How to Market your Business: Tying It All Together with Planning and Reporting

Written By James Hards – Head of Client Accounts at WorkWith Studios

Part five of How to Market your Business: Navigating Digital Marketing in the Cycling Industry

If you’ve read through our BikeBiz marketing series (Organic Social Media, Paid Social Media, Email Marketing and Influencers & affiliates), we hope you will have started your journey to a more effective marketing programme.

But… how will you know if it’s working? In this final article, we will walk you through reporting and how to interpret your data and let it influence your planning so you have a full circle of marketing activity that drives results time and again.

WHERE AND HOW TO TRACK

To effectively report on marketing activity, you will need access to reporting dashboards. Most of the marketing solutions/apps/software you use will have a space dedicated to this. 

These often double up on each other, with multiple platforms claiming the same traffic, sales, etc, so make sure you are prepared to judge channels individually or just use one platform as your “source of truth”. 

Google Analytics (GA4) is often used as a default measure of different marketing channels, but most will only look at it through a Last Touch Attribution model, so be prepared to see some channels massively outweighing others. It doesn’t mean that is the case in reality. Modern customer journeys have many digital touchpoints and different lead times (more often than not dependent on purchase value). Looking at a GA4 Acquisition report will ignore a huge part of the journey and credit only the closing channels. Think of it like a pro-cycling team – 7 riders will do the heavy lifting all day for the sprinter at the end to take the stage win.

Also, be aware that GA4 might completely miss traffic out, depending on the web browser and cookie preferences of your website visitors!

Tip: Reach out to us if you want to talk more about customer journey touchpoints and data-driven attribution models

WHAT METRICS TO LOOK AT

We live in a world that has a lot of data, and each platform is going to blast you with reporting screens, and the number of trackable metrics can be quite overwhelming. Ultimately, what to track depends on your campaign objectives and how you define success. 

For most e-commerce brands, we often see the following metrics being used as KPIs:

• Website Conversion Rate (CvR) – Percentage of website sessions that resulted in a conversion.
• Cart Abandonment Rate – Percentage of users who added to cart but did not make a purchase.
• Cost Per Result (CPR) – Average advertising cost for your desired result (click, lead, purchase, etc)
• Social Follower Growth – Net growth of social media followers
• Social Engagement Rate – Percentage of social interactions per user reached or content viewed
• Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) – Revenue from Advertising / Cost of Advertising. Often displayed as a ratio or a percentage
• Email Click Rate – Percentage of users who clicked on a link within your email campaign. Special callout to Apple for ruining Open Rate data with MPP
• Sessions / Page Views – Average number of pages viewed per session
• Engagement Time per Session – Time spent on website per session

INFLUENCE YOUR PLANNING

It’s obvious to say that if something doesn’t work, don’t repeat it, and by actively monitoring and reporting on your marketing channels, you should have much greater insight into campaign and content successes and failures. Often, it’s simply the act of reporting that will identify the smaller nuances of what you’ve done recently that may or may not have worked. 

For example, reporting on social media and noticing an increase in the amount of Stories posted vs Feed posts MoM might also have been a contributing factor in an elevated reach and views number. Correlation does not imply causation, but if you see patterns, then you can continue to test and refine with more knowledge than before.

Set up a spreadsheet and start tracking your key metrics every month – knowledge is power.

The other half of this is the planning piece. Do you have a content plan in place? This can essentially be a timeline that covers your marketing channels as well as other factors that might influence your comms. Top tip – we like to consider the following rows in our timeline to keep sales and marketing stakeholders in line all year long.

• Events
• Credibility Moments
• Category Activations
• Commercial Priorities
• Evergreen Messages

SUMMARY

Dedicate time to reporting. Without an effective tracking method, you have no way of really knowing what works and what does not. 

One of our key pillars for our Paid Social Media management service is “Test & Scale”, this is because the algorithms that power ad delivery are vastly complex, and there is a distinct push to AI and Machine Learning. What that means is a move to larger audiences and bigger budgets, and you can be sure that Meta will want to spend your budget! 

Constant testing, daily monitoring, and ultimately scaling up or down are our counter to this as we aim to keep control and make decisions backed by results. Apply this methodology to the rest of your marketing, and you will be setting yourself up for success

If you enjoyed this series and want to learn more about digital marketing or understand how it could help your business, then you can reach the WorkWith Studios team on info@workwithstudios.com or visit us at www.workwithstudios.com