If you haven’t noticed, people are fed up with old marketing strategies, such as the use of billboards, pop ups, and other spam. If your firm’s current architecture marketing initiatives aren’t receiving positive reciprocation, you might need to take another look at your methods. Luckily, with new methods, there are new, easy ways to identify and fix problems when it comes to marketing for architects.
Today, you can measure just about everything, including who is visiting your website and how they came across you or your firm. You can easily view what content they are looking at, and how much time they are spending on your site, as well as each specific page. This is a great aspect to look at to figure out what content your viewers are most interested in. In addition to what pages they’re on, you can also see which calls-to-action are getting the most attention, and use that information accordingly. You are able to see which automated email campaigns are bringing the most visitors to your site, as well as what content is then producing the most qualified leads. You are able to use all of this information to better future marketing endeavors. Ultimately you are able to see which marketing initiatives are converting leads into clients. These are just a few ways to measure and use your firm’s data; I’m sure there are many more. However, now that you have all this information about your site and its traffic, how do you make sense of everything? What’s important, what can be overlooked, and how do you use this information to create success for future endeavors?
Where to Start
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| Image by Flickr user Oskar Alexanderson |
First of all you need to identify what problems your firm is having, and measuring your success according to your firm’s needs. Many problems your firm can be having might be simple lack of awareness among your targeted audience, which can result in prospects buying from competitors, and ultimately not enough qualified leads coming to your firm. Another issue many firms have is wasting time pursuing the wrong leads, which affects the next issue of sales teams simply not having enough time to market to everyone. This is an area that needs to be addressed by figuring out your firm’s targeted audience and marketing only to that audience. Other problems include sales cycles being too long, or costs per lead being too high, making the pursuits counterproductive. In order to solve these problems, you first need to decide which issues are most important. Find which of these problems your firm needs to solve first, and then measure your effectiveness against finding solutions. It’s understandable that every firm is different, with their own set of goals, and the following three points are a great way for any firm to start getting all the kinks out of your marketing plan:
1. Measure Website Traffic Growth
One important aspect of keeping track of your marketing is knowing about the traffic flowing to and from your website. First of all, is this number increasing or decreasing? You’ll need to know where these people are coming from so you can target those places to attract new visitors to your site. You can also use this information to decide where you need to focus your efforts to attract more visitors from places resulting in less traffic. The same goes for your blog posts and pages on your site. Which posts and pages are attracting visitors as a result of search engines? You want your firm to be prominent in any search engine, so you’ll need to know where you’re ranking in Google searches through important keywords and phrases.
2. Measure lead generation
It is important to turn visitors into leads, and your site is your biggest marketing tool to accomplish this. Having remarkable content downloads as well as forms for visitors to fill out are great ways to create leads. You’ll want at least 1-3% of these interactive options to be lead converting, or you might want to reevaluate your website and decide if it’s set up as a business-generating tool. You also want to make sure your website has plenty of effective conversion paths such as calls-to-action that appeal to your targeted audience. For these calls-to-actions you’ll want to take into consideration where in the conversion process your visitors are. Are they doing initial research, are they evaluating their options, or are they even almost ready to buy? You need to have something for each of these steps to keep your visitors coming back. On that note you want to make sure your content is pursuing visitors most serious about the possibility of becoming a lead. Here you can decide what content you need to focus on with your marketing strategies, versus the content you might be wasting your time with. You can also take into consideration content that helped convert past leads and market it accordingly to new leads.
3. Measuring Customer Acquisition
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| Image by Flickr user Adam Grabek |
Now that you have a list of clients, it’s time to look back and see what marketing initiatives you put into action to acquire those clients. Is there any likenesses in where they came from, where they discovered your firm, or what content attracted them? Which lead-nurturing campaigns were most effective when it came to closing clients? Also take note of any case studies or white papers that engaged those clients along their buying journeys. You’ll want to be aware of all the content they used to help aid their decision to sign on with you, and you’ll be able to use this information for future lead nurturing.
Act On Your Data
After all is said and done, the information you have collected is only as useful as what you do with it. Review your data and figure out what has been successful. Then you can use that for future endeavors, and discard or fix what has not been successful. Once you have done this, don’t forget to stay on top of things. Keep up with clients, as well as new trends that are becoming popular; stay ahead of the game. The market is always changing, and your firm must be flexible and bend accordingly.