Should I Measure Marketing Analytics as a Startup or Small Business?
A user on Quora asked: AdLaunch CMO Paige gives some advice.
SHOULD YOU MEASURE MARKETING ANALYTICS?
I’ll cut right to the point: Yes! You should be measuring marketing analytics.
It’s an easy way to tell what is and isn’t working. This is so important for startups and new businesses because you have such limited resources. You don’t want to waste precious time, money and effort for too long on something that isn’t getting results.
I’m a firm believer in Lean Marketing. (Think “Lean Startup” but in a marketing context.) In Lean Marketing, you do purposeful marketing tests, measure the results via some analytic, and use what you learn to improve your marketing… and sometimes your product.
WHY TEST AND MEASURE?
This “test, measure, pivot” process is really important in startups because there’s so much uncertainty surrounding the product, market, customer, the core value proposition and, thus, the core marketing message.
To put it simply, there’s a lot we don’t know.
To clarify what I mean here, here’s a simple example. Let’s say you are developing an online exercise program to sell, you could run a parallel marketing campaigns to test:
- different marketing messages. Are target customers most interested to “Get in Better Shape” or “Lose Weight”? Both of these might happen using your program, but which message is more important to your customers.
- different channels. Which online marketing channels convert best? Is more relevant traffic coming from Facebook, YouTube, niche blogs or weight loss forums?
- different content types. Is video more powerful than blog posts or social updates?
- different age groups. Is your program more appealing to 20–30 year olds or 50+?
- different gender groups. What marketing message resonates with a specific marketing message? Men might be more interested in building muscle; whereas, women might be more interested in losing weight.
- different geographic locations. Are there certain regions that respond better to your marketing campaigns?
- different images, copy text, call to actions, etc…
WHAT TO TEST FIRST?
The general rule in testing anything is to start with the biggest, most important thing. At the beginning, this is usually the core marketing message and the marketing channels. Once these are clear, you can move on to more specific aspects and details like different images, copy, and CTAs.
We think video is a very powerful way to test different marketing messages, channels, copy text and call-to-actions. That’s one of the reasons why we’re building .
AH, YES, BACK TO THE POINT…
Back to your question — analytics — or better said “measuring something” helps you make decisions based on the above tests. You don’t necessarily have to use Google Analytics (though I phentermine would). Lots of services — like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics — now provide some sort of feedback data. Google AdWords also provides the most sophisticated analytic results on your ad campaigns.
What’s important is that you measure the result. Did more people click on the “Lose Weight” ad or the “Get in Shape” ad? Is Facebook bringing more traffic than Twitter?
Like I just said, these measurements help you make decisions and to know how to focus your precious resources. If 80 percent of your traffic is coming from a Facebook video ad. Focus more of your limited on Facebook and video and less on poor performing channels and content types.
