It’s time to evaluate your digital media marketing efforts
As we say goodbye to 2012, it’s essential to take a step back in order to examine the effectiveness of your digital marketing. The past year was the first that many in the jewelry industry were truly on board and focused on making social media matter. Now, with a year’s worth of data, let’s assess a few key areas.
What Are You Good At?
This may seem like an odd place to start, but before you look at numbers, take a few minutes to consider what you think is working. What type of content comes naturally to you and your team? Knowing what you excel at creating will help you make the best use of your time.
What Do Your Clients Like?
Keep an eye out for things that strike a chord with customers—even if they don’t correlate to traffic or sales. Numbers will tell a story and can help you improve, but that’s not all that matters. There’s a temptation to eliminate aspects of your social marketing that seem off-topic or anything that doesn’t relate to jewelry—or, worse, trying to bring in something that has nothing to do with jewelry. Done sparingly, the moments you allow yourself to share the store’s obsession with, say, Dancing With the Stars are the times your passions shine through. They make social media feel like more than an obligation for both your team and your customers.
What’s Working for Your Business?
Passion aside, you need to look hard at your analytics. Which efforts are driving traffic to your site and through your doors? And is this traffic converting into sales? Examine your website statistics, talk to your staff, review your customer relationship management software. Essential information such as site traffic, time on-site, conversion rates, and bounce rates can help you see what’s working and what isn’t.
What Should You Stop?
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Rate your 2012 digital efforts.
The numbers are important, but often the key to success is finding where the numbers and your passions align. Once you’ve considered what you like and what your customers like and compared that with hard data, you’ll have some decisions to make. Do the things you most enjoy parallel your biggest successes? Are some of your digital campaigns simply not working? Let’s face it: The options available to us have exploded in the past few years; beyond websites, blogs, email, and video, there are myriad social services, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. We can’t do it all. Okay, we can’t do it all well—at least not with the limited resources most jewelers have when it comes to marketing.
What Should You Do More Of?
Don’t look only for things to eliminate. Were there unexpected successes? Did an Instagram photo of a cool display generate more comments than all the questions you asked throughout the year combined? Was there an iPhone video showing off a new design that caused a spike in calls and emails to your store? Which campaigns or offers significantly outperformed the others? What did you try but perhaps not fully leverage in 2012 that you should take advantage of in 2013?
What Should You Be Looking for in 2013?
While each of us may have our opinions on the viability of one platform or another, it’s no longer a question if digital marketing is a fad. Social media, SEO, search engine marketing, email marketing, and blogging are all part of a permanent shift in the way we connect and communicate with our customers. The jewelry industry has clearly acknowledged this. (If you have any doubts, just look at the educational calendar of any trade show.) During the past few years, jewelers have invested significant thought, time, and energy into experimenting with these opportunities—and that’s a great thing. Now it’s time to put these tools into perspective and entrench them in our businesses, just as we have with every exciting and disruptive technology that came before.
If you made the effort to invest in social media for your business, take the time to examine the results. You’ll find insights that will help you grow in the new year and beyond.
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