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The Key To Marketing Success Isn't Your Creative, It's Your Analytics

Forbes Agency Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Jon Simpson

It's easy to get lumped into the “creative” bucket when discussing marketing. If you say, “I’m in marketing,” all of the sudden everyone in finance or technology starts cracking jokes about your being artsy or creative. While this may be the prevalent view of marketing, it’s certainly a misguided one.

Yes, a lot of marketing relies on the creative, the visually stunning and the artistic. But in order for marketing to be successful, it also has to prove its value, which ties back to analytics. Constantly, marketers are forced to prove their return on investment to clients or their C-suite. And many struggle to do so. In fact, per ITSMA/Vision Edge Marketing, 84% of marketers are unable to measurably state the value of their marketing endeavors to their businesses -- but the ability to do so is a core component of continued marketing success.

Knowing The Right Metrics

While web analytics (such as site traffic) can be important metrics, this doesn’t always equip you to reach the right conclusions about your marketing efforts.

Site traffic measures only one factor of marketing success: the effectiveness of your content to generate awareness. However, site traffic should not be underestimated as a tool. Take one of our clients, a mixed-use development in Dallas, as an example: When it first starting with us, the company's average monthly blog views were mostly stagnant, at around 5,500. Using this number as our benchmark, we created a new approach focused on adjusting the type of blog content we featured, and creating an aggressive social media strategy designed to expand its reach in the Dallas market. The following month, blog views jumped to about 8,600. To ensure this wasn’t a fluke, our team kept the same strategy and consistently tracked views over time. Within three months, views increased to a whopping 18,000 monthly. With this, we were able to prove our value as an awareness generator for our client, achieving the company's primary goal – something we couldn’t have done without analytics.

For a client only concerned about awareness, traffic numbers are a great measure. But this should not be the only analytic tracked regularly. Some clients are less concerned about the quantity of traffic so much as the quality of the traffic. You can measure the quality of traffic through bounce rate or by taking a look at conversion rates.

Another client, a national property management software solutions provider, was competing against larger, more established software companies. This client was less concerned with the number of leads and more concerned about the type of leads it was generating. So how do we measure that?

In September 2016, the client had an average bounce rate of 50%. Not a horrible bounce rate by web standards, but significantly increased after its website redesign. The company was also receiving a large number of smaller leads, with fewer unit amounts than its average client. We made adjustments to the company's website, including updating the language to speak to larger property management companies, and changed form fields to focus only on larger unit companies. Since then, we’ve been able to keep the bounce rate low (averaging at about 15%-20% monthly) and minimizing leads coming in with a lower unit count. In addition, we redesigned the "request a demo" page to better serve the company's target market, bumping the conversion rate from 7% to 10%.

While the changes made for this client were creative in nature (page redesigns, web copy refreshes), the way we were able to prove the worth of those changes was through the use of analytics. Analytics allowed us to see the impact of our changes (if any) and make adjustments if necessary. It may seem like common sense to use analytics to drive these tactics that focus on lead and customer acquisition, but shockingly, only 37% of marketers use analytics to drive their customer decisions.

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The Value Of Testing And Retesting

Perhaps the most important aspect of analytics is the ability to test, measure, then retest. Known as A/B testing, this allows you to change small elements — an email subject line or form title — and compare how each version performs. It’s a means to constantly check how effective messaging is to your persona, and yet most marketers fail to use it. For our team, it’s something of an analytics pro tip.

Consider our national property management software solutions client again: There was some debate as to the most effective headline on the company's demo landing page, and whether “discover” or “innovative” was a better power word. As such, we ran an A/B test. The result? Conversion rates were within a 0.02% difference of each other — far too small to state whether or not the words made a difference. While this test had no significant results, the ability to test a theory on conversions was a huge success in proving our worth to the client, and backing the value of what we do as marketers.

If you’re not an analytical marketer out of the gate, don’t fret. Analytics are tricky. But if you want to see success in your marketing, you will need to adopt an analytics-first method. The key to success with analytics is the “ferris wheel” approach: Everything you do should fall at a specific point in the cyclical pattern of measure, analyze, strategize, implement, measure and analyze again. Only then will you have the impactful data to back your results.