How to use data to guide your 2019 planning

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: annual planning.

It’s Q4, and everyone is scrambling to create their plans for 2019. Annual planning can feel like creating New Year’s resolutions. If you wait until January to start going to the gym, you’re missing out on 11 other months of opportunity to make a positive change.

It’s a great starting point, but it shouldn’t be the only time you stop and evaluate, and if that’s how you operate, you’re doing it wrong.

Planning is important, but end-of-year planning is especially important. PR pros tend to put so much pressure on this year-end work that it becomes overwhelming and time-consuming. Many executives are seeing the metrics for the first time and will probably have questions about performance.

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You want to be ahead of the game, anticipate questions and have solutions.

Understand your goals

What questions are you asked most frequently? What are you reporting on?

Your team might be in charge of acquiring new leads or achieving a conversion rate, but what is the overall business goal?

Some companies aren’t forthcoming with this information. Many companies don’t set goals at all. However, almost every organization is looking to boost revenue.

Tracking

Have you set up Google Analytics and Tag Manager so you can measure conversions? Do you have access to your customer relationship management metrics to know how many net new leads you acquire?

At a minimum, you should have Google Analytics and Tag Manager. These tools are a marketer’s best friends. Setting up Google Analytics is pretty straightforward, and if you have a website, you should have a tracking tool in place.

There are other tools in the market, but Google Analytics is the gold standard. The free version offers enough functionality for most companies.

Tag Manager is also important to set up. Other companies, such as Trust Insights, can help you get up and running.

Google has a free UTM builder tool you can use to tag your digital campaigns. A UTM tag is a set of parameters or keywords you add onto a URL. It lets you know what people are clicking on and interacting with. You can use campaign parameters for both paid and organic efforts.

Let’s say you’re posting your latest blog to social media. You might have UTM parameters such as Source = Facebook, Medium = Organic, Campaign = NovCEOBlog. The URL you post would look something like this:

https://ift.tt/2TjyluX

The UTM builder tool enables you to shorten a campaign URL. You might also use bitly.

What to measure

If you regularly measure your efforts, year-end planning won’t seem so daunting.

Break out your analytics by what you should look at daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. If you only have Google Analytics at your disposal, this still applies.

Here’s the rundown:

• Daily metrics matter most—and are those you have control over. What assets are causing people to take action? What’s converting? Should you adjust your tactics?
• Weekly metrics are website traffic or users. Are you where you should be?
• Monthly metrics would be page views at the individual page level. What are people looking at? What’s trending this month?
• Quarterly metrics cover behavioral data, such as entry and exit pages. How are people getting to your site? What are they doing once they get there? What pages do they look at last?
• Annual metrics look at things such as new and returning users. Are you attracting new users? Are people coming back multiple times?

Your dashboard

Keeping track of your data (marketing data or otherwise) doesn’t have to be hard. This is something you can easily set up in a Google Data Studio dashboard. Plus, Google Data Studio can connect directly to your Google Analytics account.

Just log in to your dashboard and refresh it. The data will be up to date. Furthermore, Google Data Studio connects to a lot of other tracking systems when you’re ready to advance.

When setting up a dashboard, it’s best to follow a “Why, What, How” structure.

Start with “why.” Why are you doing the thing? Why do you care about the outcome? Next, consider the “what.” What did you do? Finally, address the “how.” How did it perform, and what was the outcome?

Annual planning made easy

Understand your goal, get your house in order, look at your metrics regularly, and set up automated dashboards to ease your burden.

If you look at your marketing data throughout the year, annual planning won’t be such a big deal. Instead of spending all your time on “what happened?” you can refocus and look ahead to “what’s next?”

Katie Robbert is the co-founder and CEO of BrainTrust Insights. A version of this article originally ran on the Spin Sucks blog.

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