Consumers don’t always know what they want or need.
As an RA (Resident Assistant) in a college dorm, I was in charge of planning and promoting events for the residents on my floor but had trouble getting people to attend. I asked one resident on my floor if she had any suggestions for boosting attendance.
“Maybe you should put up some signs or something. I haven’t seen any information about the events.”
I pointed to the large sign on the wall right behind us, advertising the next floor event.
“Oh, I didn’t notice that.”
She may have felt silly, but the information was actually very helpful. Obviously, the signs were not drawing any attention. It was not an effective way to get the word out, even if it was the very thing that my target audience requested.
This is why it is important to analyze the results of your marketing; things that ‘should’ work sometimes don’t. While you can discover a lot through basic observation, unbiased data is also helpful and often available for low or no cost. For example, Google Analytics can provide easy-to-understand, detailed information on visits to your web page. Among other things, it shows differentiation between new and repeat guests, traffic sources, geographic vicinity of guests, and how long visitors stay. Find out which of your online placements or connections actually gets the most people to your site. If you’re using Hootsuite, it offers analytics for each social network you have loaded. This makes it easier to measure how specific marketing campaigns impact your social media engagement.
These are just a couple of examples and there are many more opportunities to measure the impact of your current marketing. Web analytics are becoming more widely valued and therefore more accessible; why not take advantage of them?
