Let Analytic Data Guide Your Online Marketing Efforts
Promoting one’s business online is an ongoing effort.
We spruce up our websites, engage with our customer base through social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, and create branded newsletters to remind clients both past and present what we can do for them.
Given all these options, it can be difficult to know where to focus our efforts. Thankfully, there is a way to track which outgoing messages are being best received by your target audience.
Here at Tripepi Smith, we install Google Analytics on every new site we create. With this free software, it’s possible to track exactly how your promotional efforts are paying off. You can see what pages people are visiting and how long they’re staying. You also can track what brought them to your site. Did they follow a link from Facebook or did they find you through a Google search? And if they did find you through a search, what search terms did they use? This is all data you can use to hone your marketing efforts and get more for your investments.
Often, we see a jump in web traffic after a company newsletter is sent out. Good newsletters encourage readers to click over to view the organization’s website, with the end goal of engaging them as clients/customers. If you notice a burst in page views after reaching out via your newsletter, you know you’re engaging your target audience well.
Most mail services, such as Constant Contact, have their own analytic reports available. For every email, the sender can see how many people opened it, how many clicked on the links it contained, and how many forwarded the email on to friends. If you’ve been chugging along with a very respectable 20% open rate, and then suddenly 50% of your email list clicks to view your latest edition – that is information you can use to tailor your content toward what your audience wants to read.
Even Facebook provides analytic data, tracking how many new “Likes” a page receives each week, or how many people saw any given post. It’s not as extensive as the data culled by Google or Constant Contact, but it can provide a basis for comparing what posts your audience is interested in and what posts they tend to skip past.
Using analytic data, we can see what marketing efforts reach clients (both current and potential). This, in turn, allows us to put our efforts where they will garner the highest return. It is a key part of any online marketing effort.