Your Analytics - Tracking, Testing and Goal Setting
Over the past few years, marketing has transformed from an art into a science. Tracking, testing and metrics are key data points to help you make decisions that drive your business. Today we get real-time insights into what’s working and what’s not. Right now, from my smartphone, I have access to our company’s marketing metrics and the metrics for every single one of our clients. I quickly see if organic traffic is up or down vs. last month. If the social media initiatives we launched across are working or not. If a specific client’s conversion rates have increased as a result of a new piece of content we created or if we need to reconsider the CTA (call to action) button we created for that content.
Never before have we, as business owners, CEOs and marketing professionals, had this level of insight into marketing performance.
One of the most important parts of tracking the performance of your inbound marketing program is setting up a regular rhythm to review your performance. Even if you are looking at your stats daily, you still need a weekly 30-minute session to dig a little deeper and you need a monthly 60-minute session to review performance for the past month, set goals for the next month and discuss any adjustments that need to be made so that you ensure you hit your goals going forward.
It’s actually less critical that you hit your numbers and more important that you have a plan in place when you don’t hit your numbers. Every business can have a down month, but making sure your down month doesn’t turn into two, three or four down months in a row is the objective of this monthly session.
Here are some actual tactical adjustments we have made during one of these sessions:
• If visitors to your website are down for this month vs. last month, schedule a series of weekly guest blog posts for the upcoming month. Guest blog posts can add hundreds of visitors over a few days and contribute up to 20 leads a day in some cases.
• If leads are down this month vs. last month, time for a new free report or tip guide to drive up conversions. One you get traffic to your website up on a consistent basis, you should consider adding new educational content to turn those visitors into leads. Adding new content to your site on a monthly basis could increase lead generation by 30% month over month.
• If your site is getting a lot of returning visitors and not enough new visitors, take a look at your publication strategy. Find a few new websites that cater to your target personas and get them to publish one of your existing whitepapers, tip guides or e-books. Create a dedicated landing page to track traffic and conversions. If the website you select has enough daily visitors, then this tactic is sure to increase both traffic and leads for your business.
What gets measured gets done. Once you have this process in place, you will see month over month improvements. When you look back over a 12-month period you will see dramatic increases in both website visits and leads for your business. In some cases, clients have seen 5x increases in traffic and 3x increases in leads.
