Using Data to Determine Your Marketing Strategy and Budgets
What defines successful marketing? This depends on your goals, but it’s usually all about your return on investment (ROI). In other words, is the budget you’re spending on marketing bringing in enough money for you to make a profit? It’s often difficult to determine whether or not a customer has found you due to your marketing efforts or simply by chance, but when it comes to digital marketing, you can usually determine its success by how much traffic you are receiving to your website and how long these users are spending browsing through your pages. This is why it’s so important to analyse the data; it will help you determine whether or not your marketing budget is being well spent.
Whether you’re a start-up or a long-standing business, you can’t really determine your marketing strategy unless you’ve established whether or not you can afford it and whether or not it will be worth your time. As mentioned above, your long-term and short-term goals play a huge part in this. How many sales or new clients would it take for you to make a profit? How likely is it that you will be able to make that many sales etc with your current budget? Get your calculator out and try and put a plan together.
If you’ve invested your money in marketing campaigns in the past, it would be wise to assess the data and determine some successful avenues. Marketing tends to be about trial and errors, so don’t be disheartened if any of your campaigns failed. Instead, learn from your mistakes and allow the data to help you determine where you’d like to invest your budgets going forward. Consider which of your previous campaigns were most successful in terms of your reach and conversions. It’s also wise to check out the competition. There are various marketing and analytics tools that can help you establish some data on your competitors so that you can gain some insight into what works (or doesn’t work) in the industry.
At Innermedia, we regularly report on the performance of our digital marketing clients and we use historical data to help us prepare a plan for your campaign when you first join us. We consider how much traffic the site is receiving, as well as things like the keyword rankings and conversions. We also monitor competitor activity to flag up any useful techniques that we could adopt. From there, we determine areas for improvement and allow it to help establish our future strategies and how we will spend your time going forward. If you require our assistance, do not hesitate to contact us by emailing hello@innermedia.co.uk.
