease key constituencies
including public markets.

A bottom up analysis is calculated by estimating potential sales in order to determine

a total sales figure. A bottom up analysis evaluates where products can be sold, the
sales of comparable products, and the slice of current sales you can carve out. While it
takes a lot more effort, the result is usually much more accurate.
Here's how a bottom up analysis might work in real life. Let's pretend you just
developed a prototype for a bicycle pump and you want to determine if there is a
market for your pump--a profitable market that will sustain a real business.

Let's walk through the steps:

1. Where are bike pumps typically sold? Most are sold, fairly obviously, in bike shops,
but also by major retailers, and online. You decide to focus on bike shops for now,
since landing shelf space at Walmart or Target isn't particularly likely, at least not at
first.

2. How many bike shops are there in the U.S.? We'll assume you don't want to try to
sell and ship overseas. With some research you find there are approximately 4,100
bike shops

3. How many of those bike shops will be willing to stock your pumps? Here's where it
gets tricky. Talk to as many bike shops as you can to see if they would be willing to
carry your pumps. Say you talk to 100; if 30 claim they would, be conservative and
cut that number in half. (While an owner may agree in principle today, they may not
come through in fact tomorrow. Plus you may be physically unable to get product into
every willing bike shop's hands.)

Then extrapolate. If 30 out of 100 say they would carry your product, and you cut
that number in half, then it's reasonable to assume that 15 percent of bike shops may
actually be willing to carry your product. 4,100 times 15 percent equals 615, so your
pumps could potentially be sold in approximately 600 bike shops.

4. Historically, how many bike pumps has each shop sold over the course of a year?

That's a good question, but a better question is, "How many bike pumps like mine
does a bike shop sell in a year?" If yours is a premium or specialized pump that could
limit your market. Always compare apples to apples.

Say the bike shops you talk to say they sell, on average, 200 pumps a year. That's
great--but how many can you sell to each store? The answer isn't 200. Every shop
carries a variety of pumps. So you decide to be conservative and assume you can sell
30 pumps a year to each shop.

The math is easy: 615 bike shops times 30 pumps per shop equals 18,450 pumps a
year. What's hard is pulling together the data so you can do the math.

What's even harder is feeling confident in that data. You have to get every shop to
stock your pumps. You have to carve out a slice of existing premium pump sales.
So factor in some sensitivities: Double the number in the event your results exceed
expectations, and cut the number in half in case things don't go as planned. And
throw in a factor for your ability to market to every bike shop; contacting each one,
especially since most are independent, will take time and money you may not have. (Of
course you could try to sell your pumps through a distributor; here's a primer on
finding and working with a distributor.

Bottom-up marketing is a concept with no single definition, but a few distinct

components that set it apart from traditional top-down marketing strategies. Unlike
traditional marketing, where executives create a marketing plan and a strategy to
promote a company’s products and services, bottom-up marketing is mainly driven by
the employees of a company. Employees recognize one specific customer need the
company can meet and create a marketing strategy around that single idea.

A great example is Dropbox. Dropbox rose to $10 Billion valuation through its
connection with the end user. Dropbox focused on providing the masses of end users
(both personal and professional) a block of cloud storage that elegantly and brilliantly
stayed synchronized on your local hard drive and your collaborative peers hard drives.
Dropbox didn’t sell the CFO on cost benefits and the CTO on the power of the cloud.
Dropbox simply delivered a great service with a viral approach to a roll out that
created an ever growing desire for more and more storage in the cloud. In the end so
many businesses had hundreds and thousands of BYOS (bring your own storage) and
they needed to take control of this corporate intellectual property, and reached out to
Dropbox for the suite of tools and administration to make managing the cloud
instances so much more manageable, secure, and scale-able.