Making your marketing work

Spring has sprung…finally.  This is a good time of year to reflect back on the last few months and decide what worked and what didn’t for your business. All too often, companies at the start of the year create and launch marketing campaigns without ever reviewing the end results.  In order to ensure your marketing is performing as it needs to, to enable you to meet your business goals, it is vital that you take the time to look back at the last few months and review the impact of your marketing activity.
To help you get started, we have highlighted below some key areas your business should be reviewing and some simple steps to help get your social media, website and email campaigns running smoothly this Spring.

Website:

We cannot stress enough the importance of reviewing your website’s performance through Google Analytics. Yes, the amount of data can be overwhelming and sometimes it’s difficult knowing where to start and how to use the data available. Reviewing the basics first, for example number of visitors, referral, search and direct traffic and the bounce rate, will help provide you with a good idea of how successful your website is performing. However, there are a few additional metrics we’d recommend including in your review:

• Page load speed

There has been an increasing importance placed on page load speeds when it comes to user experience and its impact on a site’s search engine ranking. Internet users have a notoriously short attention span and if a site takes more than a few seconds to load a page, users will quickly loose interest. To find out how you can improve the page load speeds on your website, the nice people at Google have provided a free tool, PageSpeed Insights

• Devices

The way we engage online is changing. More and more people are using mobile devices to access information quickly. You might find that the majority of your visitors access your site through mobile, if so, you would need to present you site in a way that bests fits with this form of device.

Social media:

Vowed to make the most of what social media has to offer your business? It is common for businesses to dive into social media, joining all the relevant platforms and making a promise to move the company’s marketing online. However, many companies are often disappointed with the results social media generates.

Has your social media activity been disappointing? Have you struggled to write interesting content and find interesting updates to share with your followers? Like any marketing activity, you will need to put in place a social media strategy that aligns with your overall marketing objectives. The strategy doesn’t have to be complicated, but it will help your team understand what it is you want to achieve from your social media activity and how you plan to achieve it. Consider what content they should be sharing, what links they should be including and who they should be targeting.

Social media doesn’t have to be time consuming. If you’re struggling to update your accounts consistently, there are tools like Hootsuite that will let you schedule tweets and Facebook updates. You could schedule a whole week’s worth of posts in 15 minutes.

Email marketing:

Have you recently launched an email campaign? Did you review the results? Was it successful?

We have previously discussed the importance of fine-tuning your email marketing and making the most of what email software has to offer. If you are struggling to get good results from your campaigns, it is important that you review where you might be going wrong. Several factors can influence the success rate of your marketing emails, including:

• Time of day your emails were sent
• The subject line
• Email content and links
• Plain text or HTML?
• Your data

A/B split testing campaigns can help you decide what time of day, content and subject line work best for your database.

Segmenting your database down into sensible groups, rather than sending one email to everyone on the list, will improve open and engagement rates. In addition, it will also help you identify if certain segments of your list are poor quality or not receptive to email marketing as a marketing medium.

A poor campaign could actually be the best thing that happens to your marketing, if it provides you with an insight which can inform and improve your future marketing programmes. If you cannot pinpoint what went wrong, it then just becomes a waste of money.

To aid this process, make sure you make changes to campaigns iteratively, so you can attribute any changes in results to a particular amendment.

Good luck and make sure your marketing is working for your business!