A lot of developers spend a lot of time researching various Internet marketing strategies, but neglect to make them efficient and successful - it's all in the analysis! The goal of any successful marketing campaign, regardless of whether you are using social media, mailers, paid advertising or direct marketing, is to use all of the knowledge and techniques in your arsenal to build your brand and generate new business. This article focuses on giving you the tools you need to successfully analyze your Internet marketing strategies so they can be re-tooled as necessary.
Use an Analytics Program
Before you can even begin to analyze your marketing strategy, you need tools to help you analyze it in the first place. Google Analytics is a popular tool that can help you to analyze your website traffic - for free. Another great tool that was designed to work with business-oriented websites is HubSpot.com. Always use your server stats from your hosting company as a baseline to ensure that you are getting accurate information that isn't inflated or diminished in any way to encourage you to invest more money into a marketing scheme or pay for additional advertising. It is your job to keep these resources honest.
Figure Out What You Need
What are the areas that you want to improve in your business? Do you just want more traffic - or do you need to make more sales? Are you looking to attract regular readers to your informational blog - or are you looking to add fans to your Facebook page and followers to your Twitter account? Beyond your basic wants and needs you should keep re-evaluating your business situation so you will be ready to take advantage of new opportunities as they become available.
Set the Bar
Before you can raise the bar and increase your success you need to set the initial starting goal. You can say you need 1,000 new leads within 30-days and then tweak that goal as you go along, adjusting it to a lower number or longer time-period if your initial goal is not feasible, or by increasing your goal if you get impressive results in the beginning. Of course your goals will need to be adjusted over time as your overall reach increases and as you continue to saturate the market. If everyone already knows about your business and branding isn't an issue, you will have to adjust in other ways to attract new clients to your site.
Step Four - Analyze and Refine
In addition to adjusting for changes and altered expectations, you should now be ready to analyze your current traffic and marketing results so you can refine your approach. See what ad programs, social media networks, blog posts, topics and trends are positively affecting your statistics and sales, and what tools just aren't working. While it is important to evaluate your analytics on a regular basis, it isn't always necessary to make big changes. This is why we like to use the word "refine" in this instance. Refining means making slight adjustments and then watching for results. The old saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a good adage to remember, but it is also important to always keep moving and growing, even if you are only making the slightest upgrades or tweaks.
Step Five - Evaluate Your Goals
Daily stats-checking can be good - particularly in a paid ad campaign - but it is also good to stand back and evaluate your goals and results on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis – kind of like checking the scale when you are trying to lose weight! The idea here is to set long-term goals as well as to look for short-term results. Modifying, adjusting, refining and sometimes completely over-hauling your marketing campaign is just part of the process. Raising the bar after setting your initial goals is a sign that your efforts are panning out.
Ways to Improve Your Results
Sometimes the improvements necessary to increase your success have nothing to do with your advertisements, daily posts, comments or tweets. Sometimes changes are needed in the core areas of your website development, sales pitch and general promotions. Here is a short list of things you can do to improve your results today:
- On-Page SEO - Sometimes small changes made to your landing page, home page or sales page can make big differences, but even more than that, tweaks to the meta description, page title and headings of your website as a whole can help improve the SEO of your entire website. You can do a simple one-page test and see what happens just by changing the title on one of your pages to see if it receives an increase in targeted traffic.
- Conversions - Maybe your site isn't selling because your site isn't selling! It might have nothing to do with your marketing approach, reach or ad dollars. Little things like simplifying your conversion form, making it more visible on your home page or just tweaking your landing pages can sometimes have a huge impact. Take a hard look at your pre-sale and payment pages – always try to customize third-party payment pages to match your own pages as closely as possible.
- Mailer Programs - Some mailer programs don't work for the strangest reasons. It can be anything from sending the mailers too often to allowing too much time to pass between mailers. It could also be that your sales pitch in your mailers just isn't appropriate for the people receiving them. Testing, experimenting and asking for feedback can be extremely helpful.
- Content - If you don't have the right content, you won't get sales - period. Do an evaluation of your website and find out which posts, articles, tips and tutorials are generating the most traffic and then focus on increasing that type of content within your site.
- Keywords - You can do variations of your meta keywords, the keywords used in your blog posts and the keywords used in your description on listings to see if you can improve your results. Each page on your website should be using different - yet relevant - keywords, so there are lots of opportunities to make improvements to your site within each individual page!
Now a lot a set amount of time to this tweaking each day or each week and get busy!
