May 2022 - BSA Marketing

It is a while since we have turned our attention to effective marketing analytics (here are some of our previous musings) but there is a lot going on in the field just now so I felt it was high time for an update.

What is Analytics?

I know half my marketing spend is wasted - I just don't know which half.

This quote has been variously attributed to numerous business leaders over the past half-century or so. Sometimes perhaps, as a tongue-in-cheek jibe at the perceived smoke and mirrors nature of marketing. Marketing is speculative. You communicate your message to your market in the hope/expectation that they will see the benefit of your offering. You then wait for customers flocking to your door/website to do business.

An effective marketing process certainly achieves this success but the bottom line is that some elements of your process will work better than others. It’s just not always easy to tell which are the nuggets!

This is where analytics come in. In parallel with the rise and rise of the internet as a marketing platform, analytics have developed as a way to measure how your market responds to your marketing messages. It used to be that you had to wait to see how many orders you took and then try to equate this business to your marketing activity. With analytics, you can see a granular measurement of the impact of different actions you take. You can measure virtually any interaction with your website, social media, online advertising etc. Thanks to Google Analytics, you can often do this at little or no cost. This is both a blessing and a curse. There is so much data available. It is easy to disappear down the analytics rabbit hole and lose sight of your main objective: to drive effective marketing to improve your business.

Avoiding the Rabbit hole

The path taken by many people is to simply ignore analytics entirely! This may not be ideal but at least it makes the problem go away, albeit at the expense of missing out on any of the benefits that analytics can offer.

Analytics: Just another marketing tool

I suggest that a better approach is to see analytics for what it is: Another marketing tool. By itself, it isn’t necessarily a lot of help. However, incorporate selected analytics into your Planning, and it becomes immensely valuable.

I’m sorry but there is no such thing as a free lunch. So many marketing tools are promoted as a magic wand but they just aren’t! Like everything in business (and life!) to get good results you need to invest time and effort (and sometimes some money!).

Dashboards are a great start

An analytics dashboard can be a great way of sorting the wood from the trees. As part of your marketing plan, select a modest number of key metrics that can give you a real insight into your marketing process and then build these into a custom dashboard which can automatically collect the data you are interested in and present it in a clear, easily understood format of graphs and tables like this:

This is an example of one of our own BSA dashboards. If your marketing processes are more involved, it is perfectly possible to set up multiple dashboards. You can focus separate dashboards on different aspects of your business and marketing.

Integrated Analytics

By far the leader in the Analytics field is Google Analytics….and why not! It is free to use and, no matter which platforms and sites you use for your online marketing, you can integrate them into your Google Analytics account. This way, you create a one-stop shop for your web-based marketing data. As I mentioned before, it can have a steep learning curve. However, with a bit of help and/or some time spent researching, you can soon be generating valuable data to help you make effective marketing decisions.

However, changes are afoot….

All change for Google Analytics…

Google launched analytics in 2005, initially as a premium service but switched to the free model in the following year. The service is regularly updated with the (now ubiquitous) Universal Analytics (UA) platform being launched in 2012. Now, 10 years later, Google has announced that next year, Universal Analytics will stop tracking data. The service is being replaced by Google Analytics 4 (GA4). For the time being, UA and GA4 are running in parallel.

Make the switch to GA4

If you use Google analytics, now is a good time to set up GA4. Your existing UA setup will continue to work until the middle of 2023 but setting up the GA4 platform now will allow you to gather data on both platforms in parallel facilitating a seamless transfer next year. As things stand, Google has said that UA will continue to exist and hold historic data but it will not gather any new data after 1 July 2023.

There are lots of resources online to help you set up GA4 but if you would like some assistance, or to discuss analytics and marketing in the wider context of your business, do get in touch.

As we discuss in our latest podcast, one of the most common things we hear from clients is “What I need to do is get my website to the top of Google…”

Like so many marketing ideas, this seems to make sense yet the reality is so different.

Many digital marketers and agencies promote Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as a stand-alone service: “…you pay me £xx per month and I will do stuff on your website to make it rank more highly….” The offer sounds plausible yet I rarely meet business owners who say that SEO has had a significant and positive impact on their business. Normally it is the opposite – another marketing service that sounds great but falls short on delivery of real benefit.

The truth is that SEO is simply a marketing tool and no single marketing tool is the answer. Effective marketing comes from a joined-up, holistic approach which considers all aspects of a business, its target market and how it engages with that market.

In simple terms, don’t try and force your marketing – just tell your story and show how people will benefit from doing business with you.

Technology is your friend

As the algorithms that lie behind modern search engines get ever more sophisticated, it becomes pointless to try to beat them. The goal of a search engine (conspiracy theories aside!) is to deliver effective, relevant answers to the queries that searchers put in. For your website, natural content is the best route. If you have good, relevant and engaging content, the search engines will find it. Visitors who then find your site and stay there, interacting with your content, tell the search engines that your content fits with their original search. This process can help make your site rank ever higher – all because you have good content.

SEO is just a tool. A well-written website with relevant content is likely to naturally rank well in all but the most competitive markets. There are some great tools out there to help you, as a business owner, take control of your own SEO. For WordPress users, check out YOAST

Creating engaging content is all very well but a business website should be doing more than just keeping site visitors happy. As a business owner, what’s in it for you?

What is your website for?

Ask most business owners why they have a website and their answer will be something along the lines of…”It’s my shop window“. Any high-street retailer will tell you about the importance of their shop window. On the street or on-line the shop window is a vital part of the business process charged with achieving 3 things for visitors/potential customers:

Inform the visitor – “I think I am in the right place here to find what I am looking for”
Engage – “I have confidence that this company can deliver on its proposition.”
Encourage – “I can see what to do next, I want to take the next step”

Analytics – The unsung hero

One of the real strengths of internet marketing is the ability to measure. If SEO is about ranking, analytics is about monitoring visitors numbers and tracking what they do when they arrive at your site. Analytics is what tells you if your SEO efforts are doing you any good – or not! However, the majority of small business owners rarely, if ever, use analytics to manage their online marketing.

The issue isn’t cost – many powerful analytics tools are free. I believe it is one of understanding. Analytics has the potential to blind you with science. It can look so darned complicated it’s just too challenging to get your head around. Yet, actually, analytics isn’t complicated. The key is deciding what it is that you want to measure. Take this step and the rewards are plenty.

In the famous quote, 19th Century US businessman John Wanamaker said:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Effective use of analytics can start to help answer this question. By getting earlier insight into how your market place is engaging with your marketing through your website you can tune your activities more quickly and cost-effectively.

Search marketing is not just about natural search rankings

If you do want to get your site onto the first page of Google, then natural SEO is to the only tool at your disposal. In many cases paid advertising is also well worth consideration. Yes this does have a direct cost, but so does natural optimisation (It takes time to implement, and time is money!). In reality, good marketing costs. One advantage of paid advertising is that this cost is direct and manageable. When combined with a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve and the value of these interactions along side solid analytics, its possible to carefully manage these costs, and ensure that your advertising spend is delivering results..

Whilst not always appropriate, I would suggest that if you want to be found on search pages, then advertising is always worth considering as part of the mix.

Steps on the way

Content-driven SEO helps people find your website. Good, relevant content engages visitors, making them want to explore further. Effective ‘calls to action’ tell how to take the next step. By this stage, the website has done its job. If your site is e-commerce and the next step is to place an order, the business is secured. If the next step is to send an email or pick up the phone to make an enquiry, the process goes on…more steps in your business which need to be equally joined-up.

SEO may be the starting point of the business-development journey but to be truly effective, it needs to be integrated into the rest of your marketing. The whole process must be joined up end-to-end.

Stay in control of your marketing

You can’t sub-contract the marketing of your business. You can buy-in skills and advice but ultimately it is your business and you should be in control. Marketing is one of the core fundamentals in business – you need to be in charge of it.

Keep the plates spinning on all of these elements and manage your business to take it in the direction you want to go – your personal and business goals.

BSA can’t do your marketing for you but we can help you make sure your marketing really works for you and your business. Call us.

Month: May 2022

Effective Marketing Analytics

SEO and joined-up marketing

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