Author: Christie Osborne

Wedding Industry Biz

How to Use Analytics to Optimize Your Messaging

By Christie Osborne on

You’re a smart, established professional who runs a successful business. So, why is it so hard to know what your ideal clients want to hear?

You try to be useful. You try to educate. You try to showcase your best work. But something’s not working the way you think it should.

Well, sometimes a big mistake that wedding planners make is unintentionally focusing too much on themselves. They emphasize what they like, what they want, and what they think is important. In essence, their marketing is all about them.

Instead, with a few small tweaks, you can start targeting your ideal clients with strategic messaging that makes them feel seen and understood.

Because when you make your ideal clients feel understood, it builds trust in you and your services.  Importantly, it’s how you can demonstrate, rather than just talk about, the value you offer.

But, how do you know what will make them feel this way? Fortunately, it’s easier than might think – you already have valuable information at your fingertips.

Here’s how to maximize your presence throughout your marketing channels, with the help of some light research and a little bit of data.

Your blog

Since your blog lives on your website, you can use Google Analytics to get an idea of the content that resonates with your audience best. The first thing you’ll want to look at is a traffic report to identify the blog posts that received the most visitors. These numbers can hint at the topic categories that garnered the most interest, but it’s important to note that traffic per post can also differ because of your promotional efforts. A heavily-promoted blog post will naturally see more visitors than one that is only shared once or twice.

For this reason, you’ll want to look at a few other metrics: time spent on each post, bounce rates, and conversion rates. If you notice that a blog post saw a much higher average time spent on the page, it’s a good sign that visitors stayed around for a thorough read. Lower times and high bounce rates signify a post that doesn’t keep a reader’s interest.
So, conversion rates are a vital piece of data as it’s where the money lies. Check out the blog posts that garnered the most conversions —what sets them apart? You might have had a particularly strong call-to-action, or perhaps it was a well-written piece that nailed your ideal client’s pain points. Follow the data to the highest-performing posts and continue to replicate the success.

Your social media

All of the top social media platforms have built-in analytic dashboards that are pretty robust, providing valuable data points to inform your marketing strategy. Review your top-performing posts to see what kind of content draws in the most engagement. Perhaps your audience loves sharing input when you ask them leading questions in a post. Maybe your weekly advice posts attract a lot of attention. Take note of the type of content that is most interesting to your audience, and adjust your content strategy to align with it going forward.

Of course, social media likes don’t translate to cold hard cash. That’s what conversion rates are for! Take it one step further by looking at the Social data report to see which social media platform sends the most traffic and conversions. You can then match up the dates with your social media posts to identify the content that truly drove the most conversions.

Once you’ve gathered enough data to tell you what your audience loves (and what they don’t), you’ll be able to answer the three core questions that drive a great marketing strategy:

  1. What should I start doing?
  2. What should I improve?
  3. What should I stop doing?
As you learn more and more about your audience’s preferences, your messaging and overall marketing strategy will hone in on your ideal client with precision, and your bottom line will grow accordingly. All it takes is paying a little bit of attention to your data, and you’ll be well on your way to a more profitable future.

 

Christie Osborne is the owner of Mountainside Media, a company that helps event industry professionals brands develop scalable marketing strategies that bring in more inquiries and leads. Christie is a national educator with recent speaking engagements at NACE Experience, WIPA, and the ABC Conference.