The world of advertising can seem like a fickle beast. Not only does it take time to plan, arrange and execute the best marketing strategy you can muster, but once it’s out in the wilderness, how the public will respond is hard to guess. Sure, you can make a campaign that ‘seems’ funny to your business managers, your focus groups and some of your most die-hard followers, but what about the people who may have this as a first impression of your business? If you think about this too much, nerves can set in.
However, you can take a load off your mind by analyzing the metrics carefully after you begin your marketing campaign. This can help you not only learn what mistakes you have made, but also what successes you have achieved. Additionally, this allows you to make adjustments to your campaign on the fly, while also building the next one from the foundations with more insight. This can end up saving you money, and increasing your return on investment.
To help you move in this direction, we have collected some of the following worthwhile advice.
Use Excellent Management Services
It’s worth using professional services to help bump up your ROI and manage the metadata and results for you. With the best PPC Management Company you can routinely ensure your ad testing and click-through rates are the best they can be. Additionally, years of experience in designing landing pages that work for you can help any business, even those who may be slightly unsure, understand that they have all of their boxes ticked.
This relatively small investment can guarantee from the offset that your marketing budget is not being put to waste, nor that your presence online is simply visible without returned substance. Without a means of tracking your effect like this, your business may find itself continually repeating the same mistakes until it knows better. There’s nothing wrong with being ineffective as a business when trying new systems, but there’s everything wrong with staying ineffective. Using the correct PPC management service to help you out, you can subvert that entire misdirected approach in the first place.
Read Your Social Media Metrics
Social media metrics can be thoroughly useful in helping you gauge your post activity. For instance, let’s take Twitter as an example. Twitter allows you to see how well your tweets are doing by offering ‘Tweet Activity’ on every single post. Here you can see how many people have viewed your tweet, or retweeted and liked it. Additionally, you can see how many people have expanded your tweet to read the details, or how many people have visited your page with a profile click from that particular post.
This is just one measure in a larger degree of social blade utilities offered by all social media firms. If you’re not analyzing this data and comparing the success of your posts within each environment, you are missing a useful trick. Additionally, sometimes being visible is as useful as ever to ensure a worthwhile marketing strategy. There’s a reason social media pages from companies post regularly, be that little insights, business events, product unveils or even ‘shading’ other companies on Twitter in a joking context – it’s not because the social media managers behind these companies are ‘cool’, rather because they wish to be visible and to continually remain part of the conversation.
Understand The Commentary You’re Getting
Of course, it’s important to know what people are saying about you, and social media is a great palace to start it. To return to Twitter, simply typing in your brand name into the search function can see the singular tweets people have written about you – good and bad. Support teams will often review these posts and sometimes even reach out if a bad product or service experience has been had.
Additionally, you can also read the replies to your posts, or comments left on your timeline. People are all-too-blunt about their feelings regarding certain posts. While it’s harder to measure the zeitgeist in actual numbers, the insight you gain here can be valuable. If an overwhelming number of people are mocking your new advertising slogan, or getting in on the joke, you may wish to alter or strengthen your approach from there respectively.
It can seem as though heading into the very depths of social media activity is nothing less of a waste of time, because it’s hard to bring that as concrete evidence to show how well you’re doing. However, it’s still important to note where you fall in this conversation, because it’s from here that certain insights can be gained. If you ignore this entire area of potential value, odds are you’ll struggle to stay informed.
Consider Watchtime & Skips
Online video advertising is an interesting topic, because there are a plethora of platforms via which they can be dispersed. Let us move from Twitter and take YouTube as an example, as it is by far the largest video sharing site to be found. Your advertisement must be geared to the medium in which it is being posted. For instance, if you post a twenty-minute demonstration of your services to play before a YouTube video, you can guarantee it will be skipped within the first five seconds every time. This sounds outlandish, but brands actually do this.
Additionally, through your advertising dashboard you can see how many people are clicking on, or passing through your advertisements. Does your content grab them in the first five seconds? Are you ensuring a high number of skips? How could you change this strategy to work for you and not against you? It’s these questions that grant us the means to focus our approach, which should always be seen as a great opportunity to improve.
Use Discount Codes For Influencers
Rather than continually measuring metrics on social blades from third party referral or advertising programmes, it can be worth taking a direct approach. For instance, think of the renewed culture of using influencers to promote products. This is simply a widening of the ‘celebrity endorsement’ we have become so accustomed to, only this time more focused and geared towards a specific community.
However, simply asking an influencer to endorse your brand to their social media followers is one step in the journey. To ensure thorough advertising might, it’s worth ensuring they are given a discount code for their audience to use. This can help you track influencer success with your brand, and from there you will make making sales through metric analysis. That in itself can be a positive trend to fight for, and a worthwhile marketing approach to take.
Analyze Web Traffic
Of course, your web traffic is important to keep on top of and regularly analyze. It’s not just how people visit your website or what page they first encounter, rather, how long they stay there, what they click, what products they add to their basket, or if they register an account. Here you can continually assess just how navigable your web presence is, and what changes you hope to make.
For instance, in your visitation heat map, you may find that certain pages are simply not being visited. This is how you prune your serviced offerings. You may notice that Google and Amazon are forever introducing and cutting back on new initiatives and services that may or may not hold success depending on how useful they are. In a minimal fashion, this iis the same practice you should be adhering to.
Furthermore, understanding exactly where your web traffic is coming from can be important. Was it via a social media post? Perhaps you’re doing well in the SEO rankings, using specialized services to help you get there. Maybe the blog you’re regularly posting from is starting to hold its own in raising your natural organic growth. The more you can approximate this kind of focus, the more you understand all metrics at your command.
Use Serviced Information
Finally, it’s quite important to analyze given serviced metrics before utilizing a certain service. To use an example, smart billboards use motion tracking and camera technologies to assess just how many people walk in front of them each day. This allows the firm that owns said advertising space to charge you more or less depending on natural organic reach – all bound by time and scheduling.
Provided you take this information into account and assess its relevance to your advertising approach, you may ensure further success here. For instance, a company selling merchandise for Pride events may find it lucrative to better advertise through the smart billboard in the LGBTQ district of the city. When you have this information to hand, even your seemingly scattered marketing approaches (those that cannot be measured directly) are measured in advance, and on average. That can grant you more advertising wisdom than you may have expected.
With this advice, we hope you can better ensure your advertising is effective, and that you use the correct methods of measuring your success.
