The first job for every business is to generate sales.
- If you’re developing a physical or digital product, sales equals proof of concept, product market fit, and generates the information you need to ensure you’re moving in the right direction.
- If you’re a service provider, sales proves product / market fit for your offer whereas a lack of sales indicates you need to keep tweaking until the “yeses” flow in.
Raise your hand if you’ve passed this hurdle. Now, you’re working to build out an organization to support the business opportunity you have (indicated by your sales).
As you dial in your fulfillment logistics, you can’t take your foot off of the sales-gas-pedal. You have to continue pursuing a steady stream of sales to support the investments you’re making in your organizational infrastructure.
You need a systematic approach to marketing.
Inside of Strong Brand Social, we look at three key indicators:
- Audience growth rate
- Consumer engagement
- Website traffic (that leads to sales)
If you’re invested in social media marketing and/or advertising, these are the key metrics that you should be reviewing weekly or monthly to ensure your marketing program is moving in the right direction (they act as lead indicators to your ultimate goal: more sales and profitability).
When we first start out, an uptick in website traffic is the highest value indicator we can achieve.
Once the topline metrics start to move in the right direction, it’s time to dig in:
- What is this website traffic doing once they get to our website (aka, is this traffic high quality, and what adjustments can we make to continuously improve the quality of the traffic?)
- What social media marketing activities (posts/content/stories) are responsible for generating the most amount of website traffic? What can we learn from this analysis to support the perpetual optimization of our social media content and the role it plays in our business growth?
Whether you’re a small brand owner carefully allocating your resources to the most important marketing activities, or a social media service provider trying to improve the predictability of results and value of your work, knowing your way around Google Analytics is a must. But if you don’t speak data as your first language, the tool can be a little daunting.
That’s why I’m bringing in my dear friend and data wizard, Jen Grayeb, to give us a value-packed hour on all things Google Analytics!
This is a FREE session for our Strong Brand Social community to give you the basics of what you want to pay attention to, so that you can ignore the rest.
Watch the replay NOW! (If the link isn’t working this means you need to join the group first! Click here to request access.)
In your corner,
Katie