How to keep abreast of marketing: a tale about the Queen Victoria diamond and tabs in my browser

You are the head of a medium or small company (or even a startup), you look to the future and determine the company's development strategy. And for routine marketing operations, you have a content writer, SMM, SEO, paid advertising and many more on your staff or on a contract.

From time to time you gather in your study all these nice people and ask them to tell you how things are going and what kind of success they have achieved. They show beautiful graphics, called nice numbers. You feel good.
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Just need to remember that all these marketers are not a collective fairy-godmother, and if the director blindly believes in beautiful numbers and graphics, then at one point, the company risks turning into a pumpkin.

In 1849, the largest diamond Kohinor was presented to the English Queen Victoria. There was a question - who polishes it?
- All jewelers are crooks! Said the queen, and she herself sat down at the grinding machine. After 38 days, the diamond was turned into a diamond.

Each director should remember - apart from him and the owners of the company, no one is interested in developing a prosperous business. Ordinary employees are concerned with the timely payment of salaries and minimizing their own efforts. No, they certainly do not want to send the company into a financial knockout and prematurely lose their jobs. But they won't spend their time on fine optimization either.
Can you imagine a manager responsible for Google Adwords, who on his way to work will see an advertisement for his serious corporate product on an entertainment website, and run to add this website to the list of exceptions to save a budget?



On the monitor connected to my work laptop a separate browser is constantly open. Each tab in it is a separate tool that can improve the efficiency of a process or save a company money (or both at the same time).
All of these tools are trivial and well known. I spend one to two hours a day working with them. Immediately I warn you, there are no miracle sites among them that solve all problems with one click of a button. And there is this ...

CRM

Here I check:

• the quality of new interests, namely, a legal entity (which is preferable, since the size of the transaction is significantly larger) or physical; is there a telephone, corporate mail or personal;
• the correctness of the distribution of interests between sales managers (it is better to prevent conflict than to delve into it later).

Google.Analytics and Yandex.Metrika

These services I use for:

• control the total number of incoming interests;
• identification of the most effective channels for generating interests and changes in dynamics; if I see that there are far fewer leads on advertising, then immediately the advertising manager has a question - what has changed?
• determine the dynamics of ROI. For example, I see that last week the lead in Adwords cost 500 rubles, and now it costs already 1000. What has changed? The competitors raised the bet or my manager decided that he needed to fulfill the plan for the leads in any way and pulled up the amount per click?
• control the effectiveness of marketing activities. For example, if after publication in the media, conferences, public speaking, the number of direct visits grows, it means marketing specialists have done everything correctly.

Google.Adwords and Yandex.Direct

On these tabs, I clarify the information that Google.Analytics and Yandex.Metrika have already provided me. In some cases, the reports of advertising systems are more convenient and intuitive than those of web-analytics (here someone likes what).
And of course, if I see opportunities for optimization, it is much easier to make changes on my own than to formulate a task for a manager.

Google Search Console and Yandex.Webmaster

Brief monitoring of errors with indexing, non-existent pages and other things.
When, relatively recently, we changed the structure of the division of a site into languages, errors occasionally occurred and I visited these sites often. Now it is very rare, a couple of times a week.

Alexa.com, Prodvigator.ru, SemRush.com

Analyzing the position of our site relative to competitors. If we lose our position, this is a reason for a serious conversation with the SEO manager. If competitors increase their positions, then also to the conversation, but to a good one - what needs to be changed on the site in order to keep up with them.

Facebook, VKontakte, Linkedin

Here I look at how quickly our pages grow by subscribers, how active publications are and how well these publications are.
Compare our statistics with statistics of competitors. I usually enjoy
I carefully study all their publications. This is very important and here is why.

Recently, our competitors found a pretty picture describing how to combat procrastination. They translated the text and placed it on their page in FB. Unfortunately for them, we did the same thing half a year earlier and published it on lifehacker.ru.
We, as they say, are not sorry, but from the point of view of the reader there is a feeling that the competitor is secondary. The market for personnel monitoring systems is not very large yet, the likelihood that people will read both materials is high.
Perhaps my readers will say that I exaggerate the danger, but I would put my marketer "in appearance" for such an oversight.

Competitor Sites

Have any new promotions been announced that it makes sense to take note of (copy, parry).
Have you updated the site (over the past six months, this has never happened to anyone).
Perhaps published some new materials.

I spend so much on all these actions — about 30 minutes a day. You will tell me that this time could be used for something useful and more appropriate for the status of the project manager.

Sure you may. Only now does not give me rest saying Zorga.

If you want to do well - do it yourself

I don’t want to do everything myself, but I always keep my hand on the pulse.
So these 30 minutes are a reasonable payment for the rapid growth of our company.

What and your company wish!