A Strategy Requires Data
When planning marketing content, you need to consider many things - but the 5 key focuses are;
Our Customers - new and loyal
Your Product - the variety.
The Data - what you have learnt.
Forward Planning - what you know will be coming.
And the type of content we want to create each month
What results are we looking for?
Within this article, we will be looking at The Data - both what we are looking for and also when is the best time to review and act on your results.
When reviewing the data, it’s easy to be distracted by various “unhelpful” analytics. When setting any objectives for your strategy, you must understand what you want to achieve. And all designs can differ. Targets, more often, will be sales driven, which is pretty straightforward to measure. Sometimes you may want to sell specific items due to over-stocked inventory or a slower seller line. Either way, reviewing this data is easy to quantify. If it is historically a quieter time of year for trading, you may shift to a brand awareness target of increasing data caption or social media following. Again, relatively easy to understand the rate of success.
When looking at social media data, specifically the results, we always want to encourage our clients to look at overall engagement and website taps. Yes, we want our serving content to get “saved”, but this is only to show the algorithm we are creating good content - which is seen by the increased engagement. Likes and comments often have very little return but a website tap means someone was interested enough in your content to continue their journey to your website - making them one step closer to a purchase. The main aim of any marketing is to increase a) brand awareness (reach/engagement) and b) website traffic (website taps, click-through rate).
So when reviewing any data, first of all, ask yourself - what did we want to achieve from this within the strategy - and did we?
When to analyse, when to react.
It’s important not to react too soon when looking at the results of any data - we know there are so many changing variables in marketing - we have to ensure we are looking at the results wide a wide-angle lens. We encourage our clients to share data from the very start of our partnership - especially if something is doing astronomically well (or somewhat terribly). But we only like to make minor adjustments, as often what can do well one week - could potentially fall flat the following week. We know, from experience, that it is after the 90-day point of support that we start to see the dots connecting and magic happen. Therefore, at this point, we begin to notice the data (sales and social media) more. We want to take the learnings from each “success” and see how we can implement this in more ways and understand what makes it successful. As well as look at what’s not performing, understand it and improve it.
There are very few “quick wins” in business- most of the time it is through a thoughtful plan and a detailed evaluation that we can build and grow. So it’s essential to allow the time to understand the actual results of what you are creating - rather than making knee-jerk reactions.
If you are looking to take you digital and content marketing to the next level and know you need a little support in understanding the data, as well as creating content to reflect that, get in touch - we would love to chat more about your business.