Sterce model: deployment of current resources

Good. The market, the environment and the competition has been portrayed. There is an excellent picture of the garden we are currently in and it is time to look at what tools are currently in the shed to mould it to our liking. What is already yielding results and what will it take to maintain everything in its entirety?

What is important?

Analysing a company's current situation means taking a comprehensive look at what it has to offer in terms of marketing. A look at the so-called 'marketing mix'. What all does the company currently deploy to get to its customers? Incidentally, this analysis looks at both the online, and offline marketing mix.

Under online marketing tools, we find, among others:

• The website;
• The findability in Google;
• The use of blogs;
• Using social media;

By offline marketing tools, you can think of:

• Standing at trade shows;
• Using magazines;
• Promotional events;

These online and offline resources can also overlap and do not exist alongside each other. After all, a trade fair can be perfectly combined with social media and a magazine can also very easily find its way to the website. At Sterc, we very much believe in the synergy between online and offline and therefore take this into account extensively in the analysis of the current situation.

Analytics

Analysing online data has, thanks to Google Analytics, become a lot easier. Google Analytics allows us to get a razor-sharp picture of how the online marketing mix is being used and received. A few examples of what can be analysed:

• How many visitors are reaching the site through the social media, email marketing campaigns and Google campaigns?
• Which sites do visitors reach yours through?
• Which pages have a high bounce rate? In other words, how many visitors visit one page and then leave again? Incidentally, this is not necessarily bad, but worth noting.
• What percentage of traffic comes from mobile devices?
• What is the demographic of your visitors, their age, their gender?

An important note is that you should be careful about drawing conclusions from this data. While a company may use Google Analytics, it may well be that the data is not entirely free of 'obfuscation'. Spambots, for example, can drive up a website's bounce rate and number of visitors tremendously, just as not blocking IP addresses coming from the organisation itself can do so. So it is vital that the numbers themselves are subject to deepening.

Conversion

After measuring all this data and making the corrections, we get a good picture of conversion. What does it all add up to? All those visitors, what do they do after reading your content, or looking at your pictures? Do any of them take action, or do they take it for granted?

Conversion is what it's all about in the end. You can have the most beautiful websites around, but if visitors then don't take action, they are of little use to you. Later in the model, we will therefore pay extensive attention to this conversion. For now, it is important to have a clear picture of the current conversion rate. Is the process running as it was conceived at the time and via which channels do you get the most conversions? If we have this picture clear, we can start using this information when determining next steps. We will then know which channels are still contributing, where we can focus even more on and which parts could undergo a refresh.

Mapping other data

Earlier we also talked about offline marketing tools. Trade shows, promotional events, they are tools that can work extremely well in reaching potential customers. The data this generates may be a little less hard to verify, but it can give some insight into what works and what doesn't. So you can create email lists, or lists that include appointments with potential new customers. Once this is all mapped out, we can start taking the next steps.