If you want to market effectively, you’ve got to know who you’re marketing to.
Google Analytics provides a mine of data to help you paint a clearer picture of your audience and inform and improve your social media efforts. It’s free to use and easy to get the hang of, so you can start tracking a wide array of metrics within just a few clicks.
As useful as the platform is, the amount of information on offer can get a little overwhelming if you’re new to data analysis. In today’s blog, we’ll look at the most important sections you should pay attention to and how you can use this information to assess and improve your hotel’s social media marketing campaigns.
1. Analyse The Demographic Makeup of Your Audience
The Audience section offers a lot of valuable basic demographic data about the type of people that are using your website – their age, location, interests, gender, and the browsers and mobile devices they are using to surf the web. Better yet, it gives you information about how guests came to land on your website in the first place.
The most important areas to focus on here are the insights you’ll find under Demographics and Geo.
In the Demographics section, pay particular attention to the Ageand Gender data. This will give you a basic demographic breakdown of the people that are viewing your website within a set time period. Armed with this information, you can begin uncovering new potential opportunities for content topics and work on perfecting your tone and messaging to directly appeal to your audience. Depending on your findings, you may even choose to trial a new platform you hadn’t considered before. If you’re seeing a lot of traffic from a younger age group for example, you might decide to start building a presence on Snapchat, which is hugely popular among 18-24 year olds.
Under Geo, click Location and set a time frame to begin analysing the geographic regions that are driving the most traffic. Identifying the cities, states and countries where most of your audience are browsing from will help you improve your geographic targeting, saving you time and money and improving the impact of your paid social media ad campaigns.
2. Discover Which Social Platforms Generate Most Website Traffic
To find out how your guests are arriving at your website, go to the Acquisition section; click All Traffic, then Channels. Specify the time period you want to look at, then click Social to analyse the results for each social platform your hotel is active on. The one that generates the most traffic will appear at the top of the list.
Checking in on this data on a regular basis will help you assess the performance of your hotel’s social campaigns, and identify which platform you should focus your efforts on moving forward.
3. Tweak Your Social Media Tactics
Now that you know the key demographic makeup of your audience, the cities they live in and the social platforms they’re using to discover your website, it’s time to adjust your marketing strategy as needed.
For instance, if you know that a significant portion of your audience in the lead up to the summer are young and male, you might start promoting all the ways your destination is a great choice for a boys getaway, drawing attention to local adventure tour operators, surf schools, sports stadiums and bars.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that Facebook seems to be underperforming in terms of referral traffic despite you building a sizeable fan base on the platform? Try a new tactic such as pairing every single post you publish with an eye-catching image for a month. After this time period, check back on your analytics data to see if you’re now driving more click-throughs from Facebook.
By focusing on making small adjustments to your strategy on each platform at a time, you’ll really see which sites are working for you as social referrers, and which, if any, can be considered a waste of time and resources.
There’s no doubting the power of social media to draw in an audience, get word out about your hotel and drive website traffic and bookings. But if you really want to see how your social efforts are lining up with your business goals, you’ve got to keep a close eye on your analytic data.
Does your hotel use Google Analytics to inform your social media marketing efforts? Let us know in the comments below!
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