The advent of technology means that the effect of every marketing activity can be measured, but is your marketing department providing you the entire picture of your marketing efforts? Here are 3 things to look at to make sure your marketing department is testing, measuring, and focused in their marketing efforts.
1) Are they identifying and segmenting your potential customers?
The importance of an accurate and fully developed persona can easily be overlooked. However, sending one message to all of your potential customers is not only lazy, but it is also ineffective. Some of your customers may respond to email, others to social media, and others to a well-developed blog.
Your agency should be constantly working with you to identify the general personas of your customers. Knowing how to talk to them not only improves your leads’ receptiveness to your material, but also makes it easier for you to come up with content that speaks directly to their questions and pain-points.
Don’t forget to segment your leads by their position in the buyer’s journey as well. Content that targets a buyer’s persona in their specific position in the buyer’s journey not only generates more leads, it generates higher quality leads.
2) Do they focus on vanity metrics instead of conversion metrics?
It’s very easy to report feel good numbers. Those “vanity metrics” such as web traffic, the number of likes, or new followers. It just feels good to be noticed right? Unfortunately, increased visibility doesn’t translate into increased business.
If your monthly marketing reports with these vanity metrics, you should know you aren’t looking at the entire picture. Instead of vanity metrics, ask your department to focus on conversion metrics. These metrics, such as leads generated, forms submitted, click-throughs on emails will show you what your audience actually engages in, not just views.
It’ll also help you focus and refine your marketing strategy so you aren’t just throwing content at the wall hoping it’ll stick.
3) Are they running A/B tests?
Remember those rebellious teenage years when you thought you had the answers to everything? And then as you grew older you started realizing you didn’t know as much as you thought? Well, unfortunately, in marketing there is rarely a correct answer that will automatically inspire customers to buy.
Fortunately, you can preform A/B tests. An A/B test is trying two different versions of the same email/webpage/etc. changing (typically) one factor to see which works best. This could be as simple as changing the subject line to see if one email draws more opens than the other.
A/B tests can be performed with most of your digital marketing efforts and will provide great insight into future marketing efforts. You may, for example, find that personalizing your email subject lines increases the amount of opens you get with a particular persona. The more data you compile the easier it will be to develop and improve your future marketing strategies.
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