I watch the analytics of my clients religiously. In fact, if the stats reach a certain point, we go into overdrive to ensure that more people are seeing their business. Why? It's all about the numbers. Success is always due to numbers.
Did you study statistics in college? That was one of my hardest classes so of course I focused on it. I had nightmares about it. It was dry and boring. So I did what anyone else would do, I wrote software programs that would help me to solve the problems easier. I did it for two reasons. One, I wanted to solve the problems easier, and two I had to do something to break the monotony of learning it and I know that building the program would essentially be another way to study how the problems could be solved. It was a lot of extra work and I was able to squeeze an A- out of the course.
With digital marketing I know that the answer for more customers is simple. The more people that see you within your target market, the more chances that you will have to get them as customers. I cringe every time I hear someone say that they only use word of mouth or a networking group. It is not realistic. It is not scientific. It is in fact, it is ignorant and professionally misleading if anyone tells you otherwise. Yes, you may fall into this category and I wish that I could sugar coat it to make you feel better. I really do. Yes, there are success stories, but statistically, those that succeed using these methods have something that most probably don't have. Word of mouth and networking groups are good but that is a slow death spiral for your business and if you are the business owner just sending people to do this for you, you may as well just thrown your money into your toilet and press flush. UNLESS, you are tracking analytics. You can track how many people you or your sales/marketing person talked to; the quantity of phone calls that were made; the quantity of emails sent. If you track at least this, then you can determine how many of each category was conducted to finally get a sale. Duplicate that number and now you have doubled your sales.
But then, maybe your message isn't right and maybe to increase your sales numbers you should change your pitch. Enter A/B testing. Have you heard of it? This is simple and I will use email as an example. You send an email of your pitch to a potential client. You send a similar email with a different variation to other clients and the one that gets the most sales- wins. In theory. There is more to this and I could write a book about it but I think you get the idea.
So how do you track your analytics? What metrics do you monitor? What software do you need? Who programs it all? Do I have to hire someone now? The answer is... 42. Or, you can call me and I will explain more. I can honestly tell you that I love business analytics. It's an ongoing challenge and new metrics are added often that give better indicators of success.
Comments