Stop Wasting Money! Data Analytics for Small Businesses.

We recently looked at how small businesses can leverage Customer Data and how it can be beneficial when it comes to our marketing efforts. If we don’t know who our customers are, we’re wasting money! We can’t adopt a “Hit and Miss” or “Hit and Hope” approach to marketing.

So while it’s all well and good collecting this customer data, we actually have to measure it properly. The ability to measure performance on our digital marketing activities is superb and allows us to track the performance of our marketing activities and take corrective action. That’s where Data Analytics comes in to play.

Facebook Audience Insights, WordPress Site Stats and Google Analytics are just some of several major tools which provide information and statistics on who is viewing our information online. 

These tools provide us with valuable data, allowing us as marketers to enhance and modify our marketing strategies in order to be more effective and also cost-efficient. 

Let’s ask two main questions about our Customers:

1. Who are my customers?

2. How do they buy from us?

We can answer both these questions using Analytics!

The first question, Who are my customers?, can be answered with a combination of analytics reports. Google Analytics has a whole suite of Audience reports that we can use. 

We’re interested in the Demographic information, which allows us to break down our users by Gender and Age range. This can be really useful when it comes to developing marketing strategies; by knowing the age and gender of our marketing segments, we can better craft specific marketing strategies to serve those audiences. 

Google Analytics will also allow us to determine the Geolocation of our Audience, i.e. where they are visiting from! Again, this can help us when crafting marketing strategies; what markets should we be putting more effort into? What markets are being underserved? Have we missed out somewhere? 

Another thing we might want to know is what portion of our audience are new to our site? What percentage are returning visitors? By using the Behaviour reports in Google Analytics, we can see exactly how many of our users are new or returning. We might have a loyal audience of repeat purchasers but a lack of new visitors could indicate we need to work on acquisition by marketing to new users. Likewise, a lack of repeat visitors could indicate we are not building up the relationships needed with these customers. 

The second question, How do they buy from us?, can also be answered using Google Analytics, using a mixture of Audience and Acquisition reports. Using the Technology report, we can gain insights into what operating systems and web browser a customer is using. We can also use the Mobile reports to gather what percentage of our audience are accessing our site through a mobile device. This can be useful when determining how to design our landing pages and purchase funnel. The Acquisition report section can tell us how users reached our site; through search or display ads, landing pages, social media or directly via a URL. This can be very useful for measuring the effectiveness of our various marketing strategies. We may notice that one area, for example social media, is driving a high percentage of traffic to our site. This can then determine resource allocation for future campaigns.

As we have seen, using analytics such as Google Analytics can provide extremely useful for a small business!