The Importance of Analysis in All Marketing Efforts
By Kimberly Grant
It’s the glue that holds it all together. It’s the measurement of all things progress. It’s making sure you’re on the right track. It’s the analysis of all your artful and scientific creations. Yes, marketing communications (no matter how engaging they may be) are nothing without analyzing their effectiveness.
Analyze This
Imagine developing the perfect social media campaign for your latest novel in your fantasy novel series. You’ve ordered an awesome book cover and paid good money for a book trailer. You decide on marketing it to your current and potential readers via Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You even set a timeline for your marketing message to appear on your platforms for eight weeks.
Those two months fly by in a flash and you are only checking your book sales and it’s a little on the dismal side. What went wrong? What went right? Who purchased your book? How many people clicked on your exclusive Amazon author page and didn’t make a purchase? These are all valid questions. These are also questions that would have been answered before the eight weeks were up if work had been done in the analytical side of marketing.
Analyze That
There are a number of tools at a self-published author’s disposal for tracking their marketing efforts and whether or not the money they’ve spent has yielded a return on investment (ROI). The type of marketing campaign that was ran to sell the latest novel had a goal of social engagement via social media. In order to track the campaign’s progress, the self-published author would have a number of tools at their disposal like Funnel and Thalamus.
Thalamus is an online software designed to be a one-stop service for all database and analytical needs. Thalamus can help a self-published author catalog reader information to get a better sense of what’s going right and what can be fixed when it comes to publishing their novel. Meanwhile, Funnel allows the self-published author to take data from all of their social media marketing and centralize it in one location. Now, these two services aren’t free. Then again, most things in life aren’t free.
Strategizing Before Disaster
Having a marketing strategy without the analyses to measure progress is like reading a novel and stopping at the climax of the story. There’s more to be done and not reaching the finish line properly could be a disaster.
