How to use analytics to perfect your online marketing and social media strategy

Advice on how to conduct your social media and marketing campaigns is all over the place online.

Including on our blog.

And plenty of it is good advice (especially on our blog!).

When you put that good advice into practice you can achieve some truly great advancements in the quality of your online content, your social following and marketing return on investment. However, if there’s one thing that’s true online, it’s that one size does not fit all. Most marketing advice online will move your brand forward, but the best way to make the best of your online marketing and social media plans is to keep an eye on what works for you and what doesn’t.

What works brilliantly for Business A, might not be as effective for Business B. Every business is different; every target market is different – that was true in the old days of print advertising too but let’s translate it to the present day. The advantages of online marketing and social media are manifold and a real corker among those advantages is the power of statistical analytics.
Why just put out the same Google AdWords campaign over and over when you can review the results of your last campaign and tweak accordingly? For the most part in print advertising, you were flying blind. Now you can get a plethora of feedback on the campaigns you put out.

Stats and analytics are such an exciting tool. Yes, I know, statistics. But stay with me. Using the example of a Google AdWords campaign: by tweaking your audience, the colours in your ad, the words in your ad, the dates and times your ad shows (and much more) and then comparing your different campaigns, you can find out what brings in the maximum return on investment.

Perhaps your audience responds best to images of women in ads, or men or ads without humans in them at all. Replicate the ad and make changes to only one aspect and make decisions about future ads based on what you learn. Working this way allows your marketing to be agile and react to where your audience is, in real-time.

Quick Tips to Consider on Each of Your Marketing Platforms

Email Marketing

• What’s the best time of day to send out your email campaign?
• Where were the hotspots (physical areas of the email that got the most clicks) in your email? This might tell you something about the colours, placement of links etc.
• For ecommerce, how many sales came directly from the email?
• For service based businesses, how many appointments/contact us clicks came from that email campaign?

Website Engagement

• What’s the bounce rate on your most important pages? (Bounce rate: percentage of people leaving your site after viewing only one page)
• How much time do visitors spend on your site on average?
• Are your calls-to-action working? Are people clicking where you want them to?

Facebook Boosted Posts

• What are the demographics of the people that click the link or liked the post? Age, sex, etc. How could you use this to make your ads suit that demographic even more, or how could you change the boosted post so it reaches people outside the demographic it already reached?

Facebook

• Which type of content returns the best engagement? (video, text post, questions, polls, images, etc.)

Instagram

• What’s the best time of the day for you to post?
• Which types of images work best for you? Colour images, black and white, graphics, text over image, selfies or images with people in them, etc.
• Which were your most popular hashtags? Which hashtags should you be targeting?

Pinterest

• What are your most popular pins?
• What are your most popular boards?
• What types of pin images work best for you?
• What has received the most click-throughs or re-pins?

Twitter

• What’s the best time of day for you to post?
• What are your most popular hashtags?
• Do your posts with images in them do better than your posts without images?

Analyse This: What to do with the Information

What you do with the new information is up to do. It may help you to plan for the future or enable you to better identify the demographics of your market and could even lead you to consider what type of product you focus on. But in the short term, allow it to shape your online marketing campaigns

Change and test.

Change the time of day you post, change the length of your blog posts, change the type of images you post. Start posting on the weekend instead of weekdays. Review the calls-to-action on your website and their prominence, spend more time appealing to a younger or older demographic. The possibilities are infinite.

Death by Statistics

The availability of all this detailed information is exciting and useful – but approach with moderation.

If you spend so much time looking at your web and marketing stats that you forget to move your business forward in meaningful ways, that’s a problem. It’s also easy to experience statistical overwhelm. There are numbers, dates, graphs and click rates everywhere, they all mean something and seem to be demanding your attention.

Our advice is to set a reminder for yourself to review stats on a regular basis, but don’t overdo it. Depending on the platform, try reviewing weekly or monthly and then plan what actions you’ll take based on what you learn from the analytics. Statistics are a waste of your time if you don’t let it change your approach to online marketing.

We Love Us Some Stats

At Technology Matters, we love us some stats! We use them to inform the next course of action in a marketing strategy for clients. This is seriously powerful stuff.

If you want a trained eye reviewing your stats and implementing your online marketing and social media strategies, give us a call and we can talk turkey.