Analytics: getting the full picture

People first

One thing that all marketers can be found guilty of at any one point is forgetting that the audience we are trying to communicate with is human too. Even in the world of B2B, it’s individuals within a company that we are marketing to, not a big corporate. So don’t get lost in the data and forget the people who sit behind it: a click isn’t a number – it’s a person using their mouse or finger!

We’ve recently run a social media campaign across EMEA and from insight into the different regions we knew that in Mediterranean countries workers tend to take longer lunch breaks and work later into the evening. This gave us two options: pause ads over lunch times to ensure funds were not wasted or adjust ads to make them more appealing to people who are in "home mode" instead of "work mode".

In this example quantitative data could have shown us that ads perform less well in the day in these areas, but it’s the qualitative information that has told us why and how to make the most of the situation. Knowing your audience, their culture and the reasons behind their behaviour is crucial to optimising your campaign.

The whole picture

Some of the best real-world data comes from the people who interact with your customers the most: your sales and/or customer service teams. They know your customers inside out and have first hand experience of how they interact with your brand and how they want to do so in the future. Taking this insight alongside analytics produces insight-led campaigns. Campaigns that know what your customers want and deliver it to them. Our recent GDPR campaign with Softcat illustrates this perfectly. The campaign started with the results of the annual customer survey – it revealed that what their customers really wanted was unbiased, easy-to-follow advice on GDPR. And through a multi-channel campaign we gave them exactly that. It’s been an incredibly successful campaign with a 12.3% lead generation rate and a pipeline of over £500,000.

You can read more in our case study here (after you finish reading this blog of course...) By combining customer feedback and insight with great quality data, you can create a much fuller picture of your customers and their behaviours. So next time you’re planning a campaign stop and think about who you should be involving in the planning stages to get that fuller picture.

What's good for you?

Celebrating a campaign's succes is what every marketer wants to be able to do - but what exactly does success look like for you? How do you know what numbers you should be aiming for? How many visitors should your Google Analytics account be showing? What click throughs can you realistically expect from your LinkedIn campaign?

When you’re starting from scratch the best way to approach your KPIs and goals is to first think about why you’re doing this campaign: are you trying to get more visitors, more form fills or raise brand awareness? Once you’ve decided on your focus take a look at industry benchmarks for those areas to give an idea of where you can aim.

This is a good first step yet when you’re a few months into your campaign you’ll have your own data and can start to benchmark against yourself: the ideal way to do it. Success is different for all of our clients, so by tracking a campaign over time we begin to learn what is a great campaign on a client by client basis. If you’re averaging a CTR of 0.1%, an increase to 1.4% is a great success, yet for other clients with a CTR of 2.4%, success (or indeed poor performance) looks pretty different.