As an engineer and software developer, I’m a very numbers oriented kind of guy. Heck, I created the G-Wizard Feeds and Speeds Calculator to get better feeds and speeds for my own work before I ever thought of turning it into a business. I wanted those numbers to be right!
It’s been the same thing with marketing. I use Google Analytics and other tools to help me understand how to improve my marketing for CNCCookbook. In the Digital World we live in, this works very well. CNCCookbook gets 4.5 million visitors a year, and it’s just little old me writing articles that does it. There’s no big team of marketers doing that work, and I only do it part-time because I wear a lot of hats here. The only reason I’ve been able to do it is I have carefully studied the Masters, learned from their advice, and in some cases, reverse engineered what they’re up to.
If there’s one thing I have always found useful, it’s benchmarks. No matter what I’m doing, one of the first things I try to learn is how are the experts doing it?
The same is very relevant to marketing your business. Towards that end, I have launched a benchmark series that I call the “Top 15 Marketing Masters“. In this series, I profile the Top 15 marketers I follow (I actually follow a LOT more marketers than that, but these 15 are at the very top of the game). I analyze how they operate and have collected a big database with over 50 variables on each marketer I track.
I’m really excited about the series because it gives you the ability to compare your key marketing metrics against these experts to see what you might change or try to help grow your business faster. Each profile covers the following areas:
Overview: Who is this Marketing Master, what is their website, and what are they known for?
Marketing Style: Where are they getting traffic? Search engines? Social media? Referrals? I break it down so you can see.
Content Quality: How good is their content? How long to people spend on their site on average? How many pages do they read? What’s the bounce rate? Bounce rate is a key metric Google monitors that tells what percentage visit a page and “bounce off” to return to Google, presumably because they didn’t like the page.
SEO Efficiency: Are they good at building Backlinks? How many backlinks does it take to hit your traffic goals? What about keywords? How effectively do they choose their keywords?
Social Media: What mix do they use? Is Facebook best for them? LinkedIn? Twitter? Something else?
Analysis: My analysis and observations on what makes each Marketing Master tick.
What I love about these kinds of studies is they reveal an important truth that’s common in the world–there’s more than one way to win at any game. Going over these profiles can open your eyes to some of the different possibilities by looking at how the Marketing Masters differ. It can also tell you things that are common to all of them, and hence may be required to be a winner at this level.
For an overview of the Marketing Masters Profiles, as well as the averages for all 15 on these important metrics, check here:
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Bob is responsible for the development and implementation of the popular G-Wizard CNC Software. Bob is also the founder of CNCCookbook, the largest CNC-related blog on the Internet.
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