To best understand what content performs best and also where it is falling short, you need to understand your digital analytics. Quality data should be the foundation for all financial content marketing strategies, yet it can be daunting. Here we explain how to understand data to maximise your financial content marketing.
What is digital analytics?
At the heart of it, digital marketing analytics is the utilisation of data to inform and evaluate your marketing strategies. By analysing your customer’s reactions and subsequent actions to your content, you can better understand what is working and what isn’t, as well as where you may have information gaps.
Overall, the goal of digital marketing analytics is to have a better sense of your client’s behaviours, motivations and purpose so you can make better, more personalised content.
Benefits for financial marketers
It goes without saying that understanding your clients better will always improve your financial marketing content strategy. When you have implemented strong analytics into your marketing strategy, you will always beat out the finance brands that haven’t.
“ The goal of digital marketing analytics is to have a better sense of your client’s behaviours, motivations and purpose so you can make better, more personalised content.”
When you begin producing better content that not only attracts an audience but also retains them and pushes them through the acquisition tunnel, you have a winning marketing strategy. Digital analytics can help you achieve this.
Here are some benefits to understanding your digital analytics:
- Remove the guesswork from your content creation
- Reduce risks
- Personalise and improve the customer experience
- Understand your clients better
- Identify information gaps
- Predict customer behaviour
How to use your digital marketing analytics effectively
To gain a better understanding of how financial marketers can utilise their digital marketing analytics more effectively, we spoke to The Dubs’ Social Media Director, Andrew Frith.
“Analysing how specific content is performing relies on the ability to identify specific content in the analytics platforms,” Andrew explains.
“A common technique is to add a UTM tag at the end of clickable URLs that attach categorisation information for the content clicked. This allows campaign, distribution platform and content identification to be captured in the analytics platform and then analysis on specific content can be applied.”
“Once a target audience has landed on a finance brand’s website, it is their website behaviour that determines whether your content is working or not,” Andrew says.
“First, the desired actions of the audience on the website content needs to be defined. For a website article, that may be having the audience read the article in full. Analytics platforms allow a finance brand to see how long a user spends on a page, or ‘scroll rate’, which will give a good indication as to whether visitors are actually reading the article or not.”
Alternatively, a finance brand may want the target audience to read a series of articles to understand a topic in depth. In this instance, analytics platforms allow a finance brand to see the ‘multi-page’ journeys, as well as user-journey path visualisations, that will give insight into whether visitors are clicking through to more content after their initial entry onto the website.
Bear in mind that website UX will play a part here such as strong CTA’s and intuitive navigation systems.
In addition, video content can also be measured via digital marketing analytics.
“The effectiveness of video content on the website can be measured by capturing video completion rates whilst also looking at partial completion times,” Andrew says.
Finally, Andrew explains events such as button clicks on the website can also be tracked to determine if more bottom-of-the-funnel activity such as signups to newsletters, downloads of reports, request form submissions are making a desired impact.
There is a myriad of information available at financial marketers’ fingertips that can be used to make informed decisions. “The key to successfully interpreting data is establishing what website behaviours are desired and then configuring the analytics platform to capture that information,” Andrew says.
What is A/B testing and how can finance brands make use of it?
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is an important tool in a financial marketer’s arsenal. A/B testing is simply a randomised experimentation process, that involves two or more variables being shown to different website visitors. This is used to identify what variable works best and enables your finance brand to optimise accordingly.
Andrew says a range of tests can be used such as testing the length of written content, short vs long; testing the visual component of the content e.g. photos vs illustrations; or testing the actual content format e.g. video vs static images.
“The most important thing is to test only one component at a time so that clear conclusions on the A/B test can be made. Changing two elements at the same time will defeat any analytical conclusions on content effectiveness.”
Final thoughts
Ultimately, if your finance brand is not utilising digital marketing analytics to the best of your abilities you’re making a mistake. Analytics is designed to provide you with real client data that can inform your marketing and content decisions. Not using it is a waste of your finance brand’s potential.
