13 Apr Prioritize Marketing Based on Data
In my opinion you should be reviewing your marketing efforts and evaluating them based on the quality of the results that you achieve. By doing so you can then prioritizing your efforts and do more of what yields you positive results and less of what provides less than acceptable results.
One of the complicated things for most businesses to figure out is what metrics should you be looking at in order to determine a marketing tactics value.
Here are a couple that you can use:
- Leads/sales generated
- Value of referrals to your website
Leads/Sales Generated
This is a no-brainer, right? If a particular marketing channel or campaign generates leads and or sales then this should be taken into account. You do have to take into account your closing rate for your leads. You could generate 100 leads from a particular campaign or channel but if 0% of those leads convert then this too must be taken into account.
Value of Referrals to Your Website
This is, perhaps, a little more complex. Google Analytics can help you with this. For example, you can use some metrics from Google Analytics to understand the value of your traffic from various marketing channels. What we like to look at is: # of new users from a particular source, the time spent, pages viewed, and bounce rate. All of these metrics are available to you in Google Analytics.
It is important to take into account all of these metrics and not just the # of new users from a referral source. I was once speaking with a new client and they told us that they got “tons” of traffic from Pinterest so they believed that they needed to do alot with Pinterest. When we researched “their valuable Pinterest traffic” we saw that the quality of these referrals was lack-luster. They had very low time spent numbers. The page views per user was also extremely low.
I don’t have a formula that you can use but I suggest making a spreadsheet with the Google Analytics data so you can more easily analyze it.
Keep This In Mind
One thing to keep in mind as you do this. If you look at, let’s say, the last 12 months you may be looking at flawed data. Why flawed? Well, if you were not maximizing a particular marketing channel then you may think that the quality score of that channel is low but in fact you may not be benefiting from it properly. This is why you need to run marketing experiments in order to have good data to look at.
This process can and should take some time if you are going to do it right. Don’t expect to be able to run experiments for a week and yield valuable data. Some experiments that we have run for clients have taken as long as 1 year. In the long run this approach will allow you to maximize your marketing results.