The manufacturing industry is always looking to streamline production methods. Streamlining enables more product to be produced in less time and with less cost. This is a no brainer, right?
Analysing the manufacturing process can bring a range of benefits to a company and improve the bottom line. Metrics such as labour costs, throughput, line changeover times, supplier costs and even more complex metrics such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness are all designed to show you exactly where to optimise production, lower costs and boost profit. Though how do you look at metrics in this detail for your marketing efforts?
In the digital age of marketing, it is possible to obtain the same level of insight into your marketing efforts as it is to your manufacturing processes.
Email Marketing
You can track metrics that you have never been able to before. Email open rates have been around for a while now and have advanced to the point of being able to see how long people read the email for, how many people clicked on each link, and most importantly, who clicked on each link. Suddenly, you can determine not only what products your database is interested in, but at which stage of the sales funnel they are currently sitting in. This level of insight into your potential customers allows you to make informed sales calls at the right time (you are even able to know when somebody is reading your email so that you can call them as they read it!) effectively saving you time and money, as well as increasing your conversion to sale rates.
Tracking your email analytics can also show you which day and time of the week is the best for sending emails out. The time can differ for each industry and depends on your audience, so analysing the times that you get the best open rates can lead you to creating email campaigns that reach more people.
Website Lead Generation Techniques
Your website should be (and can easily become) a very important lead generation tool for your company. Your website should be your best sales person! With a combination of blogging, having educational eBooks available to download and providing engaging content on your web pages, you will receive new leads every week. The data available can show you exactly which webpages, blogs and downloads are performing well versus which are not. Analysing traffic, bounce rates, time spent on page and other web metrics allow you to make informed decisions on what content to produce next, as well as what content currently on your site should be improved.
The image below is an example of the sort of data you can obtain from your website. From this data, you can investigate why certain call-to-actions (CTAs) work well based on the click through rate, which will in turn generate more leads.
AdWords
If used effectively, Google Ads can be an extremely effective tool for gaining new leads. Google Ads itself comes with a range of reporting analytics that show you exactly where you can improve your ads and spend less money and receive more leads.
For example, you may set up your initial campaign with 3 ad groups. One may be doing as expected, one may have a high click through rate but high bounce rate, and the last may have a low click through rate, yet the lowest bounce rate. In the case of the last group, you may need to look at the improving the copy of the ad to improve click through rate, as when they do click through, they turn into leads at a high rate. In the case of the second ad, you could use the data to conclude that something on the landing page is turning people away, despite your great ad that entices people to click. Fixing this landing page to increase conversions will generate even more leads for you at the same cost.
You may also be able to determine from your data that one or several ad groups is outperforming the rest in every way. In this case, you should lower the amount of money you spend on the underperforming ads and increase the spending on the over performing groups.
Are you starting to see how using the data tied to your marketing efforts can optimise your campaigns?
There are many more ways that a professional marketing tool like HubSpot can help you to optimise your marketing campaigns. In fact, every aspect of your digital marketing can be scrutinised and then improved upon. This includes web pages, forms, call to actions, emails and even the effectiveness of your lead nurturing automation. Collecting this data and optimising the process, in similar ways to how you run your production line, can both save you money and generate more leads and sales.
If you are would like to learn more about using data to optimise your marketing decisions, book a time for a 1 on 1 webinar.
Fit 4 Market are marketing consultants operating in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth