By Charlie Cummins – bbmm.ie
The basis for any good digital marketing planning strategy is to understand exactly how you currently use on-line/digital and how it’s preforming. From there, you can determine where you want to go for your specific business needs. Analytics provide great tools to help better understand your current position and what you should do next.
Website Analysis
You should be continually reviewing traffic levels and analysing the data for insight. Some key metrics to examine are the “engagement” scores for bounce rate, time spent on site and average page views. Which pages on the website are the most active? You should also look at the geographic origins of your traffic: is it coming from those regions important for your business? Depending on these metrics, part of your future marketing activity may need to include an update of your website to make the user experience more satisfying. If you make changes, measure the results – set some benchmark levels to track ongoing progress.
Social Media Analysis
Analyse your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flicker, YouTube, Google+ and any other channels you may be using. Do an in-depth review of all social media platforms to ensure consistency of look/imagery on each one for maximised brand impact. Check simple things like ensuring the name, address, phone number and email are consistent everywhere. Also ensure that they all cross-link via the website to each other and vice versa. Aim to have the review, photo and information sections as complete as possible. Once that’s done, make it part of your marketing plan going forward to continually refresh social media with new updates. Ensure that all posts correctly display and adjust as needed. Run the built-in analytics on social media platforms to check number of views per post, likes, re-sharing, growth patterns and so on. Analyse to find what works and do more of it!
AdWords Management
If AdWords, or other PPC, are part of your current activity, then ongoing management is crucial. Ideally, this will consist of constant reviews of specific ad performance, click through rates and cost per click. Ongoing evaluation of keyword usage, bid rate adjustments, etc will be crucial in ensuring the overall cost-effectiveness of all budgets allocated to pay per click. Build in periods for adjustment and analyse the results of any changes – are they better? Again, analysis is key to doing better marketing.
Competitor Analysis
It’s important to know where you stand, but it is certainly worth investing time to analyse what your primary competitors are doing digitally. A basic analysis can be done by looking at their websites, seeing what links they have, looking at their social media presence and viewing their posting and blogging activity. Also, analyse how they show up in Google results by searching based on your own keywords. Do they rank higher than you? If yes, is there an obvious reason why. Does your analysis show any competitor weak points you can exploit?
Summary
It is important that you draw insightful conclusions from your all your data sources. Use your analysis data to fine tune your future activity. What’s working? What’s not? Doing this will give you a clear understanding of what adjustments you’ll need to make to your current activity to improve future digital marketing plans for your business.
BBMM provides expert advice and guidance to deliver the above. Contact us on [email protected]
