How Using the Power of Analytics Can Increase Sales
Using a CRM and creating a website is one of the best methods of finding and maintaining your target audience, but the data collected from these sources is just as important! When you fully utilize these tools, you embrace the opportunity to better understand and engage with your target audience.
Read on to learn more about how you can use data from your digital marketing to increase sales.
Why Use Analytics?
As digital marketing trends come and go, consumer preferences and expectations change. People want a more personalized experience, and digital marketing tools provide the necessary information for discovering where and how you can better connect with your audience.
Use the information you gain through analytics to connect with smaller, specifically-targeted audiences, continue using this information to cultivate a loyal consumer-brand relationship, and see an overall increase in the ROI of your content marketing efforts. By creating strong relationships with loyal repeat customers, you are more likely to make repeat sales and maintain a profit.
Utilize Your Sources
Analytics can be collected by most digital marketing tools. From your website, to social media, to email, any way you connect with customers is a source for vital analytics. The more information you have on your audience, the more apt you are to effectively connect with them. Wherever your audience goes, they are providing important information you can be tracking and reviewing.
Website
Your website is probably the most obvious start for reviewing analytics. Depending on how you set up your site, you may want to use a tool like Google Analytics to review the data you’re collecting. Other CRM’s like HubSpot can also be used to review data. Depending on your unique needs, you may opt for a paid CRM system with more extensive and personalized services. For most marketers, though, Google Analytics is an excellent data collection and analysis program.
Use the data collected from Google Analytics at your disposal to learn how people are reaching and responding to your site:
- What are your most popular pages?
- Which pages convert?
- Which pages (especially blogs!) have the lowest bounce rate? Highest bounce rate?
- What are your most popular landing pages?
- On which pages do people spend the most time?
- What are the search terms people are using to find you?
- What other sites are people visiting before entering your site?
- What are your most effective CTA’s?
- Which forms do the best and where are they located on your site?
With this key information you will be empowered to make informed changes to your site that can assist user navigation, increase time spent on the site, increase conversions, encourage new leads, and more- all of which can positively affect your ROI.
Social Media
Every social media platform offers an analytics tool. While the nuances of each platform might slightly differ, the overall information you can get from these analytics tools are comparable and should give you a strong insight into the behaviors and preferences of your followers.
Facebook– as an admin for a Business Page, you can use the Insights tab to access all the data regarding your Facebook page. Key information like Post Reach, Page Responsiveness, and individual reports for each post can be easily accessed from a convenient dashboard.
Instagram– like FB, if you have a Business Profile on IG, you can access all your analytics through the Insights page. Track your daily interactions, find where you are most popular, and even determine your unique optimal posting time through the convenient in-app dashboard.
Twitter– Twitter provides a slightly less comprehensive overview by showing you a summary of your account’s performance over the past 28 days. Here you will find how well your page is operating in terms of visits, follower growth, and impressions. You can receive overall summaries for your page or get in-depth information for each tweet, too!
LinkedIn– LinkedIn gives you a basic overview of your page’s engagement, followers, and visitors. If you have a LinkedIn Career Page (used by employers to attract job candidates), then you can also access Talent Brand stats, which can be used to better brand a business to attract the right employees.
Beyond just the native tools, there are tons of free social media tools available online. Some of the most popular include Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and even Google Analytics! These tools are especially popular among small business owners and marketers working across platforms as many of these tools allow you to analyze data across multiple social channels. For most businesses, these lower cost analytics tools are more than capable of helping you make the most of your social media marketing efforts.
Email marketing gives you a great opportunity to see what resonates with your audience. It is free, easy to create and distribute, and is still one of the preferred methods of communication, even among younger audiences.
There is a wealth of information you can easily gather from email marketing that you can use to improve your open rate, engagement, link-following, and even brand loyalty:
- Who’s opening them? How often?
- What are they clicking on?
- Who are your highest openers?
- What types of subject lines are used in the most opened emails?
- What content is most popular?
- When and how often do viewers like to receive emails?
- What groups can be determined and segmented with this data?
Once you’ve determined this basic information, you can then alter the content and layout of your emails to better entice receivers. The final question, determining audience segments, is one of the most important aspects of email marketing. If you are able to determine what type viewers will best respond to certain content, you will be able to deliver a more personalized experience and boost engagement.
It is easy to assume that if you are sharing content and interacting with consumers, then your marketing program is working, but if you aren’t reviewing your analytics then you are missing out on endless opportunities to improve your engagement and conversions.
Paying attention to your analytics and using the knowledge of who is engaging with your social media, website, and emails and what they are engaging with means you can focus your efforts on those with the greatest chance of engagement, and boost your sales!
People are continuing to search for a more authentic experience online (and are weeding out the things that don’t matter to them). Give the people what they want! Don’t let this priceless data go to waste- use the power of analytics to unlock the most effective means of connecting with your prospects and customers.
Thanks for reading,
Shannon
Editor’s note: This blog was originally published in January 2020 and has been edited and updated in March 2022.
