The pandemic thrust digital marketing into the limelight. Marketers saw their budgets increase by nearly half in 2021. Many forecasted that 2022 would see even further growth, as well. Even for those looking to balance minimal spend for optimal returns, the magic marketing number stood at $8,000 per month (a sizable budget for many SMBs). With so much money pouring into the world of online marketing, it’s important for marketing professionals to maintain control over their budgets and strategies. The best way to do that is by increasing visibility into your brand’s e-commerce marketing performance.
How to Gain Visibility Into Your E-Commerce Marketing Performance
Here are a few simple, tech-driven solutions to help you do so.
Combine Everything Into a Comprehensive Tool
The first and simplest option is to go for a comprehensive marketing analytics solution. We’re talking about tools like Google Analytics that can plug into multiple programs and track data from a variety of sources.
The analytics experts at Triple Whale point out that “Spending hours manually collecting data from all kinds of sources won’t leave you any time for analysis, let alone reach any actionable insights.” It’s hard to create actionable insights if you spend all of your time chasing down and organizing information.
There are a growing number of tools that act as a middleman between you and all of your marketing analytics programs. You can integrate these with data-rich platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Pixel, and Shopify Analytics.
Once all of these data pipelines are pointing toward the same source, the tool presents the aggregated data on a single dashboard. At the least, this makes it easier to access information. In addition, more nuanced tools employ increasingly sophisticated AI solutions that can help you form actionable insights.
There are multiple ways to approach e-commerce analytics (including some more categorical items on this list). However, if you want a holistic and comprehensive solution, look for a platform that can bring all of your marketing data into a single, organized location.
Solidify Scattered Social Media
For many smaller companies with fewer marketing activities, a comprehensive platform isn’t needed. They can track things like costs and results on a limited number of individual marketing platforms. However, one area where this doesn’t tend to be true, even for smaller businesses, is social media.
This is due to accessibility. A solopreneur without a single penny to devote toward marketing can still create a social account and build a community of followers. In fact, they can do so on numerous social sites, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube — the list goes on.
The sheer number of accessible options for social media marketing makes it important for companies to choose their social channels carefully. Even if they focus on two or three platforms, though, it can be difficult to reconcile multiple sets of social media analytics. Social media analytics tool Social Sprout highlights this fact, emphasizing that “Reporting and analytics tools should make your job easier, but those tools can be complicated and hard to use.”
The good news is that there are multiple third-party tools available that can collect all of your social media marketing into a single platform. There, you can unpackage and analyze the data based on your own needs (rather than the preset categories that native social platform analytics tools use).
If you’re struggling to make sense of your social media marketing data, consider using a tool that can unify everything and help you interpret the results.
Engage With Email Analytics, Too
Email is an interesting digital marketing tool. On the one hand, it’s an extremely efficient and effective way to market. You can communicate directly with a highly-targeted audience that has opted in to hear what you have to say. On the other hand, email marketing often lacks the same data analysis that automatically comes with things like PPC ads or social media.
This doesn’t have to be the case. Most email services include analytics that can provide key insights into how your emails are performing. They can help you see things like open rates, click-throughs, and overall engagement.
Mail Chimp points out that when you tap into this information, “you can gain a deeper understanding of what your customers like and continue creating content that fits their needs.” The email service provider adds that you can also use some email analytics to compare email campaigns to competitors.
If you have an email list, make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Use the insights gleaned from email analytics to refine and improve your electronic mail content over time.
Dominating Your E-Commerce Marketing Performance Through Analysis
There are many ways to assess how well a digital marketing campaign is performing. You can track individual areas, like email or social media. You can also combine this information into a larger, more robust program that provides deeper, more comprehensive insights into your overall marketing performance.
The options are there, and hundreds of third-party software solutions make marketing analytics easier than ever. The critical piece of the puzzle is you, the boots-on-the-ground marketer making decisions with real-world ramifications. Whether you’re calling the shots at your agency, in your department, or for your entire company, if you’re tasked with overseeing your e-commerce marketing performance, you need to make sure you have a healthy level of visibility into the results.
Use tools like those listed above to gain a better idea of how effective (or ineffective) each element of your marketing strategy is. Then use that information to pivot, make adjustments, and even tinker with successful areas to make your e-commerce marketing performance even better.
The post 3 Ways to Gain Visibility Into Your E-Commerce Marketing Performance appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
