Whether it’s music, art, sports, movies or TV, our tribe loves it all, and we like to share our thoughts with a unique perspective and a little twist. This time it’s about crime and detective shows. Millions of Americans are addicted to shows that tell a great story, provide mystery and suspense and often explain how the crime was solved. The popularity of these types of shows are obvious when you look at the pure number of them on TV, their longevity and not to mention the number of spinoffs. CSI Toledo anyone?

Somehow Google Analytics didn’t make our top 10 favorites. That’s hard to believe when you think of all the mysteries GA solves on a daily basis. Who’s coming to your website? What content are they interested in consuming when they visit? How are people finding your site? What do people search for when they’re on your site? Do they stick around or do they just stop by and bounce? Google Analytics has all the information you need to help answer these questions and more. And like a crime story, you just have to find the clues (in easy-to-read dashboards) to help tell the full story.

All this data then allows you to build more relevant content that will draw visitors in and keep them engaged. You can customize your acquisition strategy if you know visitors who find you through particular channels convert (fill contact forms, download whitepapers, etc.) more than others those from other channels. On top of all these benefits, Google Analytics is free to use and easy to implement. All you need to do is set up a Google Analytics account, take the tracking code Google provides and insert it on your website. You can be up and running with GA and start unraveling the mysteries of your website just like that. It may not be as addicting as the first season of True Detective, but it can be fun to solve a different type of mystery. Yalo can help.

In the meantime, we polled our team for their favorite mysteries and found quite a variety. Some were stand-by, old-school shows, but we have a pretty good representation of newer shows, too. Here are our top 10 picks for current/recent crime and detective shows:

• Justified: Raylan Givens is a bad-ass Marshall empowered to eradicate the scourge of drug trade in the hollers of Kentucky. Boyd Crowder was a devious bad guy!
• The Wire: The greatest cast of bad guys vs cops ever. And greatest names ever . . . Omar Little, Stringer Bell, Snoop and Avon Barksdale! The BAD crew from land of Hamsterdam.
• True Detective (Season 1): Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey are amazing in the first season. It has an incredibly well-written story and characters.
• The Night Of: This is one of HBO’s best pieces of work. John Turturro is amazing. The story is gripping, and compelling. Unlike most crime dramas, this one isn’t trying to trick you or take you down the wrong path. It’s a great story with a talented cast. 
• Law & Order: It’s the longest running crime series in history of television (20 seasons). It will only take you 19 days if you watch all 458 episodes consecutively. Another benefit is it’s always on!
• Dark: This German series (yes, you’ll need subtitles) on Netflix is a bit of a slow burner to start but has major David Fincher vibes. Here’s the formula: Stranger Things + True Detective ÷ Back to the Future + Twin Peaks x Germany = Dark.
• Mindhunter: Binge-worthy crime drama on Netflix that gives a glimpse into the early days of criminal psychology and profiling. Season 2 will reportedly follow the Atlanta murders of 1979-1981. This one also has major David Fincher vibes, because he executive produced it and also directed a few of the episodes as well. Good stuff!
• The Staircase: Some have called this the Godfather of true crime documentaries.
• Making a Murderer: Whether you believe Steven Avery is innocent or guilty of murder, the story proves that truth can be stranger than fiction. Guilty pleasure for sure.
• Killing Eve: A bored security agent gets involved and obsessed with a case involving a quirky assassin and they begin to have a complicated relationship. It’s both funny and horrifying at times. Season one is on Hulu and season two just started. 

And a few podcasts, for good measure:

Up & Vanished

The Last Posdcast on the Left

Investigation Discovery

Serial

We hope you enjoy the show!

The numbers are in! 2018 shaped up to be a pretty awesome year for Yalo, statistically speaking. We’re excited for more challenging work, more amazing clients and more opportunities to defy and fly in 2019!

Another quarter of moving the ball down the field with winning plays and team spirit!

It’s that time of year when millions of people visit amusement and theme parks to experience the rush of plunging hundreds of feet in the air at breakneck speeds on roller coasters and thrill rides. In Ohio, we’re lucky enough to have Cedar Point and King’s Island right in our backyard. Our Georgia team has Six Flags to satisfy their internal dare devil. In honor of roller coasters, our Yalo team wanted to share our favorite amusement park memories. For some of us, it’s about the actual coasters and for others, it’s about something else.

ERIC CANTINI

I love roller coasters, and some of the best rides in the world are located at Cedar Point, in Sandusky Ohio. Top Thrill Dragster, Millennium, Valravn and Steel Vengeance all deliver amazing experiences, no matter how many times you’ve ridden them. My favorite roller coaster experience happened this year, when my youngest child (9 years old) finally decided to ride all the big rides with the rest of our family. To start the day, he and I sat in the first row on Gatekeeper, a winged roller coaster, and my favorite ride at Cedar Point. We screamed, we laughed, and he may have let out a swear word or two. It was such a gift to be part of such a fun, first-time experience for him. I’ll never forget it.

ARNOLD HUFFMAN

My dad made me ride a coaster when I was like 8 at Cedar Point. HATED IT. Blue Streak. The first one I rode that I actually enjoyed? 7^th grade field trip to Cedar Point and I only rode it because I didn’t want to look like a big wuss. I was sh%&&%*g my pants. And I LOVED IT. Guess what…Blue Streak.

You could say it was all downhill from there…..HAAAA!  I love this stuff. It was one of my early learnings of how to conquer my fears (was afraid of heights). It led to bungee, skydiving, paragliding, giant swings, giant Slides, scuba, and any other crazy thing I have done. If Cedar Point ever tries to tear down the Blue Streak, I will lead the fund-raising campaign to keep it!  

LANCE SHOULDERS

My favorite would be when I took my wife, then girlfriend to King’s Island near Cincy and we rode the Beast – largest wooden roller coaster in terms of length of ride. We also had a great time last fall when took the family for 1st time to Six Flags in Atlanta. The Goliath Rider was particularly memorable.

SCOTT EFFERSON

I’ll go with one of my first memories of a roller coaster…Disney’s Space Mountain. The anticipation in that long line was brutal. I’m pretty sure it was the total darkness, not the blistering 28 mph speed, that made this one thrilling.

KRISTIN WOODWARD

I don’t do rollercoasters (terrified of heights), but my favorite amusement park story was taking my daughter to Disney Paris (part of a bigger France trip) when she turned 5. I was mentally prepared for an all-day, gruesomely annoying event. Turned out, she could not have cared less about any of it! We did like 2 things in Adventureland, ate an overpriced cheeseburger and were out in 4 hours or less. She has since expressed zero interest in going back to any Disney park ever, so we’re thinking we are off the hook for this parenting milestone! Woo-hoo!

BRIAN MILLER

One of my most memorable rides was 2 years ago when my son decided he was ready for the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point (420 feet and 0-120 MPH in 3.8 seconds). He’s pretty daring on coasters, but he didn’t have any idea what he was in for. The ride lasts 17 seconds, and when we took off he went silent. He usually yells like crazy on coasters. When we were at the peak I looked over to see what looked like pure terror on his face. He didn’t breathe for 17 seconds. When he started breathing again, he let all the screaming out at once. “Let’s ride again!” – but I wasn’t convinced.

At this point, you may be asking what roller coasters have to do with marketing and more specifically marketing analytics. Take a look at your website’s traffic. Do you have a lot of peaks and valleys in your traffic, like a roller coaster, or is it flat like the old-fashioned cars? It’s completely normal to have peaks along the way, but do you know why your traffic behaves the way it does? We have clients who are in both camps. When they look at their analytics, it can be overwhelming to know what to do with all the data. They wonder whether all these peaks are good or whether it’s a sign of something else. They know that more traffic is better, but they need to know what they are doing that is driving the success and what they are doing that isn’t as effective.

Our approach to uncovering these answers centers on pulling the results from a number of tactics together (social media, email, press releases, SEO, blog posts, retargeting ads, etc.) and evaluating what is effectively driving people to your site so they can learn more about your company. The goal is to know what you can do to increase the frequency and height of those peaks. Unlike a roller coaster, you don’t need to sit back and just enjoy the ride. You can direct it more than you may realize. Do you notice that every time you send out an email, traffic jumps 20% on your site? Are there certain topics that always seem to get the attention of your audience? We’ve found that linking fun topics (music, movies, sports) to marketing concepts gets our audience’s attention. You’ve read this far. We should add roller coasters to that list.

The Yalo Team started off the year with a bang, rocking new clients, new projects and new fans, all while having a little winter fun. Check it out!

Now that the Super Bowl LII is over – it’s time to check out some of the crazy statistics. Dilly Dilly!

Email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, press releases, re-targeting ads. There are tons of marketing tactics and ways for you to get your message out, but they are not all created equally. Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic formula that works best for everyone, so how do you decide what works best for your company? The answer is in the numbers. You’ve heard and read a lot about the value of understanding analytics behind your marketing activities, and you likely get weekly, monthly and quarterly reports that tell you about your website’s traffic, your social media results and everything in between. But are you doing anything differently or better as a result?

It can be easy to get lost in the numbers or become overwhelmed by the volume of reports that throw data at you. It’s a balancing act between analysis/insights and action. The numbers by themselves won’t do anything. It’s the action they inform that will create a difference. We’ve developed an approach that we think strikes the right balance between analysis and action. We use this approach not only for our clients but for our own marketing decisions as well. As we like to say, “we drink our own champagne” and “we practice what we preach”. It all starts with capturing the right data from all your tactics and pulling it together in a centralized, organized data structure that is constructed in a way that will expose the areas for improvement and success. Whether you’re just starting out and using spreadsheets or you are more advanced and using a data warehouse, the objective is the same at this point. Get the right data structure setup to get the right metrics in a place where you can take the next step and analyze the data with purpose and intent to improve. Not only do you want to understand how tactics are working individually, you need to see how they work together and understand their interdependencies. That allows you to develop insights about what is driving your successes. What is working? What isn’t working and why? Those insights lead to action, which is updating and changing your content calendar and then executing what’s on your calendar. That is where the magic really happens.

For us, this approach has highlighted not only the value of thoughtful, original content but also what type of content is working best (is it sports marketing, is it UX, is it business topics?). We have also narrowed our focus on unique LinkedIn messaging and a consistent cadence of email communications with flair (again, because the insights tell us to do so). All of these insights get applied to our content calendar (we use Hey Orca) to drive continuous improvements. Ultimately, this has allowed us to be much more targeted in what we say and how we say it, and it has led to real, tangible results.

While the answers aren’t the same for everyone, the approach and process IS the same and can be applied to just about any organization and all their marketing activities. The answers to your marketing challenges are in your numbers too. You just need to unlock the code.

Are you ready for a glass of Yalo champagne?

As we cruise on into 2018, we thought it was worth taking a look back at some of the high points of 2017. By the numbers, it was a pretty exciting year for us. From pitches to new clients and new work, to awards and lots of social love, our hard work paid off in gains and growth. We’re proud of all that we accomplished and thankful for the clients and opportunities that helped us get here. Thanks to everyone who came along for the ride with us! Now, let’s go rock 2018!

Wins over replacement (WAR). On-base plus slugging (OPS). Player efficiency rating (PER). Catch radius. Usage percentage. Whatever happened to sports statistics like batting average, fielding percentage, rushing yards and rebounds? All of the “important” stats fit on the back of a baseball or football card when I was a kid. Today, there isn’t enough room on the back of a baseball card anymore to include the traditional stats with all the new, advanced statistics.

If Sabermetrics, as it is known in baseball, was popular when I was a kid, I would have never learned that Ozzie Smith has been recognized as one of the ten best casually dressed men in America”. It’s easy to point to the Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane of Moneyball fame (if you’re a real stat head, it may be Bill James) and give him the credit or blame for the explosion of sports statistics.

ManMany front office execs across all leagues have been turning to advanced analytics over recent years in their never ending quest to evaluate player performance and gain an edge over the competition. You can debate the validity of many statistics, but the ability to evaluate how a player contributes to their team’s success (wins and losses) and how to compensate the player appropriately, drives all the madness and ensures stats aren’t going away.

How are you measuring the success of your marketing activities? Are you consistently measuring them at all? Like professional sports teams, successful marketers apply a disciplined analytical approach to measure and guide their strategy. Every marketing tool provides data and sometimes incredibly detailed data. You probably capture metrics from your website with Google Analytics. Your social channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram) have more metrics. Don’t forget all the data you get from email and press releases. If you’re really on top of things, you measure what you are doing with retargeting ads, trade shows, events, etc.

Lack of data is not the problem. The problem is that your data is likely siloed within a variety of tools. Basic analytics can provide a singular measure of a channel’s success or failure. But are all these individual pieces of data providing the insight needed to truly understand the bigger game of wins and losses. To do that, you need to be able to understand how your marketing tactics fit together and influence each other.

I bet you likely see a boost in website traffic every time you release a new email, but are Thursday emails more impactful than emails sent on Tuesdays? What type of messages resonate with your audience best and on which channel? You likely have the data. You just have to unlock it, analyze it and act on it. It just requires the discipline and know how. Sounds like one more thing to focus on in your free time. 

So let’s play ball!!!