In this post, we are setting enterprise level big data services aside to focus on small to medium size businesses, or SME analytics and data analysis.
With the advancements in marketing data analysis, we have huge opportunities to fine tune our marketing program. We are very fortunate to have access to very powerful analytical tools for little or no cost. It is just a matter of knowing which tools to use and how to use them.
First and foremost, it is now possible to measure which marketing effort is producing results, and which is not. This clearly is the closing of the loop we were all waiting for, with respect to quantifying business results and attributing sales to specific marketing activities. We can now accurately calculate return on a marketing spend, adjusting our marketing efforts to create the most sales per marketing dollar spent.
This also enables us to definitively prove the value of marketing. Finally, our success as marketers is not up to speculation. Clearly proving ROI can lead to more resources allocated to your marketing efforts, and an even more productive marketing program as a result.
In the industry of small business data analysis, there is Google Analytics, and everyone else. However, there are some hidden gems in the world of data mining, and there are analytics functions to many services and applications you probably already use.
Below, we will cover the main tools of analytics for small business, but there are many common services like short URL, infographics and QR code generators with analytics capabilities, so keep an eye out for new tracking opportunities on the horizon.
A precaution about this process: Although this is a gold mine of useful data, one can harvest a lot of data that should be ignored entirely, to be frank. The art of this science is knowing what data is important, how to render a clean set, and how to present it in relation to KPI goals for the company.
When forming an Analytics plan, one should determine what data you need to collect, and what specific analysis and processing that will yield this data as cleanly as possible. The data is only as clean as you insist, and clean data is essential to meaningful conclusions. This is an important step.
You also need to determine who will actually consume this information in the end, and what they are looking to see. It is very common for a tech to overwhelm a C level with a bunch of confusing data.
All presentations and report should be developed with the end consumer in mind, focused on company KPIs, not confused with distracting marketing benchmarks that are only important to us geeks.
Ok, now to the meat and potatoes..
Of most importance, Website performance:
Google Analytics (GA), can deliver a lot of information that can help you improve the performance of your website - bounce rate, load times, mobile performance - and that certainly should not be overlooked in importance. GA can also provide a lot of information about demographics, information about the device used, paths a visitor takes to conversion, page depth, read times, interaction and engagement, landing page performance, and a host of other useful sets of data.
Analytics tools like MozPro, or SEMrush do a great job in evaluating site performance: identifying broken links, duplicate content, SEO opportunities, backlink analysis, keyword SERP performance analysis, social performance, competitive analysis and keyword research tools. They probably call Mom automatically on her birthday, but I have to check on that..
Content analysis: Youtube, Vimeo, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat.. all with analytics tools that are very useful in understanding what content drives sales, and what does not. They also measure many aspects of social interaction that may not be as important for conversion attribution, but useful in growing your social network and optimizing your content.
Email analysis: MailChimp and Constant Contact have analytics tools provide several useful data points, including how many people open your email, how many of them click through your links, bounce without reading, unsubscribe, report as spam and several other measurable interactions. They also provide comparable industry data for performance benchmarking. (Tip: Google has a Trackable Link Generator that is very useful for tracking traffic from a specific marketing campaign: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/)Marketing Program analysis: GA is most useful in gathering information about the visitor, their behavior on your site, and which specific actions visitors take in becoming a customer. This is very valuable in fine tuning the content that drives this traffic; determining where, when and how it should be delivered to drive the most sales. SEMRush, Moz and several other services provide similar functions and a variety of other services for a monthly fee.
Honorable mention: Kissmetrics, CrazyEgg and Yahoo Web Analytics.. there are numerous others, some paid, some free.. many fine services with some great features like heatmaps to fine tune your website UX (user experience) and cross-referenced attribution so you can track customers across the buying process. But much is redundant if you are using the other services mentioned here.
Popular CRM's like Salesforce, Insightly and Zoho all have analytics tools that can measure the leads generated by and sales attributed to specific marketing campaigns. This can bridge the gap between your content analytics and GA, and can make your grumpy CFO dance the cha-cha.
There are presentation and proposal services (Pandadoc, Quosal) that provide valuable analytics similar to the email marketing services. These services can also include read times on specific pages, click maps and heat charts to display how a potential client interacts with a proposal.
There are Social Analytics and management tools like Hootsweet and SproutSocial that provide a lot of very useful information about your Social Marketing performance; including valuable behavior based demographic information, and social marketing campaign analysis. GA, SEMrush and many other analytics services provide social data as well.
In addition, GA has sophisticated analytics of AdWords paid placement campaigns, Yahoo has a similar service, and services like companies like 33across do a good job of managing and tracking the results of social media display advertisements.
As it seems impossible for the sales staff to simply ask "how did you hear about us?"... Services like Calltrackingmetrics and CallRail can demystify phone call analytics and can be highly useful in measuring campaign impact where the rubber hits the road.
A bit about the nature of data: Ideally, one would like to get as granular as profit generated vs campaign cost, but the more refined the result, the more chance of some kind of measurement error resulting in a misleading data set.
Although the desire for exact information will always be there, the nature of this analysis lends itself to more valuable results in the generalities. That being said, we need hard numbers to prove ROI to the CFO.
..and that leads us to reporting...
There are numerous data visualization services available today, and one should find the service that provides the information you need, in the way you need to see it.
This can usually be done with GA, Google Charts, and Excel to great satisfaction. But if you are looking for something more thrilling, Fusion Charts with hundreds of visualization templates, or services like Infogram to turn your data into an infographics style rendering.
This is a powerful way to communicate complex data to a busy CEO who is more focused on a power
lunch.
All in good fun,
Tony Sternad
HabaneroMarketing@gmail.com
510-545-2054
