Capturing the analytics and ways to gauge how your content is performing is extremely important for your business. You don’t have to accept the idea that your marketing efforts are just out there somewhere. That simply isn’t the case. Your efforts can be measured and you can hone your marketing strategy based on the results of those efforts.

The importance of analytics of your marketing efforts
You may think that gathering the metrics (the analytics) from your marketing strategy for your brand is a nice thing to capture but that it isn’t really necessary and that it doesn’t really make a tremendous difference to your business. Most likely, you couldn’t be more wrong. First and foremost, you can learn a great deal from the results of your marketing efforts. You can identify patterns and you can see what is working well for you and what is not working well. Then you can tweak your marketing strategy accordingly. With this in mind, you may be wondering exactly how you should go about getting that information.

Build your credibility before you build anything else: If you have been in business for longer than a second and a half, you understand that you will never be able to make a go of your business if you don’t establish solid relationships with the people to whom you wish to sell your products and/or services at any point along the way. Once you have established the relationship with the other person, you will continue to build your credibility and trustworthiness and you will successfully position yourself within your niche as a subject matter expert. Without establishing all of those qualities, nobody will be willing to give you or your business the time of day. Once the other person finds you credible beyond all question, you will be able to really make some serious headway. There are different ways to establish your credibility relatively quickly. You can gather testimonials from various people who have worked with you. That will carry your credibility some distance. Another really effective way to establish your credibility is by demonstrating to your target audience that you have the ability to solve their problems. If you can do that, they will trust you and they will find you credible. In their minds, you know what you are talking about.

Make your call-to-action compelling: Surprisingly, more people than you may think will be willing to do whatever it is that you ask of them. It is actually all in the approach. If your call-to-action is compelling and it grabs the reader on a human/emotional level, they will most likely be willing to give you what you need. Just remember that whatever you do, do not try to give them the hard sell. That is the way to lose them the fastest. If that happens, they will never come back to you. You will probably not have a great deal of difficulty getting those people to buy what you are selling as long as you present the information in a way that touches them. You just need to figure out how to make that happen.

Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience members: It is absolutely essential that you remember that your being in business (if you have any hope or any desire to succeed) is not about how wonderful you and your business are. It is about what you can do for the other person (What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM). In other words, you must be able to solve the other person’s problems. If you can manage to do that, you will be in good. Try to avoid using too much jargon and make sure that your approach is genuine, sincere, and honest. The other person will greatly appreciate it.

Categorize your metrics in order to work with it and understand it more easily: Your marketing approach and what you do with the results of your marketing strategy should be categorized and organized in a way that works effectively for you. If you do that, you can get a great deal of benefit from the information. One of the important (and initial) things that you should do is categorize your target audience members (eventually to become clients, hopefully). Those buckets of information will come in handy at some point in the near future. The greater your understanding of the different categories, the more effective your marketing efforts will be.

Test your marketing material: Once you have gotten your marketing material to a point where you feel that it is the best that it will ever be, you will need to test it. As good as it probably is, you are not 100% objective about your own material. Even if you are somewhat apprehensive about testing, you should still go for it. You will be glad that you did because it will force you to improve your materials and you will become more successful.
Conclusion
Gathering metrics from the results of your marketing efforts is an extremely important part of your strategy. How else will you be able to ascertain how you are doing and what you are doing right and wrong. It isn’t a good idea to rely on someone else to give you that information. You need to rely on yourself. The information is critical to your business being a raging success. Only you can identify which strategies are working for your business and which ones are not. Measuring the results of your marketing efforts is one of the few objective (scientific, if you will) ways to capture a clear understanding of the effect that your hard work is having on your business.

Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies. Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company’s Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. He also reduced company travel and travel costs by introducing and implementing various collaboration technologies.

His expertise includes business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development.