Kyle Rovinski — September 29, 2017 — September 29, 2017
fancycrave1 / Pixabay
Whether you are a numbers person or not you should be focusing in on the data that is collected about your customers. It can completely guide your sales efforts, marketing efforts, and even your business model.
Early adopters were able to capitalize on the information Google was collecting about its users which meant most of us have been left behind to play catch up and get competitive. Which is fine because who likes becoming the first one to do things anyway?
Just to make sure you’re still there, we’re talking about data-driven marketing, what is it? Data-driven marketing is the marketing decisions that are directly related to an analysis of the information collected about your customers.
Regardless if you know data-driven marketing at all, by now you’ve probably heard of Google Analytics. If not, it’s a free tool from Google that allows you to install a tracking code to each page of your website to learn more about your site and your customer.
You’re able to track things like:
- Geolocation, down to the city or nearest metro
- How long one is spending on your site and individual pages
- How one got to your website
- What’s happening – filling out forms, watching your videos, reading your content
- What device people are visiting from, desktop, tablet, or mobile
- The customer journey through your website.
It’s fascinating and slightly creepy. The whole idea is that you get to understand your customer’s digital actions more.
So for example, we’ve set up our tracking codes, did some advanced Google Analytics set up and we’ve started to receive some data:
- Product A is selling great but for some reason, the website sales are down and phone orders are up.
- We’re receiving a lot of phone inquiries about Product B although there is a literal e-book on the website about it.
- A large majority of the traffic is coming from the west coast. With just 10% coming from the east coast.
- There’s a monthly blog that gets traffic but we are still receiving support calls.
Now we have to investigate.
- Upon closer inspection, you find that customers are spending 15 or more minutes to review an order and checkout. Could the cart be broken?
- It appears that people are downloading the e-book on Product B. But the questions received are not covered in the book. Can these questions be answered on the website?
- It seems that east coast visitors are coming from organic searches indicating a small network of “in the know customers.” To nurture this market and stay in their minds can an AdWords budget be created to build a digital presence in that market?
- As expected you have a high readership with a great deal of time spent on your blogs. Perhaps there is a need to increase your blog output to predict some questions that would come up?
Remember, the marketing industry has always been about knowing your customer. But now we can see how the customer interacts with your website, looks for new information, and comes to a solidified decision. Google Analytics can teach us a lot, but it requires some in-between the ears thinking too.
Your website is your most valuable assets that when neglected it could hurt your business, which is something to not gamble on. While the focus here is on your website there are other pillars of digital strategy, that yes, should be data-driven.
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