For the analytically-minded advisor, one of the most exciting parts of marketing can be the data.

While marketing requires creativity, it also requires in-depth analysis and a mind for numbers. You can’t push out content, emails, or social media posts and expect to hit a home run every time. That’s why so many companies have entire departments dedicated to marketing.

First comes the conceptualizing, then creating, then implementing, and then analyzing before starting all over again. It’s a proven circular strategy. We talk a lot about the creative side of marketing, but here we’re focusing entirely on the analytical side.

At FMG Suite, we like to separate marketing data into two categories: global and actionable.

Global data covers the broader elements of your marketing, including:

  • Website traffic
  • Time spent on your website
  • Percentage of new visitors
  • Traffic referrals
  • Email bounce rate

These elements, as you can probably tell, are hard to act on. Unless you’re knowledgeable in website analytics and search engine data, it’s hard to know what to change in order to improve these statistics. And a lot of these elements can’t easily be changed by adjusting your marketing content.

Actionable data, on the other hand, covers specific elements of your marketing, including:

  • Email subject line
  • Specific individuals who opened your emails
  • Most popular blog posts
  • Social media posts with the most interactions
  • Website pages with the most views

This data you can review and act on, as it tells you critical information about your marketing and what your audience likes.

For example, if an email had a much higher open rate than usual, look at your email subject line. How did it differ from your other emails? There’s a reason it performed well so try using the same format in another email.

If there are certain pages on your website that consistently see higher traffic rates than other pages, evaluate what they cover. Are they your services pages? Pages on investing? These are the pages that feature content your clients and prospects want to learn more about. Now you know what types of pages to keep creating to drive traffic.

Carve time out of your schedule to review your marketing analytics every quarter or semi-annually. Consistently review the same data so you can track your progress and compare results from previous months or years. After two or three review sessions, you should start seeing improvements in your marketing, including higher open and click through rates on your email campaigns, higher engagement with your social media posts, and improved website traffic.

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