Data is key to developing an informed marketing strategy, but many business owners can be overwhelmed by the amount of information available to them and aren’t sure which metrics actually matter or how to effectively put useful data into action.
“One of the biggest issues is business owners don’t understand the data they are getting,” says Lisa Carter, president of Drinkwater Marketing and Productions in Exeter. And some aren’t taking advantage of the free data readily available through social media and Google analytics.
And the metrics they do pay close attention to may not be the best guide for their marketing. “Website traffic is important but not as much as people want it to be,” says Carter Foster, marketing account manager at Calypso in Portsmouth. “It’s like getting likes on Facebook. It’s a vanity metric.”
Business owners need to understand that a majority of the people on their website are just there to research and weigh their options, and they will be doing the same with the competition, says Marlana Trombley, founder of Prosper Peak in Manchester. Which is why knowing web traffic numbers is not enough to indicate the success of a marketing strategy.
Building a Strategy
Before even considering metrics, it is important that a business establish marketing goals and develop a strategic plan to achieve them, says Linda Fanaras, CEO and strategist of Millennium Agency in Manchester.
Brian DeKoning and Duncan Craig, two of four partners at Raka Creative in Portsmouth, begin the strategy process by asking clients to identify the target buyers, review current marketing tactics, and then define and quantify goals.
“We get key stakeholders involved in the process. It’s never just about marketing anymore. We work with the sales team, and that is a source of business intelligence and data,” says DeKoning.
If a goal is to increase website leads by 20% by the end of the quarter, for example, DeKoning’s team walks through what makes sense to get there. Working with the sales team, they can determine the target audience and then build a tactical plan, he says.
Craig notes it’s important to make sure the organization or client understands the marketing approach, what success looks like and how it is tied to overarching business and revenue goals. “It’s important for the client to completely buy into the process, otherwise it’s easy to fall back into bad habits,” he says.
As such, a marketing strategy needs to have benchmarks and defined goals that help to assess the success of tactics. Foster says instead of just assuming you have to be on Facebook, first ask if your company should be on it and why. Take a proactive approach rather than reactive.
Which Metrics Matter
This is where having the right data matters from paid and organic search results, as well as social media, website, and email marketing analytics. Stats can inform good decisions, hone messaging to the target market, and allow a business to know who is interested in a product or service and where they are in the sales funnel. Are they ready to buy or just kicking the tires?
Such data will also help a business to determine its return on investment for every dollar spent on particular marketing strategies, Fanaras says.
While collecting basic contact information like email and phone numbers is useful to build databases, Carter says it’s important to look deeper and uncover behavioral trends. A business may send out an e-blast or start a loyalty program, but it’s important to look at such details as the time of day the email was opened or which links were clicked on to know what is working and to personalize future marketing efforts.
One of Carter’s clients is a beverage company with a loyalty program and uses the data collected when people sign up for the program to send them a custom bottle opener based on geography.
For most businesses, Foster says transactions, or conversions, are what matter. A conversion can be anything from pushing a button, filling out a form, downloading an e-book to making a purchase. “Conversion rate is key,” he says. “You can have high traffic on your website but have a low conversion rate, which means transactions are not happening.”
Understanding and tracking conversions is important to knowing if marketing efforts are working and reaching target audiences. Foster says many companies collect data but don’t take the time or have the capacity to process it and learn from it. “Unless you put it to use, it’s like you didn’t collect it at all,” Foster says.
If the website conversion rate is low, then a company needs to look at the data and make appropriate changes. Companies need to review marketing data at least annually or quarterly, or more frequently, depending on their sales cycle.
“We really try to get people to know what is important for their business. What would move the needle? What would make a difference? Otherwise, you are just chasing metrics that are not important to your business,” says Foster.
“Businesses need to schedule time in their calendars to actually look at the data,” Trombley says.
What can be hard is being comfortable with abandoning a tactic, even when the data indicates it is not working. “It helps to have a plan B,” Foster says.
Steps to Success
Trombley advises taking a hard look at the business’s website to make sure it is up to date and search-engine and mobile optimized. Use a heat-mapping tool like Hotjar to learn about customer behavior, such as what pages they are viewing and what they are doing on the site. Consider using a conversion tool like a chatbot, which is software that communicates with visitors via text or voice while collecting useful information.
Once a company knows which pages are most popular, they need to optimize those pages, such as adding video content. If there is a high bounce rate, consider updating the content.
If a business isn’t sure what is working, it’s time to do some A/B testing, Trombley says. A/B testing is taking an ad or piece of content, making one change, and then seeing whether the original or changed version performs best. That could mean a change of headline, the color of a call-to-action button or an image.
DeKoning and Craig recommend conducting short runs of digital ads to see what resonates with target audiences and measure results in real time using tools like Hubspot and Google analytics. “We might run two or three different campaigns that maybe run for a week and see which one gets the best result,” DeKoning says.
Understanding Marketing Speak
A/B testing: The process of comparing two variations of a marketing piece to determine which performs better.
Bounce rate: The percentage of people who land on a web page without clicking through to other pages.
Contact: A person with whom a company is having direct two-way communication.
Conversion: When a website visitor takes a desired action (clicks a button, downloads a form, makes an appointment).
CPA: Cost-per-acquisition, or when advertisers pay only for the users who complete a specified transaction.
CPC: Cost-per-click is the actual price paid for each click in a pay-per-click marketing campaign.
CPM: Cost-per-thousand refers to the price per 1,000 clicks or views.
CTR: Click-through-rate is a percentage of users who clicked on an ad on a web page versus the number of times the ad was delivered.
Engagement: Any interaction with a contact.
Impressions: The total number of people that see content.
Lead: Any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way.
Reach: The number of people who choose to see content and engage with it through likes, comments or shares.
Open rate: Percent of emails opened out of the total delivered emails.
PPC: Pay-per-click is a paid advertising model where the advertiser only pays when people click on their ad.
Sources: Crazy Egg, Google Analytics, Hubspot, Sprout Social
Current Issue - April 2024