It is April so it is time for #MDMC down in St. Louis to take place again. For the 4th year Dave is a speaker with this year being virtual again of course.
While Dave’s session is going to focus on data from Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console there is a world of data that companies create. This can be true data from sales or from running a business or it could be video and other “data” that is produced by the company that is just waiting to be reused in some fashion.
If you want some more episodes on GSC/Bing Webmaster we got you!
- MDMC & Tools for Leveraging Google Search Console Data
- Bing WordPress Plugin, Webmaster Tools & Guidelines W/ Fabrice Canel
Inspiration
Make Your Own Data. Own Your Own Data.
One of the things that F1 Racing does is own the data. In their case they own the data from the cars, they own the data from the cameras on the cars, on the track, near the track, above the track. All of the content, video and just data produced from a race they capture and own.
- What do you produce in terms of data and content that you own?
- How can you better use it to tell your story?
- How can you better use it to understand your customers?
- How can you better understand your prospects? Staff?
- How can you leverage content and data across channels better?
Leveraging Data for Revenue
So not every business is F1 or the NFL but you do create data and content in some way. The new owners of F1 in recent years have started to leverage all that data into new apps or features in the apps, new ways to look and tell stories during races and also have created new revenue streams (gambling) with it.
Imagine using data from your business or website and creating a new revenue stream? Maybe you can too.
We Aren’t Just Talking Data Here.
If you are a restaurant and have new menu items, capture the making of that new item. So not only do you make it for a photo shoot but the making of the item IS a photo shoot too.
You can easily reuse it for Social Media or on the website. Not only are you getting new product photos but you are getting content that you can use in multiple ways on multiple platforms for years.
Going back to our episode Bugging Out Over Reviews With Thomas Ballantyne we dug into using review data to look for problem points in their service. This was data from review services or from their CMS that they leveraged not for content but to better their business and their operations.
Pick of the Week
Think back to record stores (also, feel free to go support them!) and how you would walk in and see “Staff Picks”.
This is “data” or something that could be used to create content in a digital way.
Full Transcript
Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have everybody join us on another one of these businesses, digital podcast episodes. If I can talk today, Dave. How’s it going?
Dave Rohrer: [00:00:19] It’s going hopefully better talking for me than you it’s
Matt Siltala: [00:00:22] going like that today.
So, Hey, well, um, and just jumping right into it. Um, I thought this was an interesting one that you had brought up and basically we’re, we’re gonna talk just everybody knows data in 2021. Um, this idea was sparked in Dave’s mind from a video he watched
Dave Rohrer: [00:00:42] thanks to my brother that sent it to me. Thank you, sir.
Matt Siltala: [00:00:46] Well, there you go. Why don’t you just, uh, take it from there.
Dave Rohrer: [00:00:49] And, uh, so yeah, he wanted us to go two during business hours, watch a 10 minute video about F1 racing. You you’ve, you’re listening to the correct podcast. [00:01:00] If you had who doesn’t love an excuse for that. I know. And if you have no desire to watch anything and do not care about racing, do not care about F1.
Don’t even know what F1 racing is. Honestly, I would say still watch it because it’s actually quite interesting. Uh, the title of the video is how YouTube changed formula one, but actually what really changed formula one? It’s, that’s a really bad title to the person that did that. It’s actually, um, how new ownership came in and applied and use the data that was there.
So if you’ve never watched F1 racing and I’m a novice and it’s thanks to a show, they talk about on here, that kind of got me into it or Netflix, but. New owners took over, um, five, six years ago. And they started looking at all these old school way of doing things wasn’t really working. Um, they had no social media presence.
They, the current owners refuse to embrace any sort of social media. Um, in the last three years running, they’re the quickest [00:02:00] growing and biggest growing in terms of every single platform for sports. Um, across social media. So they’re destroying UFC. They’re destroying like NFL is going negative and MLB is going way negative.
Um, even like premier soccer league, which is, I believe the biggest sport in the world. Um, they’re growing way faster than them.
Matt Siltala: [00:02:22] Well, it’s not surprising because I don’t know if you remember this or not, but I used to have a brother that worked at the bonder racing school and it’s no longer, it’s no longer bond around.
It was recently. Bought out. And then there was a legal battle over them using the name. Bondra and Bob bondra just one. So they’re their own racing school now, but I always, and I’ve been watching them for the last 15 or so years. Uh, my brother no longer works there, but, um, I was always interested in how, you know, it’s just funny that you said what you said, because I’ve always, I’ve always thought that it could be so much more popular than it was.
I thought that [00:03:00] they could use. Like they could do such a better job on social that they could, uh, embrace that side of it more. But a lot of those, you know, just from what I learned and, and just, you know, just observing this business as there was a lot of the old school marketers and, you know, instead of.
Following the data, which you’re going to get into, sorry for jumping in and doing this. But instead of following the data and going where people, you know, we’re going to make the sport popular, they were still sticking cars in like airports that you walked by, that nobody cared about trying to get you interested in the business.
And anyway, I just thought that was kind of funny and stupid. And anyway, it goes right along with, I think, with what you’re
Dave Rohrer: [00:03:39] saying well, and it is it’s, they were stuck in the old ways they refused and they had all this data. So they have like, Um, it’s interesting because like the NFL in most major that most sports, um, let ESPN, they let you know CBS Fox sports.
They let them come in and film it. F1 sets up like the most [00:04:00] elaborate system for every single race. They own all of the media. They own all of it. They also have a ton of tracking in devices. Um, On each car in each engine. So there’s like some insane, like 90 or a hundred data points about every single car throughout every single race.
And they have it going back decades to like a certain extent. So they have all this insane data and they’ve started to work with AWS and they’ve started to like create apps and make predictions, which is tied into gambling, which is tied into like all sorts of things. But they’re using data that their businesses.
Their business creates every single weekend and basically using it to change their business, to change their, their monetization and using it for all sorts of interesting things. And we’ve talked about it in the past and I don’t have the examples open before, but we’ve talked about, you know, if you’re, uh, If you, you [00:05:00] know, if you’re setting up and you have new items for your menu at a restaurant, you know, this isn’t data, but it’s creating content and reusing it in some way, show someone, making the sandwich and capture it, and then you can always speed it up and use it later.
And you know, some, some social media posts, you know, you show it in the time-lapse real quick on Instagram or something, but. What F1 is doing is they’re using the data to drive the business. They’re using their own content. So even if you don’t have crazy amounts of data and I’ll get to, I think, where you do have more data than you think, um, think about what we’ve talked about before.
Think about what, you know, everyone always says, content is King, whether you think it’s not, or it is, it doesn’t, I don’t think it really matters, but I think I still think you need to create it. And if you. You know, have a camera or, you know, you can easily create content. You can create easily create videos.
You know, [00:06:00] Matt, I know you’ve talked about it in the past, but you know, there’s the one guy that created that one video with his, just his camera that still drives them leads, you know, later. Yeah. Like he did it in five
Matt Siltala: [00:06:11] minutes. And what, and to your point with what you were saying, the example of the restaurant earlier, I was blown away.
Um, you know, this is, there’s this company that I continue to talk about lately that. Um, it’s just, they’re good friends of mine. They started a business in the pandemic and, and, uh, my son was one of their first employees. And anyway, it’s that group. And, uh, you know, I’m amazed at just the simple videos of them preparing, um, the Dell or preparing the sandwich or how they do it.
Like how many views it’s gotten on Tik TOK and just how many influencers, quote unquote have walked into the store and ordered something because they saw that on the video because it looked good. Or because they wanted to try to duplicate or whatever, but it’s driving traffic and it’s amazing to me because, um, I see the numbers just [00:07:00] from the visuals, you know, like the pictures that they get, um, the views on the pictures that they get.
But this is like a whole other level, like the tic talk and Instagram real stuff. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of views for a local restaurant. That’s insane, Dave, so
Dave Rohrer: [00:07:16] that’s insane for anyone. Yeah. I mean, I don’t think there’s no one that would not want that mean,
Matt Siltala: [00:07:24] you know, you might say, okay, well, how is it?
You know, is it, you know, how exactly is it converting? But if, but if, if it took you nothing to produce it, if it literally took you 10 seconds and it drove in one customer, um, it was worth it. So I don’t know.
Dave Rohrer: [00:07:42] That’s a pretty darn good ROI.
Matt Siltala: [00:07:44] Yeah, exactly
Dave Rohrer: [00:07:46] not. I don’t think many of w our whole thing is, you know, we rather talk than write and for us to create content by writing.
I mean, Matt and I have both written some stuff on it, SEMrush, [00:08:00] and some other places, we, it takes a while for us to sit down and record the podcast and edit it and, you know, do all that stuff. It takes it. You gotta, it takes a few minutes, you know, for each to record it and edit it and stuff, but it’s and planning is easy.
Matt Siltala: [00:08:15] You’re like, Hey, can you, uh, can you record later?
Dave Rohrer: [00:08:18] Let’s do it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty much what happens lately. Um, it’s like our schedules are both crazy, so it’s like trying to figure out when we’re going to, when we’re going to record, but Hey, Dave being
Matt Siltala: [00:08:28] busy in 2021 is a
good
Dave Rohrer: [00:08:29] thing. I will take it. So, this is a bit of a segue into, um, a conference I’m speaking at where I am talking about data.
And I also want to use this as a surrogate and to talk about how, even if you don’t create data like F1 does. And I don’t think many businesses do other than maybe sports and, you know, maybe someone like ADA, AWS, or a hosting company, um, I’ve worked for a payroll company where we ha we created data based on our, our clients.
Um, our customers, [00:09:00] knowing how many payrolls they were running or something like there’s all sorts of data you could have from your business, depending on what type of business you are. Um, if you’re an Taylor, you know, how many people yeah. Walking into the store, I mean, you don’t want to give some stuff, some types of data away, but you can use that for, you know, so you think about the going back to age myself, but when you used to walk into like a music store, it was like, They always had everyone’s pick of the week or pick of the month.
Yeah. You know, if you can use your data to create some content like that from a link standpoint or just a branding or PR you know, that’s what we’re social posts, that’s what F1 does. That’s what, you know, you see from, you know, CBS sports and ESPN and stuff. They always create these little, you know, how many.
How many championships about Tom Brady and they show them compared to other stuff. That’s all just data. That’s all out there. You just have to figure out what that data [00:10:00] is and how to leverage it either on your site, on social and on different. Well, it’s true
Matt Siltala: [00:10:05] because it’s funny that you mentioned that.
Cause I just, I watched the whole video,
Dave Rohrer: [00:10:09] Tom Brady. I’m trying to, I’m trying to make our site rate for Tom Brady marketing
Matt Siltala: [00:10:12] or sign up. Hey, I’m fine with that. If, if Tom Brady ever reaches out and says, hi, Matt, my life will be complete, but, um, But, uh, no, it’s funny because I watched a video saying, you know, where they were talking about the data and the odds of what it was going to take Patrick Mahone’s to get as many championships and, and where Brady’s addict, like accomplished all the same things.
Cause they ran all this data for all the new QBs and stuff like that and everything. And the likelihood of him even coming close to Brady is slim to none. But. It was just interesting. He was like out of every quarterback they compared, and I dunno, it’s just stuff like that. So you’re right. And I even think about it until like, we were talking about this, uh, episode, but, uh, it was because of the data that they probably did that video and put it out there and it [00:11:00] got eyeballs on it and it made me view it.
And here we are talking about it. So
Dave Rohrer: [00:11:04] I knew it worked. Yeah. And th the conference I’m speaking at is the Midwest digital marketing conference it’s online. Um, and it’s pretty darn cheap for I’m a mix of live session, which I believe are free. There’s some that are free. I believe. Um, if you’re a student, you get a crazy discount and then there’s three days where they’re kind of going a drip.
Yeah. Full ticket price. $99.
Matt Siltala: [00:11:29] Yeah. These days with, with virtual and what’s going on, like people should be, I hope he will have taken advantage of it the last year and this year, because there has been some amazing conferences for super cheap, because when it goes back to the old format, it’s going to be a lot more expensive.
Dave Rohrer: [00:11:44] This one is always cheap. Honestly, it’s run by, it’s run by, um, the university down in St. Louis. Is it always
Matt Siltala: [00:11:51] $99 cheap? Cause that’s super cheap,
Dave Rohrer: [00:11:54] uh, in the past year. Yeah, it’s been pretty darn cheap period. But in fact, there’s a free [00:12:00] ticket. So you can watch a bunch of live sessions, um, on April 28th and 29th, um, you don’t get, you know, access, blah, blah, blah.
I’m not gonna talk too much about it, but you can go look it up. It’s best marketing conference.com. And I am talking about go figure, go figure that segue. Okay. But I’m going to be talking about Saturday, which is, um, thing we talked about with, um, Oh, shoot. What’s his name from Microsoft? Uh, when it came out last year, uh, the new Bing webmaster tools and just the data that’s there.
No, um, I’m horrible person now. I will look it up. I had it open and I closed it. Um, and then just Google search console. I’m not going to talk about Google analytics. I’m just talking about your, your websites data that comes from the search engines. And the amount of data that is in there and the number of people that don’t even to this day have [00:13:00] Google or Google.
My business is another thing you could set it up and should set up most cases, but, um, Google search console, like just the number of people that do not have. It is remarkable.
Matt Siltala: [00:13:17] I’m always amazed. I’m still amazed in 2021 when I get access and I look at it. And I asked simple things like, do you have accurate set up?
Yeah. And the answer is always no, and I’m just like, it just still blows my mind in 2021. That that’s the
Dave Rohrer: [00:13:32] case. And, um, the person we had from, um, being was for Reese canal. Oh yes, that’s right. I know. I could see, I could see his face and I could see it started with an app, but I could not for the life of me remember, and that was episode one 63, where we dug into, um, all of this stuff that being launched.
And there were new webmaster tools.
Matt Siltala: [00:13:54] Definitely recommend people go check that out if they haven’t. I don’t think we
Dave Rohrer: [00:13:57] talked about Saturday that day, but I’ve talked about it since [00:14:00] then. Um, and Saturday is interesting. It’s if you’ve ever heard of hot jar, it’s a free tool from Ben that does just like Hotjar where you can track and monitor what people are doing and looking at your own website.
And I believe I have it set up on my agency site or the podcast. Yeah, my agency site, just for some data. Um, cause I need screenshots and I’m always just curious. Yeah, that’s awesome. But, um, up until I believe you get quite a few page views, um, I haven’t even tested it really to that extent, but you know, talking about data and changing yourself, um, and there was just an article from, uh, the, the conference that just came out.
And one of the things I was quoted in saying, and I, I thought it would be a good, another good reason to talk about it today is people are starting to do year over year. Q1 just wrapped up. Okay. If you look at Q1 from 2020 to 2021, it’s going to be weird. Oh yeah. If you didn’t have your data, you don’t have your, you know, little notes.
[00:15:00] Um, if you’ve just moved into a new role, um, or working with a new company, um, you know, having Bing and Google webmaster tools set up, having your analytics, having that internal data and understanding, and being able to go back to 2019. To understand that, you know, what did this look like? Pre COVID? What did COVID look like now?
What, what do we expect 20, 21 to be? Because it’s going to be completely different depending on where you are in the world and how open everything is or how open everything isn’t. Yeah, very true. And if you don’t have that data now and you don’t have it from last year, you don’t have it from 2019. You got to start looking forward or at least start setting it up so that you can, you know, figure out what 20, 22 is going to look like or what Q2 and Q3, when someone comes to you and says, Hey, well, you made all these changes.
You asked for more budget, you’ve got head count. You know, you’ve done all this stuff. What, what, what do you have to show? Yeah. [00:16:00] And you’ve got crickets cause you’ve got no understanding, no data.
Matt Siltala: [00:16:05] Can you, uh, Edit some crickets in there for us on that. No,
Dave Rohrer: [00:16:10] I might be able to it’s too early in the year. We don’t have any crickets.
Uh, maybe I’ll go find a Cicada sound. That’ll that’ll drive people crazy.
Matt Siltala: [00:16:18] Oh yeah.
Dave Rohrer: [00:16:19] Well, I don’t know. Do you get cicadas down there? Yeah, we do. We do the
Matt Siltala: [00:16:23] gym, the gym bugs are the ones that are annoying
Dave Rohrer: [00:16:25] the 17 year March. Yeah.
Matt Siltala: [00:16:29] Well, um, that’s awesome. So again, we recommend everybody go and check out that video.
We’ll do the link to it. Um, any final thoughts on this one? Dave,
Dave Rohrer: [00:16:37] feel free to sign up for the conference. Feel free to come and watch me talk about that stuff or not. It won’t hurt my feelings. Um, but no, just, but you’ll learn if you do. You probably hopefully will, it’ll be beginning and advanced stuff. So you can, it’ll be video so you can skip the intro stuff if you want and save your time.
I’m also free tip. If you’re ever watching a [00:17:00] video, um, on YouTube or any look and see about changing the speed, as long as they’re a clear speaker. And it’s a good sound. You can turn it up to 1.25, or at Lummi B 1.5 and that 20 minute talk becomes 10. Uh, well, I know, but I don’t think everyone does it
Matt Siltala: [00:17:22] all the time.
No, it’s awesome. It’s a great tip.
Dave Rohrer: [00:17:24] Um, but it’s just, you know, as long as you don’t have 50 other things going on and it’s not just background noise and you can actually pay attention to it just yeah. You can get through it a lot quicker. Um, no, I think, look at, look at using data, you know, just like the F1 did.
For your business. They CA they updated their apps based on what people are wanting. They’re creating content, they’re creating social media posts. They’re creating like new ways, new revenue streams from it, um, will ever be company be able to do that? No.
Matt Siltala: [00:17:56] Well, here, I know we’re trying to wrap this up, but I’ll give you even [00:18:00] something, something that’s simple.
Um, you know, the going back to that restaurant, I was talking about. Um, I know that this is simple data, but they were paying attention to it. You know, the reviews that they were getting, whether it be on Yelp, whether it be Google, wherever it might be TripAdvisor. Um, but basically they were paying attention to the day that was saying, you know, what would be really good on this is a chicken tender one anyway.
So like so many people kept telling them. They should do that and they’ve tried it and it’s ended up being their biggest sandwich now. And so I just thought that that was interesting. It’s just like paying attention to those simple data points and not being so old school or old fashioned that you’re like, Nope, this is my business.
You can’t tell me how to run it or what to do, you know? So anyway, just that was a final thought that I had there. So with that said, guys, hold
Dave Rohrer: [00:18:50] on. I’m looking up when we had Thomas on, because episode one 26, Because you’re talking about using your data for business, [00:19:00] um, episode one 26, when we had Thomas on, we were talking about the, the, the smartly titled bugging out over reviews.
Oh yeah, yeah. Um, but he using data that they collected to understand where their problem points were with their service and with their company. Yeah. That’s true. And they would, you know, every review they looked at and it’s just a different data point they would look at and try to understand, and he like.
I think he shared some charts with us. Yeah. He, he, uh, he had some, some slides from a presentation you’d done at Pubcon. He actually let us use it in, uh, in the writeup. And, you know, he went by what, what over quarter, month after month or quarter after quarter, our problem points. And is it in a market, is it S is it, you know, across the business or is it just in a certain market?
And, you know, he comes in, he ended up finding out things like certain communities had, um, Gates and they couldn’t [00:20:00] get in it. And so they’ve started marking down and a better, had a better understanding of what those communities were and what those addresses were, so that they could ask for it ahead of time.
And it created like a 10% decrease in complaints and bad reviews just from doing that. And that the scale they do, it’s a lot. So, you know, just little things like that, use the data for all sorts of things, but you have to have the data
Matt Siltala: [00:20:27] there. You guys go, you got a couple of videos to go and check out and a couple of episodes to go and check out.
And so, uh, perfect. As a, as a reminder, as we’re wrapping this up as always guys, make sure you go and follow us, uh, find us on iTunes and give us a review. Um, Obviously, we love those five star resume reviews. So thank you guys for doing that for Dave re-org Northside metrics. I met sows a little with avalanche media and thank you guys for joining us.
We’ll catch you on the next one. Bye. Bye.
Bye.