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Analyzing a large amount of marketing information can sometimes be a complicated matter.
So, what should you do when faced with a concrete question you want to answer with clear marketing data? Can you provide yourself or your client a quick answer to a question about our campaign without being dizzied by too many figures?
There are two fundamental points on the way to a clear answer:
1. Formulate The Question
In order to receive a clear answer, you must first formulate a clear question. “Is our brand succeeding online?” is an example of an unclear question. It’s not clear to which period the word “succeeding” is referring to, it’s not clear how “success” is measured by the decision-makers, and even the word “online” can infer any number of meanings.
In order to create a clear question, you must first define your expectations from your online branding activity using the following questions:
• What is the time period you want to examine (e.g., a week, month, the first quarter)?
• What will you consider a success (e.g., increased sales, greater exposure, initiation of a discussion)?
• What are the marketing channels you want to examine (e.g., Facebook, Google Search, all online activity)?
• How will you measure their success?
If, for example, you choose “initiation of a discussion” as a key to success, Facebook as the marketing channel and the previous month as the time period, you might define success as “100 comments on our posts during the last month.”
Some of you are probably asking how to gauge a specific number to measure success against. Good question! There are certainly professional ways of arriving at such a number for our example above, such as examining your competitors’ average number of online reactions, examining the number of comments you received during recent months, and adding a growth factor percentage, or searching the internet for benchmarks — an average performance figure for our field of activity. But our goal today is to save, not create more work, and so my (perhaps surprising) answer is to use whatever feels right or appropriate. If you’re not new to Facebook, the number you suggest will probably not be five or 10,000 but rather something reasonably logical. Trust yourself.
2. Find The Most Appropriate Analytical Tool
The most common tools for analyzing online marketing data are Google Analytics and the independent analytical tools of each of the social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. If you are not familiar with these tools, I suggest you get to know them — they contain a lot of valuable information.
From the moment you define your marketing question, the route to choosing a relevant tool for finding the answer should be short and simple. For example, if the question you define is “Did I reach 100 comments on my Facebook page last month?” you can find the answer within 60 seconds via the Insights section on your Facebook page.
And what if you defined the number of sales of a particular product on your website as the success index? Or the desired number of leads? It is quite simple to locate each one of these figures using the free and simple tools mentioned above without the need for any complicated downloads or an intensive two-month course.
Let’s try and demonstrate what we’ve learned via the following example:
Let’s assume that you run a local club that hosts a monthly performance of an excellent standup comedian. The club has 200 seats, but you only succeed in selling 100 tickets via the internet each month.
Your media budget stands at $5,000 and each ticket costs $100. So, you expend $5,000 and sell 100 tickets at $100 each ($10,000 in total). The return on your investment, therefore, stands at $2 of income for every dollar expended.
Because we still have another 100 seats to fill in the hall, we ask ourselves if, when we double the media budget to $10,000, we can fill the hall and still maintain the 2-1 return on investment ratio.
This is a question faced daily by millions of advertisers worldwide. When achieving good results, there is, on the one hand, a constant desire to increase our expenses in order to increase income, accompanied, on the other hand, by a fear that we will fail to preserve our return on investment and maybe even run the risk of our expenses exceeding our income.
As said above, we will start with a clear formulation of a marketing question: “Have I, using all marketing channels, already reached the entire target audience for this standup performance during the last month?”
If my campaign has already reached the entire target audience and I succeeded in selling them 100 tickets, doubling the budget will enable me to increase the frequency that this same audience sees my ads, but it will not expose me to a new audience. The chance of doubling the number of purchases in this situation is low.
If, however, I discover that I have only reached 50% or less of my target audience, this would suggest that if I were to double the budget and reach a new audience, I may also succeed in doubling the number of purchases.
What is the best tool for examining this question?
If, for example, the campaign is conducted on Facebook, I will turn to the Facebook Ads Manager and use it to assess the reach my campaign attained. If I estimate my target audience on Facebook at 50,000 and the campaign’s reach is less than 25,000 users, that would be a positive sign.
In conclusion, it’s true that tasks like correctly defining questions and finding the appropriate analytical tool may initially take more than a few minutes, but if you practice these tasks enough, you will save yourself time, learn much more and, most importantly, make better decisions based not on gut feeling but on precise, clear-cut information.
