3 Simple Ways to Optimise Your Marketing Strategy

Estimated read time: 4m

Continually assess market trends to guide strategy

Identifying and assessing trends in your market is extremely valuable when it comes to planning your marketing strategy on a yearly, monthly or even daily basis. Market trend analysis might sound complicated, but it’s generally fairly straightforward to undertake. 

It’s simply the process of evaluating data over time to identify patterns in data or ebbs and flows in the market. You can use all sorts of data sources to do this – historical data from paid platforms, Google Trends, Keyword Planner or site traffic data.

It is however important to take into account the reliability of the data you’re using for comparison so that you can trust it to make an informed decision. A good way to do this is to use a blend of data from different sources for comparison, such as Google Search Console and Keyword Planner. 

Let’s take a garden centre for example. Whilst it can be useful to take a look at a 5-year Google Trends snapshot to see when the best time in the year is to advertise BBQs, overlaying yearly charts and historical purchasing data can provide even deeper insight.

Deeper insight can add context to budgeting decisions in previous years, and help to forecast for the year ahead. For example, if you budgeted £500 to advertise BBQs in 2022 but saw that the demand was reduced by 50% in 2023, you could adjust spending accordingly and gain further context to expected performance. 

Identifying trends not only helps you to make better marketing decisions, but it can help you to keep your CPAs in check whilst fine-tuning your communications to reach the right customer at the right time.

Assessing market trends can also help you to stay ahead of the competition, and identifying micro-trends can even help you to capitalise on a newly developed niche, or address shifts in your industry which you can service.

Sticking with the garden centre theme, if you were to search ‘garden furniture’ in Google Trends, it reveals breakout search terms which can provide insight on related trending products, which can help to guide your planning for the summer season. 

Analyse & contextualise the metrics that matter

If you’re a marketing or business bod, you’ve probably heard the acronym ROI (return on investment) more times than you care to count. But it’s more than just another fancy marketing acronym, it can determine the viability of a new campaign early on, help to reveal trends and aid in refining your message.

So, why is your ROI so important, and how what’s the best way to go about scrutinising it, and reporting it to reveal insights and trends? Well, ROI is an honest metric, and no matter how you feel about some fancy new creative or ultra-refined copy, it can bring things back down to earth with a bump. 

By comparing the cost of the campaign to generated revenue, marketers can see if the campaign was profitable and if it achieved its objectives. Aside from historical trends, your ROI on any given campaign or project provides insight, which can justify certain decisions, such as extending the campaign, adding further budget or cutting it and making improvements. 

You can improve ROI accuracy too, for example on Google ads, you can analyse new customers generated by uploading customer match data, making your new customer acquisition ROI accurate rather than just holistic.

Overall, ROI is the key to optimisation, enabling you to change your campaigns to get better results. By testing different tactics and measuring the return on each of them, you can make data-driven decisions about how to improve campaigns and achieve better results.

Know Your Audience

One of the most important factors of marketing is making sure that all of your communications are consumer-centric. This means that everything you do is to solve a problem for your target market or to provide information that will truly help them.

To create successful campaigns and see a healthy return, you have to have in-depth knowledge of your audience to ensure the content you’re producing resonates – and performs.

Having audience insight doesn’t just apply to imagery or copy either, you need to know which platforms your customers are on, what interests them, which metrics are relevant and which strategies will be the best approach. 

Long gone are the days when a spray-and-pray approach worked on the internet, consumers now expect highly tailored and relevant messaging to cut through the noise and reach them when they need it the most. 

So, knowing your audience helps you to target your users more effectively and protect your budget, shape your marketing planning, boost engagement and improve user retention.

There is no single magic trick to defining your audience, but it just takes a little investigative work, for example: 

• Knowing which problem your product or service solves, and which people it solves it for
• Creating audience personas, define the characteristics of your ideal customer including demographic info, behaviours and interests
• Scrutinise the audience of your close competitors
• Put yourself in the mind of a customer and explore which discovery terms are used
• Analyse your existing customer base and any segments within it 
• Know who your audience is not – who would your offering not apply to
• Examine existing analytical data and know your best-performing channels 

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By incorporating these 3 simple factors into your marketing strategy, over time, you can achieve better results for your business.

At Affinity, we’re experts when it comes to scrutinising metrics and using them to boost results, so get in touch today if you need help.