Wouldn’t running your business be easier if you had a crystal ball to predict what marketing and messages were going to bring in more customers or clients? Don’t be surprised, but you’ve already got one and we’re going to teach you how to read the tea leaves to predict your future success!
If past experience is a predictor of future, you can dig into your metrics on social media, your website, and even advertising to discover exactly what’s successful and how to recreate it!
Social Insights
What It Is: Meta, Twitter (yes, we’re still not calling it X), LinkedIn, and pretty much every social media out there offers you information about each of your posts.
What You’re Looking for: Sure you’ll want to check out how many views your posts are getting, but look harder at the engagement numbers. Likes, reactions, comments. These are the indicators of successful posts because people didn’t just passively scroll through on the way to something else.
How You Get It: Replicate and repeat. Create posts with similar photos, try another post with the same kind of topics or content type. Start to narrow down what element made people engage in the first place and keep refining until you have a customized formula of your own. Better engagement always results in more views thanks to the algorithm.
Website Analytics
What It Is: Google Analytics is a background application tracking how people use your website. Having it installed gives you information about what information people want from your website, what products are most popular, and what your customers are interested in.
What You’re Looking for: Audience demographic information like age, gender, location, and even customers’ other interests will help you get to know who your customer is.
How You Get It: Use the information about how customers navigate your site and you can improve how it operates. Meanwhile, improving your SEO will help bring more traffic to your site. Need SEO tips? Get in touch to get our super valuable tip sheet!
PRO TIP: Use the Analytics from your website to improve your digital ad targeting!
Digital Ad Results
What It Is: Whether you’re running Search, Display, or social media advertising, or even ads on local news or blog sites, all these outlets provide reports. Don’t just file them away, they have tons of information you can use to improve your next campaign.
What You’re Looking for: Just like on social media, views of your ads are great. But you want to compare how much you’re spending with how many clicks, calls, or purchases come from your ads.
How You Get It: Target as much as possible - choosing traits of people you really want to reach. Whether that’s age, gender, shopping habits or interests. Try A/B testing to see whether one ad performs better than another. Do this a couple times and you’ll know which ads are most successful!
Email Newsletter
What It Is: A customizable newsletter to share your stories your way. Whether that’s a sale, an event, or a story.
What You’re Looking for: Your Open Rate is key, but you’ll also want to look deeper at the click-through rate. Are your customers taking action?
How You Get It: You can achieve a better open rate in both technical and creative ways. For example subject lines are how you encourage opens and clarity, calls to action, and great design will make sure people click within the email.
Traditional Marketing
What It Is: Billboards, brochures, radio or television advertising can all get your message out to massive audience. But it can be tough to track these leads.
What You’re Looking for: Awareness is the best goal for a large-scale campaign in traditional media. However, you still want people who have seen the ads to take action in the form of purchases.
How You Get It: A couple ways to track your results is to be very specific in your promotion - offer one item and track your inventory on that item, for example. If you have a brochure for an event, include a specific landing page to gather leads or an offer exclusive to the people receiving the brochure.
PRO TIP: Always ASK your customers where they heard about you and keep that information to see how it changes over time.
Tracking the Response
If you take a little time at the end of each month or quarter to review the numbers – just like you would for your accounting and bookkeeping – you’ll quickly find the trends and learn how to leverage what’s worked best!
Feel like you deal with enough numbers in your business? Just don’t have the time to dig into them? Get in touch and we’ll use our expertise to tell you exactly what those numbers mean, and how to optimize your marketing to reach more of your audience.
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