Set your objectives beforehand
Setting your objectives and goals before diving is a must. It’s the best way to ensure your team is working toward a common goal, while increasing the odds that you’ll hit your key performance indicators.
Your marketing teams’ main objective needs to relate to overall business goals. What’s the top profit generator for your business? That’s one place to start.
Marketing objectives might be:
- Generate high-quality leads at scale
- Improve checkout conversion rate
- Increase profit margins
- Boost sales through upselling and cross-selling
- Increase customer loyalty
- Reduce abandoned carts
Use the SMART goals framework when deciding on objectives. For example, yours can be “Reduce abandoned carts by 5% in Q1.” Goals don’t need to be complex, but they have to be clear.
Then break down your goals into actionable steps and send them to your teams:
- Decide on the goal you want to achieve.
- Prioritize the tasks you need to fulfill to get there.
- Specify how to fulfill each task.
- Send those marketing objectives to decision-makers and managers.
Establish benchmarks
A benchmark is the set standard at which you compare something to. When used for digital marketing and web analytics, it involves taking note of a distinct metric (abandoned cart, customer acquisition cost, etc.) over a period of time, then using the benchmark to infer conclusions during decision making. Benchmarks provide valuable content and help you set meaningful targets and find out how you compare to yourself over time.
For example, say you are working on an SEO campaign to improve website traffic in November. You may track metrics such as pageviews, average time on page, bounce rate, and exit rate. November will act as the test period for your changes, so you decide that October site metrics will be your benchmark.
If you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily compare the two time frames to see results.
Each campaign will have a different benchmark. If you’re running ads, it may be the previous CTR or CPC. The important thing is to set a timeframe and specific metric to benchmark, so you can understand if your campaigns are successful or not.
Optimize your campaigns
“Analytics is focused on measuring business performance and the variables that assist such performance. Optimization is the next step because it attempts to improve performance by incrementally tweaking marketing variables and their levels such that they are configured more appropriately or optimally,” Siva says.
“For example, a business may spend on variables such as advertising to customers, devote resources to improve channel relationships, and other promotion efforts as part of its marketing campaign. All these factors drive performance metrics such as sales, profits, and market share.”
Siva adds that to make sure that resources devoted to each variable are configured, “businesses often use simulations and experimentation to identify optimal resource allocation decisions across variables that drive performance.”
Read more: The Beginner's Guide to Analyzing Shopify Reports and Analytics
Incorporate data into your company’s routine
You can really see the difference in performance of companies that incorporate data into their weekly routines. Merchants in the habit of analyzing data, getting marketing insights from their analytics, and putting those insights into action are the ones who become the most successful.
Making data analytics a habit is simple. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or part of a team, all you need to do is implement weekly check-ups.
Successful companies focus on solving their biggest bottlenecks first. Start every week by opening your analytics and taking a clear view of what your priorities and marketing initiatives need to be for the coming days.
By understanding, for example, that your average page load time is high in comparison to your peers (or your previous week), and that page load time directly impacts conversions, you’ll know that its reduction should be a top priority for you.
Tommy & Steve.
