Determine Marketing Analytics Path By Using Business Goals
There are mountains of data that could be analyzed when looking at your marketing analytics, but not every piece of information is necessarily going to help. Before you look at the metrics, it’s important to determine your immediate marketing goals. Whether you’d like to drive brand awareness or generate more leads, the following information will assist you in determining which metrics to focus on based on your goals.
Marketers are always looking to improve their business. Examining analytical data is crucial for guiding your decision-making as a marketer. Let’s take a look at four different goals that a marketing professional may have and the analytics data needed to achieve them.
Goal #1: Establish and improve brand awareness
Whether you are a new company trying to launch your brand, or an established company that wants to improve their branding and/or rebrand, it is vital to monitor and increase the amount of traffic coming to your site. Determine which channels are driving higher traffic to your website by examining the analytical data. This will help you to adjust your efforts and focus on what’s working. You can also compare the traffic coming to the different pages of your site (i.e. the home page vs. other pages).
Another area of focus should be the search engine rankings. The more content you create, the higher your search engine rank for keywords that relate to your site’s content. For branding purposes, it is important to monitor the traffic being driven from brand-specific terms.
Social media is another crucial aspect of building brand awareness, and your social media reach can also be a good metric to observe. Monitor your followers and fans, and keep a close eye on the amount of engagement those followers provide.
Goal #2: Grow your database
When visitors convert to become leads, they become a part of your database. Here are some tips and metrics to look at when growing your database.
Monitor blog visits to see if this is helping your lead growth. When you create more content for blog posts, you are generating more opportunities for your blog to be ranked by search engines. If blog traffic is growing, this is a good sign for your database. If it is declining, then you should focus on improving your blog to grow your lead database.
Social media reach is not only important for brand awareness, but also for generating blog traffic and growing your lead database. Discuss your blog and other interesting content to boost engagement and improve your social media reach.
Another area to focus on is the traffic and conversions of your landing pages. See where the traffic is coming from so that you can improve those channels (i.e. email marketing, social media, etc.). Compare the conversion rates across different channels as well. Focus your attention on the channels and topics that have higher engagement and conversions and build upon them.
Goal #3: Increase volume of qualified leads
Obtaining a high volume of leads does not guarantee that you will obtain a high volume of customers. Qualified leads are leads that are not only interested in reading your content, but that are also interested in becoming your customer. Here are some of the metrics that you should focus on to determine how your leads become qualified leads.
Examine the CTA CTR (call-to-action clickthrough rate)
Look at your analytics to see which CTAs generate more leads. CTAs (i.e. Join Now for Free Trial, Go To New Features, etc.) should be placed strategically in areas of your site that have the highest traffic (ex. The homepage, blog posts, other web pages). Through analytics, you can determine the best content and best location for posting CTAs. This will assist you in making better decisions about where and what pages to post CTAs on.
Observe landing page conversion rates
The conversion rate is the percentage of views based on a form submission. Looking at the conversion rates of different landing pages will assist you in determining what content leads to the highest conversion rates.
It’s also a good idea to use different landing page formats to see what works best (ex. Lead gen vs. clickthrough landing pages). The conversion rates will guide you as to what form of landing page is generating higher conversion rates.
Goal #4: Close more business
Observe certain metrics when looking at lead-to-customer conversion rates. Examine the lead-nurturing sequences and determine their effectiveness. By identifying low performing lead-nurturing workflows, you can help the sales team move customers further down towards the bottom of the funnel. Define a close relationship between marketing and sales, ensuring efficient communication between the two.
