Marketing is no longer fuzzy – almost every aspect of (digital) marketing can be measured. Here are a few tips to make your marketing efforts more effective.
What is the overall goal?
Do you have a clear, measurable marketing goal for the year? Increase trial signups by 50% is a very clear goal. Something like “double website traffic” might be easy to measure – but is not very goal oriented, because it doesn’t sound like a goal but more like a means to an end: “double website traffic so that we can double the number of online leads”. The overall goal is to double leads.
Which metrics to focus on?
From a clear overall goal you can move to specific metrics. Every activity has metrics that you can track and try to improve, every time. From email open rate to website bounce – no metric is static – you can influence it – if you track it!
Make metrics part of your routine: use a dashboard
There are a lot of metrics in a lot of different places. Using a Dashboard helps to have quick view of the metrics that matter. We like Cyfe but there are plenty of options.
Dashboards save the effort of looking for different things in different places, all the time.
Make sure to have your OVERALL GOAL on the dashboard. It might be as simple as a number in a google spreadsheet that you update manually every week – but a dashboard without your key goal is not complete!
Example of marketing metrics without a goal focus
Monthly email. Metric: frequency (monthly) and open rate.
Consider focus on website traffic from the email over the open rate. What do you have to offer to readers of the email? Great content? Make sure it is on the website – not in the newsletter. ‘Tease’ them into reading the whole article. Are you organizing an event,webinar – do I find your events in a sidebar when reading the blog? How many people signed up for the event based on the newsletter.
[tweet_dis]Conclusion: Open rate is nice, but it’s really like website traffic. It’s a number: not a success metric.[/tweet_dis]7 of our favorite tools
We like Optimizely as super simple way to start tweaking and a/b testing important pages on your website. Is that sign-up button in the right spot? Is it big enough? Do A/B testing and find out. [tweet_dis]Create a slightly different version of your page in minutes. [/tweet_dis]Move content around. Than wait and see how your hypothesis worked out!
If you want to see what your users actually do on your website, then you are ready for FullStory – a ‘DVR for your website’ – recording in full detail every step your visitors take.
- We use SemRush for SEO keyword analysis and competitive keyword research.
- Wistia is our favorite Video hosting platform – because of great statistics, but also fantastic embedding options.
- CallRail has become indispensable for almost all our clients
- Cyfe is our Dashboard of choice and we use Zapier to automate some of the tasks of keeping different cloud systems up to date.
Take a look at the summary of our recent Atlanta public relations Lunch & Learn Event.