You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Peter Drucker

Take a look at where your marketing is today. Are you getting the results you want? Is your hard work paying off the way you want it to?

If you are tired of spinning your wheels, continuing to do the same things simply will not work. You’ll need to take an inventory of your marketing, determining what is working, what you need to improve, and where to get the help you need. You can do this by looking at your data and analytics.

Diving Into the Data

The best marketers, whether it be social media professionals, blog writers, email marketers, or web developers, all use data to make smart decisions that drive leads and sales. The more you can see, the more you can do.

Understanding the Story of Your Business

Storytelling is an art form. You can think of your data and analytics as a story that gives you tremendous insight into your business, marketing plan, and audience. When you study the analytics of your business, you are reading the story of what is happening on your social platforms, with your emails, in your paid campaigns, and on your website.

The analytics will give you answers to the questions you have. Those answers will lead to action, which will lead to change and improvement within your business. The data helps you identify marketing opportunities and avoid making unfounded assumptions about your audience, marketing, and business. This insight will help you prepare better marketing strategies, streamline your marketing efforts, and reduce unnecessary expenses.

Between Google Analytics, email service providers, and social media websites, each has its own metrics, tools, and dashboards to help you evaluate your data and analytics. However, no matter which platform you are looking at, you should always start in the same place…

Start With a Question

When getting started, think about how much you know now, what questions you want to be able to answer, and what actions might you take if you knew these things?

Some questions you might want to ask yourself include:

• How are customers finding us?
• Which one of my marketing tactics are driving the (most traffic, engaged traffic, most results) to my website?
• Is a traffic source not performing like others or as expected?
• How important is email to get my audience to take the next step?
• What traffic sources should I scale?
• Who is more likely to engage/purchase?
• Are your buyers matching your expectations?

• If my goal is to get them to the contact form or booking a call, where am I losing people along the way?
• How are people engaging with your sales pages? Are they spending enough time to make a purchase decision?
• How is your content performing? Which content is driving the most email subscribers or leads? Are people actually reading your content?
• What do people search for on your site? Could this open up an opportunity to create new content or sales resources?

Do the Answers Match Your Expectations?

You have your questions, and you have your assumptions, but do they match line up?

Perhaps Instagram has the most engagement on the platform itself, so you feel like that’s where you need to be spending your time and energy. However, when you look at the actual traffic going to your website, LinkedIn is outperforming Instagram by a landslide. Not only with the volume of the traffic that you’re getting from LinkedIn, but that traffic may also be spending more time on your site and viewing more pages while they’re there. And it’s possible that visitors coming from LinkedIn are quicker to convert, meaning book a discovery call with you on a first visit as opposed to Instagram where they rarely ever book.

This example illustrated just how important it is to base your marketing decisions on data and analytics as opposed to what you think is happening within your marketing campaigns. Having this knowledge sets you up for success going forward. You will be able to better prioritize your time, focus in the right places, and change the things that aren’t working.

We would love to sit down with you to evaluate the analytics of your business! Reach out to us at any time to schedule a discovery call of your own!