By Tyler Byrd
CEO, Red Rokk Interactive
Contributing Writer

Q: How can I produce better marketing results on my company’s website?

For many business managers, it is often difficult to choose where and when and how to invest their marketing dollars.

They are constantly being bombarded by new ideas and new solutions. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to decide where their marketing budget will be most effective.

Is it upgrading the website, utilizing social media, or maybe it’s SEO (search-engine optimization) and Web banner ads?

This dilemma leads many marketing managers to seek the advice from experts. However, depending on who the expert is, and what they specialize in, the answers given may often be very different.

So what is the right answer?

Unfortunately, no one can say with absolute certainty what the most effective marketing strategy will be for a business. As marketers, we review the situation and attempt to make the best decision possible based on our own experience and what we have seen work for other companies in similar industries. Then we work to improve.

We test our ideas, track the results, refine our ideas and then test some more. When using the Internet, this becomes much more efficient. That’s not to say you should only use the Internet for marketing, only that your ability to track what is working (or not) is much easier and more accurate with analytics.

Using tools such as Google Analytics, we can see what keywords or website’s drive traffic, what content our customers are most interested in, how much time they spend reading a specific page and which pages lead to the most conversions and/or sales.

By using the right tools online we can see how many impressions a campaign has accrued, how many clicks to a website a campaign has delivered, and how many of those website visitors then convert into customers.

This doesn’t necessarily have to occur all at the same time either. We can evaluate the life of a lead over a period of time. We will track how often they return, what information they continue to research, whether they choose to interact via social media and if they find the website at a later time via a banner ad.

If you track this information correctly, you will begin to see what drives the best results for you and your company.

For instance, we know that social media converts for us at about 2.8 percent, versus referral traffic that only converts at 0.8 percent and organic search traffic that converts at 1.5 percent.

The Internet and analytics also allow us to dig deeper into how well we are performing online.

For example, we were able to track a client’s banner ad that we thought was underperforming. The analytics told us that the banner ad was converting 1.6 percent of the people into actual sales. During our attempt to discover what factors were affecting the viewer’s decision-making process, we decided to update the button.

Online research had told us that viewer habits are affected by the location of a button as well as something as simple as its color. So, after deciding that the button location was fine, we decided to change the color of the button from blue to red. We then monitored the results.

Over a relatively short period of time, we were able to see that the conversion rate for this banner ad increased from 1.6 percent to 2.6 percent, just because the color changed from blue to red. This is just one example of where examining the details and making minor adjustments lead to better results.

For the marketing manager who wants to make the informed choice on where and how to spend their online marketing budget, the best advice is for him or her to be highly adaptable.

In today’s ever-changing marketplace, being agile and willing to make adjustments by testing what works and analyzing what isn’t performing well is key to continually seeking better methods that will create optimal solutions. There is no such thing as a permanent plan. What worked last year or last month may not work as well the next time without constant refinement.

Having trouble effectively reaching your target market?  Let us answer your questions about marketing, advertising, website design and development, social media, SEO or anything else related to the promotion of your business. Send questions to the Red Rokk Interactive team by email at info@redrokk.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Tyler Byrd is CEO of Red Rokk Interactive, a marketing and advertising agency located in Bellingham. The company specializes in developing high impact campaigns that create awareness and drive sales. Columns from the Red Rokk Interactive team appear on BBJToday.com on the first Tuesday of every month. Red Rokk is online at www.redrokk.com.