The majority of my clients would be SME’s. Most are wearing many hats and genuinely don’t have the time or the budget to “fiddle around” with statistics and I totally get and respect that. It is worthy of noting however that by doing this “fiddling” you’re finding out if your efforts and energy are being utilised properly.
For direct marketing (in other words, not through a 3rd party), it’s relatively easy to determine which sales are the result of a particular method. Once you’re using a tracking tool like UTM’s or maybe something like Google Analytics or you maybe using the organic insights you can get from each of the social media platforms, you can monitor and track how your audience have arrived at your content.
Digital marketing has moved on from being simple banner ads online to a more complex system of optimising the return on investment (ROI) in various formats. The ultimate aim is to see a profit on every pound, euro or dollar that your business spends on marketing (online or offline).
There should be KPI’s for every department in your business. From enquiries to sales, they all require a KPI in order to measure its effectiveness.
As an example, KPI’s can help you measure progress, identify weaknesses, optimise budgets and of course, all of this data should be guiding your decision making going forward.
These measurements can be quite personal or maybe you have shareholders that you’re accountable to,either way you’re likely to consider:
· Hits on your website
· Engagement rate
· Email signups
· Calls completed
· SEO
· Customer Leads
· Backlink tracking
And so much more.
KPIs help you to figure out whether your business is on course, whether you’re meeting your own and / or your customers’ expectations and reaching your goals. Every KPI is different. Some should just be monitored in isolation, while others need to be viewed in relation to other KPIs.
Almost all of them should and need to be monitored regularly, while others over time spans of weeks, months, quarterly or annually. All of your KPIs need to be quantifiable and closely linked to definitive goals. Don’t forget you also need to factor in your ROI as well.
in this article I wanted to share a few high-level strategies that you can explore. I won’t be going into detail here, as this is just an overview but strategies you may want to consider are:
· Optimising your Landing pages
· More strategic email marketing
· Working on your Keyword analysis
· More systematic Search Engine optimisation
· Automating more of your campaigns
· Ad copy optimisation
· More customer avatar research
· Using retargeting techniques
· Building and improving your budget
· Updating your competitor analysis
· Monitoring your ROI
Another couple of things to explore would be in paid advertising, and using geotargeting which has a proven and highly effective strategy in reaching a demographic in a particular area.
Paid ads also offers you remarketing to your customers a second time and as they already have some idea of what you do, it makes getting a purchase far easier.
Done right, organic search can dramatically improve the website's traffic and credibility. However, many businesses still don’t understand how to create search engine-friendly content, or how to ensure that it features in high rankings for their entire “target keyword set” (all the keywords chosen on the basis of attractiveness, relevance, difficulty, and their competitiveness in the marketplace). Check out this article from Hubspot that shows you potential tools you can use to improve your SEO.
Obviously, there is a cost to organic reach and that is time. Time to create the suitable content and the time to schedule, repurpose and check it. Time is money! I have found outsourcing this to be really helpful, this can be done either using AI or a VA or a mixture of both (which is what I do) but it’s a personal choice on your part.
The best use of our time is to be analysing our insights and benchmarking them. This was something I was guilty of not doing for far too long. Like you, I learned that this was something I needed to correct and work on, and I guess, that’s why you’re here reading this right now.
There are a few crucial questions you need to ask yourself during the data analysis process.
· What will help us interpret our digital marketing analytics into action steps.
· How is the current campaign performing?
· When looking at the key performance indicators (or KPIs), have we met with our goals?
If we don't have goals outlined before the launch of a campaign (hopefully we do!), our KPIs will normally just include site engagement and sales generated. You may want to also include cost per acquisition, follower count, and level of social media engagement as well. All of this data can help you establish what demographic is buying your product, so if needed you can adjust the customer profile of your typical customer.For example, you might want to edit the call-to-action to appeal to a different gender or age group. You may also want to choose to create more"filtered" ad sets for different demographics where the differences are particularly large.
I’ve just reread the above paragraph and I hope it makes sense to you! It’s not an easy topic to discuss and its not my specialist area, so I did my best! I can always put you in touch with someone who knows this is greater detail if needed!
Because I am not a specialist in A/B and Split testing, I will share this article from Freshworks.com that discussed the differences and when to use one or the other. It’s a little dated but I found it easier to read than other more current articles.
The point is to benchmark and then frequently follow up with analytics / insights with your chosen KPI’s. Then you need to evaluate two or more things (A/B testing or Split Testing) in the same campaign, these can be different images or texts. Once you’ve decided which of these you want to do and understood you past analytics and digested all of the data, you can then use it to optimise your campaign in a few ways. The easiest way to optimise it, is to make edits directly to the campaign you’ve just run. I find that simple to do, especially in Meta in the Ads app, it’s extremely easy to do and convenient!
I hope this has somewhat helped you today,if you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Working with clients Nationwide from base in Mullingar.
