Online Marketing | Inbound Marketing | Marketing Analytics
Track Marketing Activity: Everything You Need to Know If You Run Your Own Business Online
Using digital analytics to track marketing results
In the digital era, almost all businesses need a marketing strategy and Marketing Funnels to scale their business and propel growth. However, many businesses ineffectively measure or collect data to see how their efforts affect the business. This could be due to a lack of knowledge or time.
Digital marketing analytics is a great way to keep track of the interests and interactions of customers with your content and business. So, whether you are a business owner or are planning to start one, unlock the key to perfecting your marketing tactics here.
Analyze these Marketing Metrics for Business Growth
Analyzing key marketing metrics becomes crucial for any business to strengthen personal branding and reach clients worldwide. You can focus on these marketing metrics to boost and increase your yearly turnover —
Quality Leads
Many businesses measure their success based on the quality of leads. A small number of qualified leads is better than a large number of non-converting leads.
Social Media Engagement
While “likes” and “shares” indicate engagement in social media, they may not be the best metric to establish success as people share content without even reading it. Comments, therefore, become a dependable factor to assess quality engagement. However, sharing by credible and organic brands indicates growth.
Cost of Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition cost is the fee (research, marketing, advertising, etc.) that goes into convincing people to buy your product/ service. Let us consider you added five customers and spent $10,000 on marketing in a month. Your customer acquisition cost would be $2,000.
You will be able to assess your marketing’s actual effectiveness from this data.
Website Traffic and Time Spent on Site
The amount of people visiting your site and the duration while browsing and reading your content is a key indicator of growth. If visitors are spending considerable time on your pages, it means they are gaining value from your site. The chances of coming back to your site for information/products/services get high.
Email Open Rate
The percentage of subscribers who open your email out of all subscribers is the mail open rate. If it is 17–28%, your business is in a good shape. Depending on the numbers, you can channel your marketing approach to reach your ideal goal.
Conversion Rates
A crucial business indicator is conversion rates, which is a significant aspect for any business to establish brand authority. When you get calls from customers, converting most of them leads to a successful sale.
Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI determines which strategies are successful and which are not. It paints a clear picture of the amount that should be spent on which marketing strategies. To calculate ROI, take the sales growth of the product/service and subtract the marketing costs, and then divide it by the marketing cost.
Bounce Rate
A bounce is when a visitor lands on your homepage and leaves. When a bounce rate is high, marketing teams can work around to lay off ineffective aspects and brainstorm new ideas. It may involve improving the UI/UX design, page loading time, or the content itself.
Invest in These Tools and Resources to Monitor Metrics
Numerous inbound marketing tools can assist you to analyze the feasibility of your marketing tactics. While a majority of them are free, some are paid tools —
- Google Analytics for SEO — It is a tool for web analytics that keeps track of nearly every click on your website. You can keep track of how visitors use your website, which pages receive the most traffic, etc. Additionally, it helps you to track the keywords that people use to find your website.
- Keywords Everywhere — It is a tool that is both very effective and simple to use. It will assist you in comprehending the keywords people use to locate your website. It also provides data on how often people search for your keywords every day.
- Facebook Insights — It is a tool to analyze the performance of your posts on Facebook. It also provides suggestions for improvement.
- Twitter Analytics — This tool can assist you in tracking your Twitter campaigns. It lets you look at how well your Twitter campaigns are doing by identifying the most successful tweets. Additionally, it helps you determine which hashtags to use.
- Hubspot Social Analytics — It provides extensive graphs and visuals that break down the data by particular platform features like audience, session lengths, and impressions. You can also access data about ROI from your social media campaigns.
- Bounce Exchange — This is a great tool for determining the optimal time to send emails. You can identify the days that are most popular for the same.
Pin down areas of Improvement to Optimize your Marketing Efforts
To create a successful marketing plan for your business, you need to focus on optimizing your marketing campaigns. Some of the common ways to test your marketing efforts are —
A/B testing
A/B testing is comparing two versions of something to determine which one performs better. Here, marketing professionals split the audience to test several variations of a campaign and determine which performs better. For instance, if your team is confused between two optimal web designs, A/B testing helps you pick the best based on your goals.
Segmentation
The process of separating potential customers or markets into distinct groups is known as segmentation. An essential part of any marketing campaign is segmentation-based market research analysis. Business decision-makers can maximize profitability by concentrating on resources that are most favorable to their goals.
Personalization
The process of targeting and retargeting sales leads with a brand message that speaks directly to specific customers’ interests is personalization. Some major aspects include demographics, purchasing habits, gender, etc. Customers offer a positive response when they get tailored messages.
Remarketing
The cookie that pops up when you visit a website and ask customers to accept is one way of tracking customer behavior. Businesses re-engage with these IDs to increase the chances of conversions. This is called remarketing.
Remarketing campaigns in ad accounts like Google Ads are based on remarketing audiences you create on your website or app.
Case Studies
Many businesses have successfully tracked and optimized their marketing activity to become global names. We will discuss two such successful marketing strategies –
Salesforce
It is a software company based in the United States which focuses on CRM (Customer Relationship Management), marketing automation, customer service, analytics, etc. The marketing campaign of Salesforce encourages organic audience and engagement.
In addition, the business focuses on contacting the ideal client at the right time. As a result, the company saw a significant increase in LinkedIn engagement and report downloads. Consequently, conversions have increased in comparison to its competitors.
Microsoft
A household name, Microsoft specializes in cloud computing, software development, and related services. Microsoft uses the STP model to its advantage — segmentation, targeting, and positioning. The company uses a significant social media presence to promote its products online targeting the urban population through Microsoft’s social media foray.
They have around 4 million Instagram followers and over 14 million Facebook followers, respectively. You can learn and use such strategies to boost your business online. However, ensure that your business goal is in tandem with your business idol since following any strategy blindly is not feasible.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
While it seems easy to get hold of some marketing analytics tools and start reviewing all the progress, steer clear of these pitfalls —
- Don’t waste time on vanity metrics although they may look tempting. It’s vital to choose the right KPIs. (Key performance indicators).
- Avoid building overwhelming/confusing reports. Use your reports to ask business questions and produce actionable insights.
- Don’t jump to successful competitor tactics instantly — Even if it works for your business in the first go; it may not be replicable in the long run.
Conclusion
Tracking the marketing activity sits at the core of any marketing strategy to make a business successful. Emails, website analytics, phone calls, conversions, metrics, and other data related to business can help you gauge your success.
However, ensure to prepare a custom approach based on the metrics because the tools only provide a numerical assessment. They fail to capture the feeling and emotions of the consumer.
When you own and manage your data, you can more effectively map out a marketing plan to increase click-throughs and engagement.
