April 2016 archive

How to measure the effectiveness of a blog

You’ve been keeping a blog for your small business, and you feel like your content is interesting and engaging, but how can you measure how effective this time investment is for your business? Keeping track of key metrics using the right methods is a great way to identify ways to improve the reach and performance of your blog, and ensure you are getting a good return on investment for your blogging efforts.

 

To start with, it’s a good idea to identify what your aim is: what do you want to achieve through your blog posts? Some examples of this could be:

  • Drive more traffic to your website through search engine optimisation
  • Raise the profile of your business
  • Engage with your current customer base
  • Gain new customers through interest and trust
  • Learn more about what your customers want
  • Share and gain expertise in your area

Depending on what your aim is, there are a variety of ways to keep track of how effective your blog is at achieving this.

 

Google Analytics

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Google Analytics is a great, free tool to keep an eye on the natural growth of your blog. Monitor the number of visits to your blog and the average visits for each individual post to see if any content got a particularly high number of visits, this way you can learn what kind of content your readers are interested in and focus more on sharing this. Through Google Analytics, you can also monitor the sources of this traffic: which social media sites are most effective at promoting your content? This will enable you to focus on promoting your blog through these sites, and stop wasting time on those that don’t bring you any traffic. Keywords are another area to keep an eye on, by monitoring what people are searching for to find your blog you can utilise these words within new posts in order to gain more views. You can also monitor the click-throughs for your call to action: a link to your business’s products or services, and how many of the blog readers are following up on this, which is a real measure of the success of the blog for your business rather than for its content.

 

Bounce Rate

This is an important metric to keep track of, and is usually much higher for blogs than other kinds of web pages. It is usually measured in one of two ways:

  1. User visits for 10 seconds or less
  2. User visits one page and then leaves

If a user discovers your blog post through a search engine, they will read the page that they are directed to and usually once they have found the information they are searching for, will exit. When users are visiting the site of a business, they will generally be looking for that business specifically and are therefore more likely to spend time looking around the site. It is suggested by this source that a bounce rate of below 65% should be aimed for, however this is easier said than done as you can’t directly control what people want to read! Visitors that find your blog through social media are likely to remain on the site for longer, as they are usually more engaged with your business: although this is intangible and difficult to define. Reducing your bounce rate is clearly beneficial as it means that visitors are more interested in your content, so perhaps if your rate is very high you should consider thinking about what you are posting.

 

Conversations

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One of the biggest measures of the success of a blog, and the biggest benefits to a business running one, are the real conversations that are happening with their customers (Briffet & Ruebke, 2013). A key measure of this is the number of subscribers, comments and shares that your blog posts are having, and ensuring that your business is responding to those comments and providing real value to your customers: both current and future.

 

Overall, there are many metrics you can monitor to check your blog is achieving what you want it to achieve, and these should be utilised in order to improve your content and to increase the number of leads you are getting through the blog post. It is important to consider your metrics against the time, effort and funding put into the blog, and ensure that you are getting a good return on investment (Davis & Crawford, 2011).

 

Read more here:

How to measure the success of your business blog

Social media measurement tools

How effective is your blog?

Blogging success

 

References:

Davis, T. and Crawford, I. (2011) Business Accounting and Finance. 1st ed. Financial Times/Prentice Hall.

Briffett, S. & Ruebke, S. (2013) ‘The role of content in creating meaningful conversations online: Case study of Henkel Beauty Care’s digital campaign in Germany’. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Volume 1, Number 2, 1 January 2013, pp. 128-135(8)

How to create an effective email marketing campaign

According to this source 144.8 billion emails are sent globally every single day. So it is important to ensure that yours is one of the few that ends up being noticed, and doesn’t end up straight in the trash. But what are the most effective ways to ensure your marketing email is noticed, opened and actioned?

 

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1. Personalisation
It is important to make an email relevant and personalised to the reader, but without coming across as false. This source suggests that using a customer’s name at the start of an email is actually off-putting, forcing familiarity too soon will not create a relationship where one does not already exist. Briffett (2013) reminds us to keep relationships with the consumer meaningful. Much like in real life, intimacy must be earned rather than assumed. Instead, opt for personalisation based on previous customer activity such as their needs or history, demonstrating much more care and effort and acknowledging a subscribers individuality.

 

2. Subject line
The subject line of an email is going to be the deciding factor on whether someone decides to open or not, so it needs to be eye-catching and relevant. When it comes to the length, there appears to be one area to avoid: between 60 and 70 characters, or what is referred to by marketers as the ‘dead zone’ of subject length. Research by Adestra found that there is no increase in click throughs or open rate for subject titles of this length, through tracking over 900 million emails in their report. It was found that subject lines of above 70 characters were most beneficial to engage readers in clicking through to content within the email, and subject lines of less than 50 tested well with open rate. A great example of an effective subject line was Barrack Obama’s fundraising campaign, with just ‘Hey’ as the subject he saw fantastic engagement with the campaign.

 

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3. Timing
Research (see below) has shown that the optimum time to send out a Marketing email is between 8am and midday, in order to get not only the best open rate but click throughs and sales too. Importantly, each customer base will be different so the best way to find the right timing for success is to test! Send out emails at different times and see what is most effective for your business, and be sure to monitor stats through your email client.

 

 

4. Build your subscriber list!
If you are sending emails out to the same small pool of recipients it makes sense that you would get a limited response rate. Look for opportunities to increase opt-ins and collect contact details for your customers and those who are interested in your business.

  • Strategically place a newsletter signup form on relevant pages of your website
  • Link to an email newsletter opt-in within a one-off email
  • Add a newsletter opt-in field to inquiry or booking forms
  • Add an opt-in link to order confirmations, surveys and other emails that you send out

It is also a good idea to include links to social media within your email to allow recipients to share with others, enabling you to gain even more subscribers.

 

It is important to remember that email marketing is still a paid media (Chaffey, 2012) much like traditional leaflets, and as a business you would not continue to invest in handing out leaflets if there was no sign of return on this investment. Although email marketing can take some time to figure out, and it can take some practise to make the most of this channel, that does not mean that it will work for everyone. However if you are willing to put in a bit of work and investment, as with any marketing, it can pay off as a cost effective and successful way to advertise your business.

 

Check out some great examples and more tips:
Email marketing examples
8 effective email strategies backed by research

Effective email marketing in 10 simple steps
14 tips for effective email marketing

 

References:

Briffett, S. & Ruebke, S. (2013) ‘The role of content in creating meaningful conversations online: Case study of Henkel Beauty Care’s digital campaign in Germany’. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Volume 1, Number 2, 1 January 2013, pp. 128-135(8)

Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012) ‘Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practise’. [Online] < http://lib.myilibrary.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/Open.aspx?id=399626 > [Accessed 20/4/16]

How Can I Drive More Traffic to my Blog?

With such a huge number of blogs for every topic imaginable available on the internet, estimated at over 275 million by this source, it is important to ensure that your business can make its blog visible to its target audience. Although it would be great for a business for readers to be able to randomly stumble upon your content, in reality it takes some work to build up an audience but the results can be worthwhile for making a good impression on customers! But what is the best way to drive readers to a blog?

 

  1. Content

If your content isn’t interesting and relevant to your target audience, why would they want to read your blog in the first place? Ensure you follow a clear theme, decide on a target audience and ensure you are conveying messages that they will want to read. According to this source, studies have shown that including visual content in your blog can increase people’s willingness to read by up to 80%, so it’s important to consider including not just photos but infographics, videos and recognisable visual links to social media platforms – enabling and encouraging readers to share your content with others. According to Briffett & Ruebke (2013) modern marketers need to give consumers multiple platforms through which they can engage in meaningful conversations with a business in order to succeed.

 

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  1. Promote

For many businesses there is a mentality of sharing a post once and then forgetting about it, but this should not be the case. Many people will miss the first communication but would pick up on subsequent shares at differing times and dates, meaning you can draw more of an audience by alerting them, or even nudge someone who may have seen something the first time to read it later. Be careful not to spam potential readers though, or you risk being unfollowed on social media platforms, instead try tweaking your post by sharing the title, a question, a fact or even a quote from the author (Some great examples here). As Taylor (2013) states, a social media strategy will determine which platforms are most suitable and will allow your business to share the same content across relevant channels ensuring synergy and accurate brand representation.

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  1. Title

Make sure you give each blog post a catchy and descriptive title, relevant to the content as not only is this the first thing that a potential reader will see – and what will help them to decide whether to read on or not – but it is also one of the factors used by search engines to determine what your blog is about. Keep it short, and stay on topic! There are some great tips on writing a good title here.

 

  1. Keywords

Keywords are the key to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and driving more traffic to your posts. Choose words in the title that you believe readers may search for to find your post and ensure you use these within the post at least twice, helping search engines to understand what your page is about and ultimately driving more people to your blog. Make sure to add links to other valuable sources, what search engines want to do is prioritize good quality information. As you can see in the graph below, SEO provides a huge opportunity to gather additional page views and increase reach and is only growing:

 

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As you can see it really pays to put some effort into improving the reach of your blog. It is important to remember to monitor your blog statistics through a free service like Google Analytics, to work out which methods are effective at getting your content out there and ensure that your hard work is successful. According to Ryan (2014) it is still important to remember that direct response, such as number of clicks, is not the only measure of success and to stay responsive with other metrics such as shares and comments.

 

 

Here are some other sources about driving traffic to check out:

20 ways to drive more traffic to your blog

21 tactics to increase blog traffic

How to drive more traffic to your blog

 

References:

Briffett, S. & Ruebke, S. (2013) ‘The role of content in creating meaningful conversations online: Case study of Henkel Beauty Care’s digital campaign in Germany’. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Volume 1, Number 2, 1 January 2013, pp. 128-135(8)

Ryan, D. (2014) ‘Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation’. Page. 3rd Ed, pp. 76-77

Taylor, N. (2013) ‘Choosing between social media platforms and understanding the markets they reach’. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Volume 1, Number 3, 1 December 2013, pp. 283-291(9)