If you’re new to the world of digital marketing, you might be asking ‘What does Strava have to do with all this?’ You’re not wrong to ask. Let’s get into it…
If you’re like most business owners, you probably try to find time in your busy week to squeeze in some form of exercise, whether it’s running, cycling, or reaching your 10,000 steps a day. Whichever way you try and stay in shape, however, health and fitness is ongoing - and a key part of being able to reach your goals is being able to see that you are already making progress.
Digital marketing strategy is no different.
When you track your exercise with Strava, the app records all the details for you – how fast you’ve gone, where you peaked, how you did compared to last time – and gives you a clear breakdown of whether your approach to exercise is really effective.
In the ideal scenario, you’d go out for your normal run or bike around the same route you went last time, and you’d see from Strava’s analytics that you improved somehow. Whether it’s overall time, covering harder parts in a shorter duration, or just stopping for fewer breaks, you want Strava to tell you that you’re doing better than you did this time last week.
Strava then breaks those data results down into even smaller increments for you to look at, if you’re interested in the finer details (which we’ll get to in a moment!).
But what if you go out for that run and Strava tells you that you actually went slower than expected?
You’ve not made any progress in that week? Or worse – you’re actually going backwards?
Not necessarily.
Like with HubSpot’s blog analytics, the surface level numbers don’t always tell the whole story.
In HubSpot, we can look at how well an individual blog article has performed, holding it up against all other articles on that same website. We can look at how many pageviews each blog post has, what platforms those readers found the article from, and how long they stayed on the page.
We might have ten blog articles, all of which have a certain number of pageviews, and we might look at the lowest number in the list and wonder, ‘Why isn’t anyone reading that article?’
As with Strava, we have to go a bit deeper.
Once we click into the further analytics for the individual blog, we might find that although fewer people read the article, of those who did, quite a few got to the end and then clicked on the Call To Action. This article would, therefore, have a high clickthrough rate. It may even have the highest clickthrough rate of all our articles – despite having had the least number of readers.
In HubSpot, the least viewed blog article may have the highest clickthrough rate, whilst in Strava your slowest run time may have been against the strongest winds or along the steepest route. It may not look like a standalone success, but relatively, it is a success when viewed against other key metrics.
It’s important to view results in increments when you can’t see a win in a bigger picture.
The only way to get better at something is to measure it.
So, don’t worry about what your progress looks like at first glance – take a second to pay attention to the smaller details, and you may see improvements in the places you least expected.
At JDR we’ll break down inbound marketing for you into small, measurable goals that allow you to track positive trends in your campaign – so no matter where you are right now, you’ll always be able to see when you’ve made progress. Call us today on 01332 343281 to find out more.
Image source: Pixabay
