Analytics are an important part of any marketing activity, even if it’s only to track website usage from your potential and existing customers. Analytics is a great way to better understand your customers and measure your marketing successes. Whether you only use Google Analytics or have a more sophisticated analytics tool at your disposal, the insights they offer will help you make more effective decisions regarding your marketing strategy.
Gain a deeper understanding of your customers
Sometimes what you expect your customer demographic to be, isn’t always reality. Using analytics tools can help you better understand your customer base, saving you time and money. Social media platforms are great for getting to know the locations, ages and hobbies of people that are liking and following your business’ social media page and posts (of course you may have to exclude your friends and family from the findings).
If you have a business website, but don’t have Google Analytics, I would highly recommend getting it. It’s a free tool that offers a range of data including website visits, individual page visits, conversions, session durations, and more. Google Analytics can also follow your customer’s (and potential customers) journey through your website, so you know which customers are researching, which are researching then purchasing, and which are converting straight to purchase.
Other analytics software can reveal where the people that have visited your website came from, in terms of the source they used to click to your website (whether that’s your social media page, display advert, search advert, or organically etc.). This information can be advantageous when deciding how to target your audience more effectively with marketing campaigns.
More effective marketing
Analytics can hugely impact your marketing efforts for the better. If data is showing your campaigns/website/social media aren’t generating the reach you wanted, it might be time to update your messaging or visual content. Updating content regularly, whether it’s marketing materials, social media or website pages ensures your business stays dynamic and is kept search engine optimised, as well as maximises clicks, session durations and conversions.
It’s important not to get disheartened if your analytics aren’t showing the results you want, take it as an opportunity to refresh our messaging, visuals or both. It might be that you need to talk to your customers more to understand why they choose your business, and which channels will be most effective to engage with them.
Measuring success
Even if you don’t have a marketing campaign, it’s important to set goals for website clicks and views, as well as social media followers and post interactions. This allows you to measure the success of these marketing efforts and gives an idea of which content your customers and potential customers like to interact with. No matter how low or high the targets you set are, analytics measured against your goals will allow for increasingly realistic and specific targets to be made next time around.
It may be obvious to some, but when creating objectives, it’s important to make them as specific as possible, measurable against analytics, as realistic as possible, and time-bound (SMART). Of course, your SMART objectives are going to get more refined over time, but it’s great practice to create them from the start because it’s a fantastic way of setting expectations and understanding your customers.
With the uncertainty of Brexit looming, and the decline of high-street stores, it’s more important than ever to maximise your marketing efforts and drive new customers to your business. If you’d like some help along the way, we would be more than happy to help. If you’d like to be introduced to an analytics platform that doesn’t only highlight marketing stats on one simple dashboard, but also manages leads, talk to us today about our Client Centre solution.
