This week I’ve been thinking about measuring the impact of your digital marketing. I’ve got a client who has relaunched their website, not really ever done any website analytics and so I suggested that we put some reporting in place.
When they asked me what I thought should be in the report I asked them what they are hoping to get from the new website. Whilst it sounds like that could get us trapped in a circular ‘what do you think I should do?’ ‘what do you want to do?’ state of questioning, what I explained to them was that with so many measure available they need to know what their goals are in order to find the stats that will show them if it is working.
There are so many measures for your digital marketing – website analytics, followers, likes, shares, comments, search rank, views – the list goes on and on. So how do you find out what matters to you?
Take my email newsletter for example. OK, small plug, why don’t you sign up? I write an email to my list every fortnight with digital marketing thoughts and tips aimed at people who run a small business and do their own marketing. Want to join? Sign up here.
So take my email list, I set up the email as a way to share information with small businesses who I might not otherwise get to speak to and start a conversation with them. My subscribe rate is very very small right now, but I’ve already had someone contact me after subscribing to start a conversation. So I could be worried that I don’t have many subscribers, but my open rate is over 70% and I’ve had engagement straight away from someone who wants to work with me, so by my measure it’s been a total success.
Social media is a good example of this. We are often so focused on followers, we forget why we are really there. It won’t do you any good to have over 1k followers if none of them are engaging with your business. What do you want people to do after looking at your social posts? Think about that, tailor your posts to meet that goal and then measure if it has worked. Do customers and potential customers mention your social when they chat to you? I often find that people rarely interact with my posts on LinkedIn, but they often mention what I post to me when we chat in person, so spreading the word about what I do is working, but I wouldn’t know that from looking just at the stats LinkedIn gives me, I need to connect them to what I see happening across my business.
And for my client with the new website? They want to drive traffic to the new website and have people be inspired by the content they are sharing. So I’ve built them a report to look at where their traffic is coming from, what referrals the website gets from social and other places, how they are growing in search and what pages people are looking at once they get to the site. From there they can start to make decisions about what activity they want to do to keep this growing.
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