How drilling down on your data could help grow your business...
Many small business owners struggle to find time to market themselves.
Diane Hall
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And if they do find a spare hour or two, they’re overwhelmed by where to start their promotional efforts.
In comparison, marketing savvy entrepreneurs set up systems and automations to ensure a consistency of brand messages; these same processes also create a funnel through which a potential enquiry should convert into a customer eager to part with their money.
Those who struggle to inject strategies, processes and valuable content into their business are likely the same business owners who pay little attention to measurement. Any marketing they implement will be via a scattergun approach, where content is fired into the ether with little thought to where it may land and little interest into what happens after it hits.
A true joined-up approach to marketing is to not only pay close attention to what you put out into the wide world, but on any responses you receive. For instance, is your content reaching your target market? Are they reading it and, more importantly, acting upon it? Are they visiting your website? Have they placed an order? Are they engaging with or ignoring the things you say?
There are many different analytical tools and techniques out there that can record the impact of your marketing. If you’re unsure how to gather and interpret such information, consult a professional—you’ll be glad you did. The vast majority of analytical tools and programs available are completely free. The sheer weight of information you can gain is impressive but considering the alternative techniques you’d need to implement to gather the same data—via in-person market research and continuous advice from marketing consultants, for example—and the price you’d have to pay for this, makes incorporating analytics an easy and cheap win for your business.
Your analytics can tell you so much. They can confirm if you have the correct target market. They can show you which of your messages are more evocative than others. They can highlight the optimum day of the week/time of day in which your potential clients are the most active/responsive.
Your analytics can point to any elements of your marketing and/or customers’ buying process that turns them off. They can help you determine the best price for your product.
Your analytics allow you to experiment with your marketing, to test new strategies and approaches. It represents market research for the digital age. All this valuable feedback can help you hone your marketing and improve your offering. It can help you widen your reach, so that you increase the size of your market, which will lead to business growth.
Business growth is in your hands
The more you know about your potential customers, the more you can tailor your marketing to them. Your analytics can point to your target market’s life stages, their challenges and objections, the benefits they will gain from your product. They can help you start a conversation and engage more people.
It’s not just money you save from analysing your marketing efforts, it’s your time, too, which also has a financial value. The time you could waste shouting about what you offer into a vacuum could be vast, with nothing to show for it at the end of your efforts.
A savvy business owner thinks this about any promotional campaign or marketing strategy: how will I measure the success of this action?
Your website can carry its own analytics program for click through data and gauging how effective your copy is, i.e. does it ultimately prompt your visitors to act/order?
Social media platforms have their own analytics built in, which provide a wealth of useful information about the activity of your audience relating to the content you post. Both analytical tools should work in conjunction with each other.
Says Lydia Chou, Public Relations Manager at Marketo, ‘…social media analytics can help gauge the power and reach of (your) social media platforms. In a nutshell, these metrics help measure the performance of social media channels. Using this information, you can analyse the content to optimise a strategy to drive your business forward. One example of a social media analytics metric is click-through rate, which is the percentage of people that click your link from a social media post to your actual website.
‘At its core, analytics is data—lots of data. Combined with experience and expertise, that information is analysed to develop a social media strategy that meets your target. Social media analytics can give insight into a variety of topics, including audience growth, content engagement, customer service, and even conversions from prospect to customer.’
Growing your business is a lot easier if you can actually see the effect of your marketing and promotional efforts, and that’s where analytics come in.
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