When you begin to implement a digital marketing campaign and start producing content for your website and various social platforms, it can get a bit overwhelming at first.
“How much do I write? Which channels should I use? What’s the best way to connect with my audience?” These are all likely questions you’ll pose to yourself as you start out, but once you’ve actually produced some content you’ll arrive at possibly the most important question: “Is it working?”
To help you through these growing pains, we at Sixth City Marketing thought we’d provide you with some ways to gauge how your content is performing so you can determine ways to improve.
1. Find Your Highest-Ranking Pages
Within Google Analytics, Bing Analytics, or other analytics software, you’ll want to seek out your best-performing pages to try to determine what’s working and how you can duplicate your success.
Your homepage and certain key product or services pages will often be among your highest performing, but other pages, such as blog posts, have the potential to outrank even your homepage if they have been optimized with keywords and include lengthy, authoritative content.
For any pages that you want to boost, you’ll want to include:
- A significant amount of clean and worthwhile written copy
- Keywords and metadata
- Optimized images and, if available, relevant videos
- Headers, bullets, and other structural aides
After optimizing your pages, check back in the following weeks to see how well they’re now performing. You should see some real improvement.
2. Check Your Traffic and Lead Numbers
While you’re in Google Analytics or any other software, you’ll also want to see how much traffic is coming to your site and how much of that traffic is turning into leads. This is especially important within a couple months of initiating a digital marketing campaign, as you’ll be able to compare where you started from and evaluate how far you’ve come.
You’ll want to look at:
- The total amount of traffic the site has gained
- Any increases in traffic for specific pages
- Your total number of leads, through both online sources and by phone
- Key pages that are generating leads
With these numbers in tow, you’ll be able to make strategic decisions moving forward to boost the efficacy of your campaign.
3. Track Your Followers and Subscribers
First of all, if your business isn’t utilizing social media platforms, you absolutely should be. Social media helps you to stay connected with your customers, present relevant company and industry news, and advertise your products or services. Best of all, it’s free!
While the relevance of each of the following may vary based on your industry, some of the key social media channels you should consider utilizing include:
- Snapchat
- YouTube
- Yelp
Once you create accounts on these platforms and begin actively crafting content, you’ll want to keep an eye on how many followers and subscribers you accrue. Posting worthwhile content and regularly promoting it should produce a steady increase in your follower count, giving you more traffic and potential leads.
4. Track Your Likes, Reactions, Shares, and Retweets
Once your social accounts are underway and you’re posting new content, checking in to see which posts garner reactions is a good way to see what your audience is invested in and wants to see more of. Some of this is luck of the draw, though, since even your biggest supporters will not see every post you share, or will feel compelled to react to or share it.
If you have specific posts you really want to see do well, though, you can get the ball rolling by having those within your organization like, react to, and share them, increasing the likelihood the algorithms on a given social channel will populate them in others’ feeds.
5. Check Your Numbers on Your Email Marketing Efforts
Much like social media, email marketing is an avenue you should pursue if you haven’t already. Once you do, you’ll want to look at your:
- Email open rates
- Email click-through rates/leads
- Email subscriber numbers
All of these factors can tell you important information about the efficacy of your email marketing campaigns and will help you find ways to improve moving forward.
6. Use Heatmapping Software
Heatmapping software can be incredibly beneficial for a website because it can show you exactly how visitors are engaging with your content.
Through various software types, you’ll be able to:
- See how far a user scrolls before leaving a page
- Determine the areas of your site users most interact with
- Track mouse movement
- Utilize screen recording
Once you know just how your users are interacting with your site, you’ll be able to more effectively improve the site, including through its design, its content, and its functionality.
Need Help? Contact Sixth City!
If you’re looking to boost your online presence and drive more leads to your business, we’re ready to help. Reach out to our dedicated team because we’re experts at crafting effective strategies tailored to each business.
