Actionable Marketing Advice
From Our Growth Spurts Blog

We regularly update our Growth Spurts blog with actionable marketing & technology advice, news and information. These articles are often hand-picked to address issues and projects we’re working on with our clients, but they are relevant to most business owners involved with any aspect of marketing their business.

In this month’s content roundup, we’re focusing on goals, measurement and metrics. Any integrated marketing plan will define strategic goals that boil down to:

• Awareness: Build an audience for your product or service.
• Engagement: Drive engagement with your product or service.
• Conversion: Drive sales and leads.

No matter which channels your use as part of an integrated marketing program, measurement and metrics are key to making sure you’re meeting your goals. Here are 5 timely and relevant posts that look at measurement and analytics.

On Content Marketing

Why It’s Essential to Track Your Content
Online marketing is about serving messages and media to your audience at the right times in the right places with one single goal: to move them through the customer journey and drive conversion.

What makes social different from other channels is the personal referrals by sharing, liking, and commenting. Learning what types of content resonate most with your audience at each point in the customer journey will help you use content to increase conversions. Read the article here.

Content Marketing Metrics: How to Transform Data into Action
It’s the age of big data, so marketers need to make data-driven decisions about when, how, and why you produce content. Content marketing metrics tend to fall into one of two distinct categories: engagement metrics and growth. Chances are, you’ll need to track both. Continue reading…

On SEO

KPIs for SEO: Measuring SEO Success
There are many variables at play in an SEO campaign, and key performance indicators (KPIs) allow you to identify what is working – and often, more importantly, provide an early warning system if something is not moving the needle as expected. Learn some of the most useful KPIs in terms of connecting SEO outcomes to business objectives here.

On Social Media

How to Draw Meaningful Conclusions from Social Media Metrics – Put Fans and Followers in Context
Don’t be fooled – a high number of followers does not equal social media success. Although “likes” and follows are where prospective customers begin their journey, these numbers aren’t meaningful as standalone snapshots. Companies typically track “likes” and retweets, but they can also track qualified leads coming from social, a company’s share of a conversation, and even the amount of revenue generated from an individual social marketing initiative. Continue reading…

On Customer Rentention

How to Measure and Improve Retention Marketing Metrics
The key to retention marketing – the efforts your store takes to get customers who have bought from you in the past to buy more from you more often – is understanding the metrics. Metrics give you a deeper understanding of your customers and their behaviors, allowing you to build experiences that turn one purchase into multiple purchases. This article looks at three of the most impactful retention metrics and how other companies have used them to build thriving brand loyalty: repeat customer rate, purchase frequency, and average order value. Continue reading…