3 Keys For Leveraging Analytics to Drive Marketing
No one likes to see money go to waste. But it’s especially hard to watch companies blowing budgets on outdated or misguided digital marketing strategies. Marketing budgets typically don’t come with very much wiggle room, so its essential to get the most bang for your buck on every dollar spent.
So what does that mean? It means digital metrics are your best friend from this point forward. So to help you maximize the efficiency of your marketing strategy, we’ve put together these three keys to driving your marketing efforts with analytics.
1). Measure the Success and Return on All of Your Marketing Efforts
Every industry is different, which means you aren’t going to know exactly where and how to best reach your target audience. But you probably have an idea of how to do it. For example, you may know that a large majority of your customers discover you through Facebook initially, so you decide to promote a few blog posts. You might want to create a specific landing page for those customers, so you know that they initially came from your Facebook campaign.
It’s crucial to measure and analyze how all of your marketing efforts are working so you’ll know what is most beneficial to your business. Each week, marketers should have a pretty good idea about what has worked and what hasn’t. Failure to do this is a common mistake, and it can also be a costly one.
2). Use Analytics to Create New Content
Content marketing has exploded in the past couple of years. It’s a strategy that few people had ever heard of five years ago, but some experts expect companies to commit over $300 billion per year in resources by 2019.
Content marketing is all about bringing quality information to your prospective customers in the form of blog posts, webinars, ebooks and more. With everyone realizing the opportunity to take advantage of content marketing, it has become more and more difficult to cut through the noise and get your voice heard.
Quality is the key factor between a good and a bad content marketing campaign. But even if you write the most perfect, insanely informational blog post ever, your content marketing campaign can still fall short because of one of these reasons. And using analytics to guide your efforts can help you identify glaring issues with your content strategy like:
- WHAT YOU’RE WRITING ABOUT ISN’T WHAT YOUR AUDIENCE IS INTERESTED IN.
Oftentimes you aren’t getting the reaction you were hoping for from your content because your audience isn’t really interested in it. One reason could be that they’ve seen it in some shape or form before.
You’ll want to stay up to date with how all of your different pieces of content perform so you can see what resonates with your audience. It’s also a good idea to check the search traffic or certain phrases or topics you want to write around. Luckily for you, Google has made that easy with their fancy keyword planning tool.
- YOU CREATE GREAT CONTENT, BUT YOU DON’T PROMOTE IT.
As mentioned earlier, content marketing has exploded in the past few years. This is good because it shows that content marketing has proven itself as a viable strategy across a wide range of industries. But it also means that your content has got to stand out amongst everything else out there.
It isn’t enough to rely on search engines to put your content in front of your audience. By promoting your content though tactics such as email marketing, pay-per-click ads, social media, and many other creative ideas, you can increase the chances that the ideal customer will hear what you have to say.
3). Pair your Customer Data and Your Web Analytics
These may sound like the same thing on the surface, but knowing the difference can allow you to supercharge your online marketing efforts. Web analytics are the metrics you’re probably familiar with: unique sessions, bounce rates, session length, etc.
But customer data is any piece of information that can give you some insight to the person interacting with your organization. This is information like who they are, their purpose for coming to your site, where they land on your site first and much more. Having this information will allow you to paint a more complete picture of your customer’s experience with your company. Having this information available will make it easy to provide the prospect with the information they’ll need to make a purchase, and prepare your customer-facing team for future interactions with your new client.
Without tracking your marketing analytics, tracking and improving ROI isn’t just hard, it’s almost impossible. And it isn’t enough to simply be watching the data; you’ll need to put it to work for you if you ever want your programs to grow.
To get you started, we’re bringing you our free eBook, 6 Marketing Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About. Inside, we cover everything from Customer Acquisition Cost to Lifetime Value so you can spend less time wondering where you should focus your efforts. Download your copy now to let the metrics drive your marketing decisions!
