Last month, we talked about the range of options open to you when your marketing isn’t working. (I wrote about a situation where the website was not doing its job, but the same broad principles apply for just about any other marketing tool or channel, so you may want to go back and have another read with that in mind if your marketing problems are stemming from something other than your website.)
One path I presented as a worthwhile option was taking a dive into your marketing metrics. They truly can save the day. In fact, without them, most other paths worth considering become a bit of a guessing game.
Which metrics should you take a look at? The specific metrics you should review will vary with the particulars of your situation, so let’s focus less on the metrics themselves and talk instead about the insights you need to glean from your metrics in order to find the root of whatever marketing issues you find. 
Once again, I’ll use website metrics as examples, but similar measurements exist for social media, email marketing, and other marketing tools and channels. Let’s start with the basics:
Traffic
Are you getting a reasonable amount of traffic?
From what sources are you getting your traffic?
Is there a difference in how visitors from different sources behave?
Engagement
How long are visitors staying on your site?
How many pages are they visiting?
Are they consuming content on each page completely?
Conversion
What action are visitors taking, if any?
Are they clicking through to download PDFs or request gated content?
Do you not have enough CTAs (calls to action) to gather usable data?
Evaluating Your Marketing Data
First, we want to know if we’re getting the appropriate amount of traffic. Clearly, that’s a metric that will look a lot different for a Main Street shop with one location in a small town than it will for a major consumer brand with a global footprint.
If you aren’t sure what an appropriate amount of traffic looks like, start by creating snapshots that you can compare to one another. Meaning, track the information over time and look for patterns. That might be comparing this month to last or some other timeframe that makes sense with any seasonality to your business.
No single snapshot is likely to be deeply helpful on its own, but the patterns that emerge over time will almost certainly give you insights into where you can make changes that will improve your marketing results.
Next, you want to be sure that site visitors are engaged and interacting with the information you’re sharing. There are two elements to this.
The first is offering content that provides value to your target audience. Ideally, the content is actionable. Does your content speak to the issues your prospect is facing? Does it provide them with information they can use to better understand their options for solving that problem. If not, you should consider a content audit to refocus your marketing more fully on your prospects’ pain points.
Second, and more frequently overlooked, what you deliver has to match what you’ve promised. It may be tempting to create social media posts touting how you can share the secret to a prospect tripling their revenue in less than an hour (to use a particularly fantastical claim) but if you don’t deliver credible specifics, your content won’t encourage engagement and won’t generate value or revenue for your firm. Which leads us to conversion.
Unless you’re in the business of giving away valuable information for the betterment of the business community, you need your efforts to provide value for you as well as for your prospect. Ultimately, your marketing needs to lead to sales and revenue. Along the way there can be smaller conversions. In fact, for most B2B marketers, there have to be these micro-conversions before a sale takes place. Prospects need to work their way through their own buying process and through the “know/like/trust” continuum before making a commitment.
These metrics – and a host of others – will help you identify where the problem is, whether that weak link is the website, the content driving prospects to the website, or your value proposition.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by these metrics. There’s a firehose of data in our marketing and not all of it will help you move the needle. But the process isn’t “rocket surgery,” to borrow of phrase from Steve Krug, author of the classic-but-invaluable, “Don’t Make Me Think.” The goal is to attribute your marketing successes and failures to specific components of your marketing.
If your email marketing generates tons of interest and drives a strong percentage of your readers to your website, but you get no sales, how can you use that information to improve those results?
Ultimately, you need to find the clues that will help you take action based on more than a hunch. Gut instinct is good, but gut instinct combined with data is even better. (And it’s the experience of seeing where data leads you that hones your gut instinct, so this approach is a win-win, short-term and long.)
Occasional large-scale changes can re-invigorate a marketing plan that’s beginning to falter and can provide a blast of inspiration that ripples out through the rest of your marketing.
By the way, if you’re interested in hearing some of my podcast and radio appearances, you’ll find a few of them listed on the Andigo website.
Photo by Ekaterina Grosheva on Unsplash
