The Solutionistas LOVE to come up with awesome ideas, design, content, and strategy to help you make the most of your marketing dollars. We get equally excited about measuring how well your marketing efforts perform. And while it’s not as flashy as fabulous graphic design or snappy copy, reviewing the performance of your website, blog, email campaigns, and social posts is just as important. We break the process down into three steps: gather, analyze, and maximize. Here’s how.
Step 1: Gather Your Marketing Data
The first step in taking the pulse of your marketing efforts is to locate and gather your data. For your website and blog, the Solutionistas recommend adding Google Analytics to your website. It offers valuable insights into who’s visiting your site, how they’re finding you, and what they’re interested in.
Constant Contact and MailChimp offer data and reporting as part of their email platforms. You’ll want to track email open rates, click rates, bounces, and unsubscribes. These metrics will tell you how many of your subscribers are opening your emails and clicking on your content. Bounces let you know what emails are out of date and no longer active so you can delete them from your list. This makes your list stronger and improves your reputation as a safe sender.
Each social platform also offers data analytics so you can track engagement on your pages and profiles. Facebook, for example, gives you valuable data on your page’s reach, who’s following you, and who’s liking, sharing, and commenting on your posts. Find all the data you’ll ever care to look at under the “Insights” tab on your page.
Step 2: Analyze Your Marketing Data
Once you’ve gathered your data, it’s time to analyze it. Have unique visitors to your website and blog gone up or down? How have they found your website or blog? What search terms did they use to find you, and are they relevant to the products and services you offer?
The same goes for your email marketing data. Compare this month’s newsletter performance to last month’s. Why do you think your open rate increased or decreased? Did you change the day and time you sent it? This can have a substantial effect on how many people open your emails. So can major holidays and Minnesota’s cabin season.
Lastly, take a look at your social media data. Did your number of followers go up? What posts performed the best, and can you determine why? Often, posts with video or images do better than those with no visuals. Did you reach more people or fewer people this month?
Step 3: Maximize Your Marketing Data
Now that you have a grasp of how your marketing efforts are performing, how are you going to use that knowledge to improve it? Maybe you’ll refresh the content of your website to include more or different keywords, or add one more post a month to your blog to bump up in search engine results.
When analyzing your email marketing, consider changing up the day and time you’re sending to see what effect it has on open rates. Or, jazz up your subject lines to entice more recipients to open your emails.
And as for social, do more of the types of posts that performed well for you. Consider being more in the moment on your social pages. Share a little bit of what you’re working on, who you’re meeting with, and successes you’re having.
The important thing is to actually use your data. If you don’t use your data to take action, it’s essentially worthless. Does the idea of gathering, analyzing, and maximizing your marketing data sound overwhelming? The Solutionistas can help! Let’s talk.
