Using Analytics to Meet Your Marketing Goals

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Deciding which analytics matter most is an important step in helping you determine if your marketing strategy is producing the desired results. You’ll need to understand why your company exists, what your goals are, and which data to collect to determine success or failure.

Understand why you’re doing “it” – Whatever your marketing strategy is – whether content marketing or social media marketing – it’s important to know why you’re doing it. Are you creating products to make the lives of your target market easier? Do you want more newsletter members? Are you trying to get sign-ups for a webinar? What exactly do you do, and why do you do it? Related to this, what do you want your website visitors to do when they get to your site?

Know for whom you’re doing “it” – Who is your target audience? Can you describe a persona down to the age, sex, occupation, and income of your ideal target market? As you create marketing materials, consider addressing everything toward your ideal target audience. This will enable you not only to make better choices for content but also to create better products and services.

Set benchmarks and goals – Once you know what you’re doing, it’s important to set goals. Your goals should be specific and realistic. For instance, you don’t simply want to reach more people; you want to have at least 100 new people register for your email list. If you know what your goals are, it will be easier to decide how to word your content, schedule your advertisements, place sign-up boxes, and more.

Collect the data – Finally, you need to know which data to collect. There is more to a website than the number of visitors to a page. You really want to track conversions based on your goals. How many people signed up for your newsletter due to the article you placed on that article marketing site? How many people signed up for and attended your webinar based on affiliate marketing efforts? How many people bought your book after reading an advertisement for it on Facebook?

Analyze the data – The metrics that matter most are the ones that show progress toward your goals. You can have a million site visitors every month, but if you make zero conversions (no newsletter sign-ups, no sales), you haven’t succeed. These types of metrics show that your marketing isn’t targeting the right people. If you experience the sales and conversions you were looking for, then you can reasonably focus on the marketing efforts that are working and spend less time and money on those that aren’t getting conversions.

The best tool to use for analytics is Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it works. There are others, such as Spring Engage and Adobe Analytics. These tools can help you test and target your site with A/B testing and more. Some tools are quite expensive, so it’s best to start with the free one, which is Google Analytics. If you determine you need more advanced features, you can go from there.

Before you kick off your next marketing strategy, consider how you can use web analytics to create and meet your marketing goals.

Do analytics seem like a foreign language? Ask me to help translate them for you!