Measuring your e-marketing in 2013

This week my guest blog comes from Bristol IT Company - Here they discuss the importance of measuring your marketing and how IT can help.

Measuring your e-marketing in 2013

At Bristol IT Company, we're keen on measuring the performance of our our online marketing activities: our website, email and social media. It's not glamourous but it's important. If you’re not measuring, you will never know what worked and what didn’t. It's easy to waste money: "if you  always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got!” This article is a quick overview of what you need to do it too, quickly and cheaply.

Watching your web site

Easily the best tool for small businesses to use is Google Analytics. It's free to use and integrating it into a website is easy. It gives comprehensive information about visitor activity, not just the number of visits but how they reached your site and what they did while they were there.

In fact, Google Analytics shows pretty much every kind of user statistic you might need, apart from exactly who your users are. You can even find out a bit about the geography of where they're from, and the internet service providers they're using.

Did your newspaper advertising campaign drive traffic to your web site? How good is the redesigned home page? Careful use of Google Analytics will give you the answers you seek. Did we mention it's free, too?

Examining Emails

Email marketing is woefully underused by small businesses. It’s easy to set up, really simple to use, and very low cost, almost free, in fact. It's also dangerously easy to make a hash of, and unintentionally to spoil the business relationships you're trying to grow.

So, like your web site, you need to send marketing emails carefully, and measure how well each one performs.  Realistically, you can't  do this with workplace email software such as Outlook. Gmail and  Windows Live Mail. You need a professional emailing platform such as those from MailChimp, AWeber and Constant Contact. It may sound daunting, but it's neither hard nor expensive, and the additional information you gain is very worthwhile.

With these tools, you can immediately see how many messages are opened (and by whom), how many people opened your email more than once (always a good sign), how many clicked on links, and who forwarded the message on to friends and colleagues.

Scoring social media

This is harder to do than the others, but it's worth the effort. The right sort of social media activity should mean direct, positive contacts with your business, more 'followers' on Twitter, etc. and more visits to your web site.

Some measures of success can be observed directly, such as the quantity of your Facebook "friends," and actual new business leads, but for other sorts of outcome you need to be clever about measurement.

To understand which posts and updates generate the best activity for your website, time plays a part. Can you see peaks in traffic that correspond to postings you've made? Were there more hits on the product page you specifically talked about? Google Analytics can help you here, too.

Adding it all up

A really simple philosophy that I follow is, “If you can’t measure it, then don’t do it!”

You may find it easier to run a successful campaign by working "backwards." Start off by thinking about what you want to achieve and how you're going to measure your success. When you have those measures identified and set up (if that's necessary), you can confidently aim for the results you need.

Even if you don't win the first time, you'll be learning, and growing in confidence. And you'll be using the technology to advance, not letting it beat you!

Best of luck,

Andy Poulton

Andy Poulton is the Sales and Marketing Manager for Bristol IT Company,  providing IT support and software development services across the region. You can reach him directly at andy.poulton@bristolitcompany.com, or 0117 370 0777