This past November, along with SEO agency Evolve Digital Labs, Gorilla 76 co-hosted and presented at our second Get Digital Seminar in St. Louis. The event was an all-day, learning-intensive introduction to web marketing. Above is a 5-minute highlight video from my presentation on measuring results across across web marketing channels, including your website, social media and search engines. A summary of my session follows.
So much data out there
The quantity of raw data available to marketers today can be totally overwhelming if you don’t know how to parse through it. The first third of my presentation focused on how to distinguish between what can be measured and what should be measured. The key is in understanding how to filter through it all, make sense of what bits matter and infuse your learnings into adjustments to your web marketing strategy.
What dictates success or failure?
A common thread from one presentation to the next throughout the day was constructing a web marketing strategy around real business goals. In this session on measurement, I emphasized the importance of measuring against these goals and counting your successes and failures not just by direct sales, but rather by other critical factors for your business such as lead generation, brand awareness and thought leadership.
Measuring the performance of your website
During the middle third of my session I shifted the focus from “what” to “how” in measurement. I used the pyramid graphic below to illustrate the crucial idea that your website is home base. Measurement needs to begin there because your website is your property and you have total control over what happens there. It’s your place to capture leads, publish valuable content for your audience and define who your brand really is. Using tools like conversion tracking in Google Analytics lets you understand your success or failure in doing these things.
Measuring the traffic drivers to your site
After measuring your site’s success and or failure, your attention can turn to the social channels where your content is promoted and the search engines where your content is found by active searchers. Measurement in these channels revolve around your ability to engage your audience and drive traffic to your website, where you then can funnel visitors toward conversions.
Measuring opportunity
Measurement of your own performance is only a piece of the pie. From keyword research to content publishing opportunities to identifying influencers in the social channels, there is plenty to be learned about your marketplace. While tools exist to help you get the job done, there’s plenty of grunt work to do as well.
Reporting and adjusting
All these learnings go to waste unless you do something with them. I concluded the day by emphasizing that you must make use of the data you’ve collected by generating reports for yourself, your boss, your business partners or whoever would benefit from seeing it. Then figure out how it can be used to make your marketing strategy more effective.
Future seminars and corporate consultation
While no future seminars are planned at the moment, you can check out the Get Digital site for updates. We also put on 1-2 day private, customized seminars to help businesses implement a web marketing strategy. You can contact me (Joe Sullivan) at joe@gorilla76.com if you’d like to discuss a corporate consultation engagement like this.
