In the early days of the web, people would often visit websites to learn about the products or services the sites offered. Nowadays, with most people getting most of their information from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, online marketing is more about branding and attracting potential customers to your site than it is about actually selling products.
While it’s still important to have a website, having a digital billboard nearby is just as effective (if not more so). Think about all the companies you know and love; they have Twitter accounts, they have Facebook pages, and sometimes they have websites. The point is that you can connect with customers where they are. If someone is interested in your product or service, you can connect with them through social media and learn from their behavior.
What’s also important is that you measure the success of your online marketing efforts. Are people interacting with your content regularly and do you have a decent amount of website traffic? If you’re doing all of this to grow your business, then you need to make sure that your investment in digital marketing is paying off. Luckily, there are a variety of tools you can use to track the performance of your marketing strategies. Here are just a few of them.
Analytics.
You’ve probably heard of analytics; they’re those tools that companies and websites use to examine the performance of their websites and digital marketing strategies. One of the first things you’ll want to do is to install Google Analytics on your website. Once you have GA set up, you can begin exploring various metrics and report cards that reveal a lot about how effective your digital marketing strategies are. You’ll want to look at things like the number of page views, where people are coming from, what keywords are people using to find your website, and the referring URLs (or the websites that lead to your website). With this information, you can begin forming educated guesses about what is and isn’t working.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
You might think that having high traffic is the best way to grow your business, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, high traffic can actually hurt your business (read: the bigger the network, the more you’ll see of everyone’s bad posts).
What if you could find a way to get the same engagement (read: traffic) but with less effort? Enter conversion rate optimization, or CRO. CRO is a set of tools and tactics that can help you optimize the engagement of your website visitors so that they become customers. You’ll want to look into incorporating a/b testing, funnel analysis, and A/B testing to get the best results from your CRO efforts. Essentially, you’re using metrics like conversion and engagement to determine the effectiveness of different web content (e.g., blog posts, social media posts, etc.) in bringing in revenue and nurturing leads.
Content Planning & Marketing Automation
Let’s be honest: creating content for your blog can be a lot of work. Between researching topics, writing and editing content, and posting it regularly, there’s a lot of effort involved. Once you’ve got your content ready, you need to get the word out there about it. To do this, you can use content planning and marketing automation. These are tools that can help you map out an editorial calendar, distribute your content across various platforms (social media, email, and website), and track the performance of your marketing strategies.
For example, you can create an email campaign and track the open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates of different emails you send out (A/B testing). You can also use content planning and marketing automation to find the best times to post on social media, and you can get the most out of your social media content by measuring the success of your campaigns and adjusting your strategy as needed.
Performance Marketing
Performance marketing is all the rage these days. The idea behind performance marketing is to target the right audiences on social media with the right messages at the right times. For example, if you sell clothing, you might want to keep an eye on Twitter during fashion weeks in New York, Paris, and London to see what’s going on.
Then, you can take advantage of the fact that people are talking about fashion weeks and use this as a way to attract potential customers to your website. Performance marketing can also include paid social media campaigns, where you simply pay to have your content shown to a targeted audience. You can use performance marketing to get the word out about new products or services, invite people to join your email list, or simply boost your social media presence. Essentially, performance marketing is about using digital channels to get the most exposure for your product or service.
Reporting
Last but not least, we have reporting. You might think that the more you have, the better. However, too much data can be a bad thing; having too many tools that track the performance of your marketing efforts (as mentioned above) can make it a bit overwhelming. That’s why it’s important to have a system for collecting and reviewing all the data; it will make it easier to find patterns and understand performance.
This is why you need to create a customer database; it will keep all your contact details, including email addresses, and make it easier to follow up with people who have expressed an interest in your products or services. You can also use a tool like HubSpot to manage your customer relationships and follow up with customers via email to keep them engaged.
Once you have all of this information, you can track the performance of your marketing strategies and adjust your approach as needed. You can also look at the performance of various campaigns over time to see how different approaches and strategies have worked (or have yet to work). For example, you might want to try a retargeting campaign, where you show ads to people who have visited your website in the past. It’s a simple idea but one that can help you grow your business.