Since Business X’s overarching marketing goal was to gain email addresses for email marketing, all other marketing activities had to be geared towards that end. So social media campaigns needed to entice people to click through to a landing page that collected their email address. The website needed to give visitors the chance to share their email on every page. And even the email newsletter going out to current subscribers needed to ask them to forward it to a friend who might find it useful, in the hopes that they might subscribe, too.
7. Develop individual marketing campaigns and initiatives.
Within your new strategy, you can now finally begin to create individual campaigns. Again, these should all be geared towards driving the specific, quantifiable conversions you’ve decided on, which should all contribute clearly to your larger business goals.
» Business X decided they would post educational blog posts filled with useful industry information on LinkedIn on a regular basis, as well as taking an active part in the conversations in relevant LinkedIn Groups. They also planned to create a free e-book containing valuable information for their target audience, promote it on Twitter, and give it away to anyone who subscribed to their emails. And they decided to start updating their website with new, search-friendly content, in order to attract more prospects via Google.
8. Realize that the marketing strategy and campaigns you just spent so much time on will need to change—many times.
You already know this, but knowing something and really being ready and willing to do it are two different things. In order to become an agile marketer, you’ve got to be truly willing to make changes—sometimes tiny, sometimes drastic— based on what you see in your analytics. And not just once, but over and over again—every single time you see something that needs to be acted on. Creating a strategy is not a one-and-done–type thing. Your strategy and campaigns will need constant tweaking.
» Business X committed to thinking of each change they would make as the next step in an ongoing process, not as revisiting something that had been finished.
9. Don’t expect instant results.
Unless you’re a growth hacker looking for instant results from an intensive marketing push, it’s not just okay but necessary to give your strategy some time to work. Don’t get worried if orders don’t start pouring in immediately once you publish that blog post, or if no one has signed up for your webinar yet, even though you sent the email yesterday. Look at what’s happening week by week, and often even month by month, to see where trends are emerging and where changes need to be made. As a general rule of thumb, the newer your online marketing strategy is, the more time it will need to work. A company that’s brand new to blogging or to social media might not see results for ninety days or even longer, while a company simply making tweaks to an existing strategy might start seeing results within a week.
» Business X decided to look at their analytics on a daily basis in order to see what was taking off and what was not so successful, but determined that they would hold back for at least ninety days and give their campaigns a chance to work rather than get frustrated and change things too soon.
10. Put things in motion, and then fan the flames.
Take action on your campaigns, and start watching your analytics. Now that the groundwork has been laid for agile, analytics-driven marketing, the real work begins. This is where you monitor, analyze, and then tweak, over and over again, until you have optimized and fine-tuned your campaigns and your strategy to achieve their highest possible levels of success. This is where you find out where the momentum is slowly beginning to build in your marketing efforts, and then fan the flames by adding more and more fuel to those successful areas.
» Business X launched its campaigns, and then saw that their conversations in LinkedIn Groups were having a real effect on quality traffic coming to their site, so they decided to ramp up their efforts in that area. They also noticed that traffic from search was still not as high as they wanted it to be, so they decided to try paid ads on Google as well. They discovered that Twitter posts that included an image were significantly more effective at driving traffic to the site to subscribe than those without, so they created images to attract more attention. The constant tweaks paid off in more conversions—more email addresses—which in turn meant that overall business goals were being reached.
» Analytics Tools
Tracking all this data sounds complicated, but there are plenty of tools you can use to keep tabs on it all. When it comes to analytics, however, there’s no one-size-fits-all tool that tracks every piece of data on every platform. So it’s important to understand what types of tools are available, and how to combine them to get the best insight into your audience’s behavior.
The analytics tool that should have the most direct and noticeable impact on your day-to-day marketing activities and campaigns is marketing automation software. This branch of business software covers a very wide range of capabilities, although the term typically is used to define software that helps marketers to:
collect and track data, often across multiple channels
organize and sort that data to make database segmentation much easier when creating targeted campaigns
actually help execute marketing campaigns, while tracking the progress and results of those efforts
Here’s a (very) limited list of marketing automation technology vendors, ranging from email-specific tools to full marketing automation suites that cover everything from email statistics to social media analytics to lead-generation tools. Some are better suited for smaller businesses, some are highly scalable and appeal to both SMB (small- and medium-size businesses) and enterprise companies, and others probably are best described as enterprise-class. But all are established in the marketing industry.
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