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
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
