If Traditional Marketing Is Dead, How Should I Market My Business?

As we have mentioned previously in our article titled “Why Traditional Marketing Is Dead”, today’s consumers tend to tune out traditional marketing as they are seen as unwarranted interruptions. The consumer of today decides when and where they will engage the brands of their choice. This ultimately is a great advantage to you, the marketer, as you now have the ability to connect consumer actions to outcomes. Through Google Analytics you have the ability to track, analyze, compare and adapt all of your eMarketing campaigns to better suit your needs.

How Google Analytics Can Benefit Your Business.

A/B Testing. A/B testing is the act of testing two different versions of the same campaign. Let’s say for example that you are running PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertisements on Google Adwords. In order to get the best bang for your buck, construct a well developed ad as well as a well developed landing page for users to get sent to when they click your ad. You can then attempt to create variations in the advertisement to see if certain key words in the initial ad lead to more clicks. Your CTR (click-through rate), which is easily tracked through Google Analytics, should be higher in the advertisement that is more effective. Finally, once they reach your landing page you can attempt to try different variations in the landing page to compare conversions (the amount of people who ultimately complete the goal action). Conversions are also easily tracked through Google Analytics. Examples of changes which you could test are: different color combinations of the layout, different CTA’s (call to actions), etc. The landing page with the most conversions is the better of the two and therefore you will get your best ROI (return on investment) by running that ad.

Test Social Media Reach. Although Facebook offers analytics, Twitter does not offer analytics unless you utilize their advertising platform. That being said, Google analytics offers a great option which allows the user to place a tracking code in links. By doing so you can now have improved social media campaigns which are fully traceable. You can monitor the amount of clicks from a given link as well as the amount of unique visitors, pages per visit, bounce rate, etc. You can even compare the amount of people who saw your post vs the amount of people who clicked the link to determine the click through rate. Of course if your link leads to an eCommerce website or a e-mail newsletter sign up you can also calculate the amount of conversions. By dividing the amount of people who purchased a product or signed up for the newsletter by the amount of people who clicked you can determine the effectiveness of both the link as well as your website.

Determine Conversion Rates Per Device. Google Analytics allows you to see what devices your users are accessing your website on. It also allows you to see how well these devices convert your users into paying customers, e-mail subscribers, etc! By having access to this information it allows you to optimize your website for specific devices as you see fit. For example, if you happen to be in an industry whose target market utilizes their mobile phones to conduct most of their interactions, than analyzing the numbers may give you an inclination to optimize your website specifically for those users. This will create a great ROI for your marketing efforts.

Other Ways Google Analytics Can Optimize Your Marketing Efforts.

• Find out the best times to post your content through the Google Analytics Android app. Google’s Android app provides an invaluable piece of information. The ability to see when the majority of your audience is consuming information online. As mentioned earlier Google Analytics gives you the opportunity to turn actions into outcomes. What better way to do that then to target your posts and materials for the times when they are already consuming content!
• Figure out how your campaign has progressed over time. Through Google Analytics you are able to see how your campaign (and it’s reach) has evolved over time. This is incredible as it will allow you to see how your campaign has improved, or declined. Either way this will help you adapt your campaign to be more effective.
• Set up an internal site search. If you own an eCommerce website with a search feature, you are able to set up an internal site search to see what your customers are searching for on your website. This puts you in the driver seat as you are able to see what items are the most popular, as well as what popular items you could add to your repertoire that maybe you haven’t considered.
• See your referrals. Google Analytics gives you the option to see where your website visitors saw the link that they ultimately clicked to reach your site. This is great news because you can see if your organic search results are improving (more users are reaching your site organically through Google.) Or maybe you published an interesting PR article on your business that is now catching traction on the internet and people are suddenly interested in visiting your website. Either way this is a win-win situation for you and your marketing campaign.

Well, that’s it for this week. Thank you for everyone who read the article and make sure to leave any questions, comments, or concerns in the comment section! Thanks!