Champagne Anyone?

Email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, press releases, re-targeting ads. There are tons of marketing tactics and ways for you to get your message out, but they are not all created equally. Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic formula that works best for everyone, so how do you decide what works best for your company? The answer is in the numbers. You’ve heard and read a lot about the value of understanding analytics behind your marketing activities, and you likely get weekly, monthly and quarterly reports that tell you about your website’s traffic, your social media results and everything in between. But are you doing anything differently or better as a result?

It can be easy to get lost in the numbers or become overwhelmed by the volume of reports that throw data at you. It’s a balancing act between analysis/insights and action. The numbers by themselves won’t do anything. It’s the action they inform that will create a difference. We’ve developed an approach that we think strikes the right balance between analysis and action. We use this approach not only for our clients but for our own marketing decisions as well. As we like to say, “we drink our own champagne” and “we practice what we preach”. It all starts with capturing the right data from all your tactics and pulling it together in a centralized, organized data structure that is constructed in a way that will expose the areas for improvement and success. Whether you’re just starting out and using spreadsheets or you are more advanced and using a data warehouse, the objective is the same at this point. Get the right data structure setup to get the right metrics in a place where you can take the next step and analyze the data with purpose and intent to improve. Not only do you want to understand how tactics are working individually, you need to see how they work together and understand their interdependencies. That allows you to develop insights about what is driving your successes. What is working? What isn’t working and why? Those insights lead to action, which is updating and changing your content calendar and then executing what’s on your calendar. That is where the magic really happens.

For us, this approach has highlighted not only the value of thoughtful, original content but also what type of content is working best (is it sports marketing, is it UX, is it business topics?). We have also narrowed our focus on unique LinkedIn messaging and a consistent cadence of email communications with flair (again, because the insights tell us to do so). All of these insights get applied to our content calendar (we use Hey Orca) to drive continuous improvements. Ultimately, this has allowed us to be much more targeted in what we say and how we say it, and it has led to real, tangible results.

While the answers aren’t the same for everyone, the approach and process IS the same and can be applied to just about any organization and all their marketing activities. The answers to your marketing challenges are in your numbers too. You just need to unlock the code.

Are you ready for a glass of Yalo champagne?