Next year’s marketing strategy should already be on your mind. And one of the best ways to make that a successful strategy is to analyze your marketing performance.
How Do you Start Tracking Your Marketing Data?
If you haven’t done this before you might be wondering how to begin. Start simple. Make a commitment to yourself, your team and your business that you will track your data and stick with it. Here are some ways to do that:
- Ask your customers some questions!
Specifically: ‘How did you hear about us?’ This info can go on a simple spreadsheet or a page with tally marks if need be. But start tracking what the customer says when you ask them this question. If they say ‘online’, ask if they can remember where. Google search? Facebook? An banner ad? This is the be all, end all question. Once you know where new customers are coming from, you can build a strategy from there.
- Review Google Analytics.
If you don’t have this tracking code set up on your website, you’ll want to do it right away. There is so much information you can gather just from the User Acquisition reports. You can view by day, week, month, year and do year over year comparisons. If you want to know where your clients are coming from and what they are doing once they land on your site, this is the program that will help you do it. There is a learning curve if you’re new to it, but like anything else, once you start to use it, you’ll understand more and more.
- Use Insights in the Meta Business Suite.
If your company uses Facebook or Instagram to reach its customers, then the Insights section of the Meta Business Suite will tell you so much of what you want to know. You can choose date ranges to review and at a quick glance can see if your reach went up or down, which content pieces performed the best, basic audience demographics and more. When you see content that performed well, be sure to try to duplicate the style, info or type of content that worked.
- Utilize Automation Software.
With the automated marketing software we use, we can track how often people have come to our website, what pages they’ve gone to, how long they’ve spent browsing, what they clicked, how they got there and when they left the site. This information is so valuable when we determine what we are going to post, email or give away in the future. If you don’t have an automation strategy in place, reach out to see if it might be a fit for your business. If you do use automation software, take time to look through all of the data it supplies.
Set aside a few hours at the end of the year to review your data and find ways to incorporate your findings into your marketing strategy. If you can do this quarterly, it’s even better. Hopefully you’ll utilize these tools to put some data confidence behind your social, digital and print marketing in the future.
