Any business starting afresh on their marketing is unlikely to be able to predict the perfect strategy right off the bat. This ideal strategy is formed over time, taking into account a significant amount of audience research and data that will inform your future activity.
We cannot stress enough, the importance of utilising your analytics data when planning your future marketing activity. Simply guessing what you think will work well will ultimately waste a significant amount of time and resources. So, what can your analytics data tell you about your marketing? And how can you use this to structure the ideal marketing strategy?
Marketing channels
Knowing what channels will work for your business is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to your marketing strategy. There may be some platforms that common sense would suggest will not work for your business; for example, promoting an accountancy business on Pinterest is highly unlikely to have the desired results, whereas promoting this same business on LinkedIn has a much better chance to success.
Collecting and analysing data from these platforms will provide insight into which platforms are performing more effectively than others. Using this data you can adapt your activity to focus on a particular platform that isn’t bringing the results expected, scrapping activity on a platform or even taking advantage of a platform’s popularity of increasing activity.
Content
In the same respect that analytics data will pinpoint the platforms that are performing well, it will also highlight the type of content that your audience is responding to. From our own experience, we have found that a mixture of content will typically bring great results. This can include company news and relevant industry updates, however, above all else, evergreen content will play a huge role in your content strategy, and analytics data will support this.
Evergreen content is essentially content (be it blogs, videos, infographics, etc) that does not age, and therefore can be shared numerous times, and often performs well the longer it is on your site. This is not to say that evergreen content will not need updating, but by tracking popular pieces in your analytics and reviewing as and when necessary audiences will continue to click through to your website to read or watch these relevant pieces of content.
Forming the ideal marketing strategy for your business takes a significant amount of time, research and data to ensure that you are carrying out the ‘right’ type of activity for the highest returns. I have covered only a couple of aspects to your strategy that analytics data will support. Sales funnels, tracking goals, analysing website journeys and so much more can be analysed with this data and used to improve your marketing strategy.