The Unexpected Benefits of Data Analysis in Sales & Marketing
Save your advertising dollars and acquire ROI through data & contextual analysis.
Are your business decisions driven by data or hunches? Data and analytics, are fundamentals to help you make smart-driven decisions.
Data, let alone analytics, can be a daunting topic and task to handle for a lot of people in the business. It can be very overwhelming and sounds scary. Yes, looking at your google analytics and Facebook insights, can lead to analysis paralysis. But only looking at your numbers and drilling down, deep-dive through analysis, reveals the truth and the root cause behind the truth.
You are powerless to improve your business because you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t.
My goal here is to show you how to simply scale your business through data-driven strategy, consumer psychology, and marketing without the OVERWHELM.
What is the relevance between website visitors and revenue?
What is the relevance between awareness and direct search traffic?
How to stay on top of your prospects’ minds?
How to scale the revenue of your business?
Let’s dive in first to the oldest marketing funnel. ( this isn’t to click funnels or any kind of landing page software)
This is a foundational concept that makes it easy to visualize customer acquisition in marketing. Your brand marketing creates awareness and attracts new visitors to your website. Some of these new leads will be interested enough to evaluate your business and products, and a percentage of them will go on to become customers.
I’ve included the graphical representation of the marketing funnel and the buyer’s journey.
AWARENESS- In any business awareness is a critical part of your marketing funnel. It’s your job to constantly generate awareness about your business and capture the interest of your market. You have to continually and consistently drive streams of fresh eyeballs into the business.
CONSIDERATION- This part of the funnel is to convert the interest into consideration. The goal here is to get your business on top of your prospects’ minds.
EVALUATION- Celebration! Our goal is to convert people from the awareness and consideration stage. Increase the sales frequency, lifetime value of customers and average order value through retention and loyalty.
Any sales transactions and business in all sizes, this is the exact strategy on how to convert total strangers to sales.
Now, what is the next thing for me… (I thought you can help me scale my business)
I want you to start working on your Google analytics and your Facebook Ad account insight dashboards. These tools pull-up data, in which you can uncover significant insights to implement important business strategies and business metrics. You can contextualize trends and discrepancies by looking at your data.
Data will support every business decision you make—especially your marketing. That’s why you need to be tracking your analytics, watching the trends, and identifying the marketing activities that give you the most traction
You can pull up reports of your audience, acquisition, behavior, conversions and customize a report.
When you know how to use it, Google Analytics can tell you SO MUCH about your website and the people on it. Who are your users? Where are they coming from? What actions are they taking?
Just to make it easier for everyone, these are the base metrics that I constantly checking to measure my marketing and drill down important insights.
These metrics are like a thermometer for your business. For a metric to be key, you need to be able to look at it and know immediately whether your business is doing well or not.
New Visitors- This indicates the awareness level of your prospect about your business. This is an important metric to watch out for in google analytics. If you’re getting a low dip of sales, it can be an indicator that you’re spending a minimal effort to drive awareness about your business and that only means lower new visitors value.
This data is the raw material for segmentation and retargeting purpose,
Segmentation- based on your visitor’s interest
Ex: Article readers of custom orthotics and fibromyalgia. They are an entirely different topic- that’s exactly the reason why you have to segment your visitors.
Retargeting- Showing relevant ads to your visitors to optimize conversion.
Ex: Ad 1- free assessment for custom orthotics
Ad 2- Customized treatment for fibromyalgia
Total Visitors-. I’ve mentioned earlier, there is always a relevance between the number of clicks, total visitors and the number of sales.
Revenue per Visitor (RPV) is a measurement of the amount of money generated each time a customer visits your website. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the total number of visitors to your site and is a method of estimating the value of each additional visitor.
Direct Visitors- is the number of people who are typing your website URL directly into Google? It can measure the effectiveness of online and offline advertising. It indicates the effectiveness of your advertising campaign.
Page Visit/Exit Page- insights to understand what people are looking on your website. You can figure out their interest and what they pay attention to. You should see a spike of page visits from your publish blog posts, social media posts and paid traffic ads,
To get a better picture of these two metrics and how it will help you to better understand the behavior of your market.
BLOG POST- REVIEWS- ABOUT CONTACT
A traffic visitor has read your blog about back pain, now after the reading blog post, the visitor gained a piece of great information to be pain-free. He wants more information about you.
Now he had been checking your reviews and about us page. After diving into that information, he had decided to contact you for an appointment.
Bounce Rate/ Average Session- this indicates a mismatch on your ad messaging and website. It can be a huge concern in your business if you’re getting a spike of bounce rate. You have to understand what is really happening beyond the surface level. Why visitors leaving the website- it speaks volumes that there is some sort of disconnect. These insights can also reveal how well your landing pages are performing.
Acquisition- check source/medium under traffic category. It allows you to see the traffic sources and figure out what platform/channel performs best in your business.
Visitor Recency/Direct Visitor Count Returning- I’ve mentioned earlier about reaching a new audience and generating awareness to drive new traffic. Pulling up this data shows the important insights and behavior of your visitors. If they aren’t coming back to your website, (especially for business with a longer window of decision-making) then you’re not hitting to goal to convert people from awareness stage to consideration stage. Your business along with your offers isn’t on top of your prospect’s mind.
You can evaluate four things by asking the right questions?
The quality of content on your website.
The quality of the audience/ traffic on your website
The retargeting ads to remind people about the service offer.
The lead capture strategy to get them to subscribe.
Days to Conversion/Visits to Conversion- I’m not just interested to know the conversion path, I also want to find out how long it takes for my visitors to convert.
I want to dive into the FACEBOOK AD INSIGHTS dashboard. Facebook ad dashboard provides powerful insights and ways to segment your data. The combination of two, google analytics and Facebook ads, such a powerful duo to help you scale the business.
The best way to introduce the Facebook ad dashboard is to start with the pixel. It’s a snippet code you can install on your website. Once you've set up the Facebook pixel, the pixel will fire when someone takes an action on your website. Pixels allow us to follow up with people who have visited our website and track your online activities based on purchases and website visits.
Let’s drill down on how you can leverage your ads through Facebook pixel.
FACEBOOK CUSTOM AUDIENCES
I can’t stress enough how valuable it is for your business. Not only it provides data, but it also allows us to properly segment the audiences and use these data for your retargeting ads.
Let me show you how it works...
You can set up custom audiences based on the interactions and engagements of your audience.
Website Visitors- segment your visitors based on the pageview or time spent on your website. You can show retargeting ads based on their interests. You can also create a specific condition that allows you to exclude variables on your data.
EXAMPLE: ARTICLE READER FOR CUSTOM ORTHOTICS THE LAST 60 DAYS
CUSTOMER FILES- You can upload the customer’s data on your custom audience. It will allow you to use this data to show relevant ads and reengage with your email subscribers. In addition to that, Facebook has a feature that is “lookalike audience”. It has the ability to find people with similar behavior based on your data.
EXAMPLE: PODIATRIST:
ADS TO OFFER CUSTOM ORTHOTICS SESSION FROM YOUR EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS
VIDEO VIEWS- You can segment your audience based on your video viewers. This is a great feature to capture the data of your video viewers and show relevant ads to optimize the conversion rates.
EXAMPLE: PHYSICAL THERAPIST AD
OFFER AN ASSESSMENT FROM YOUR EXERCISE TIPS VIDEO VIEWERS
You can also do the same for your Facebook page engagements/pageviews and Instagram engagements/followers.
These segmentation tools and features from Facebook has been hugely beneficial for every advertisers/business owners. It becomes a lot easier to use these data for ads optimization for higher conversion rates.
Let’s dive into Facebook powerful deep-dive insights and analytics to drive higher ROI paid ads and track your results.
Track your results with offline events.
Upload your customer data (csv files with customer value) every month. Facebook can attribute sales and bookings and match the data from your advertising results. In addition to that, you can leverage your customer data by creating a lookalike audience. Facebook matches similar behaviors from your highest caliber data- which is your existing customers. This can help you optimize your ad conversion and ROI.
How to apply the analytical data and buyers’ journey to a powerful house of marketing strategy to generate ROI for your business…
Now that we had gone through the methodology and foundation- it’s time to contextualize the strategy to marketing execution.
I’m going to divide the marketing strategy into 3 actionable goals, steps, and key performance indicators.
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
TOFU GOALS
1. Reach new target audiences.
- Segmentation and retargeting
- Generate awareness
- Branding optimization
KEY METRICS
- New visitors
- New direct visitors
- Total pixeled audience
- Retargeting lists
ACTIONABLE STEPS
- Social media marketing
- Paid ads (Facebook Ad & Google Ad)
- Podcast
- Article
- Email marketing
- Offline strategy
The goal here is to generate awareness and capture the interest of your market. As a business owner, it’s your job to constantly acquire a stream of new visitors, brand awareness and introduce your products to your market. Your marketing efforts for your TOFU- should optimize your branding and organic search. As you generate awareness of your market, people start actively searching about you and your service offers.
MOFU GOALS
- Drive visitors back to your site
- Generate leads and inquiries
- Build social media channels
- Grow interest in your brand/service offers
KEY METRICS
- Visitor recency
- New leads generated
- Returning direct visitors
- Re-engage and nurture strategy
ACTIONABLE STEPS
- Track the growth of your social media followers and email subscribers
- Create a chatbot to continually engage with your followers and leads
- Email sequence to nurture your leads
- Facebook group
The goal here is to warm up and nurture the audience from your TOFU strategy. We have to keep them engaged so that you can build up the trust factor and authority in the market. It will be a lot easier for your market to trust and consider your services along the buyer’s journey.
BOFU GOALS
1. Convert leads to sales/bookings/appointments.
- Maximize the frequency of transaction
- Maximize the average order value
- Convert existing customers to a loyal and advocate customer for the recommendation, word of mouth and maximize customer lifetime value.
KEY METRICS
- Days to conversion
- Revenue on ad spent
- Revenue Per visit
- Earnings Per click
- Paid Traffic Revenue
- Average Order Value
ACTIONABLE STEPS
- Run retargeting ad stacks to your retargeting lists
- Run promotional email campaigns
- Run chatbot promotional campaign
- Run SMS campaign
- Pull up the data from google analytics and Facebook ad insights
- Track your numbers in analytic sheet
- Revisit your campaign for optimization and tweaking
- Do the math based on the formula for key metrics.
The goal here is to acquire conversion, increase the frequency of sales and turn your customers into advocates. More importantly, pull up your data, track your numbers and drill down to contextualize your analysis.
What you are aiming for is to improve your numbers to acquire better results.
You can asses the behavior of your market and dive into your social media channels to improve the performance.
I’ve written tons of information in this article and it’s my goal that I didn’t put you into a sleep coma. I’m just kidding! Lol
My strategy can be summarized into three concepts:
- Know your goals. Start with a goal that allows you to conceptualize what success looks like.
- Reverse engineer. Awareness of your lead indicators that requires you to achieve a certain goal.
- Math Proves Phenomena. I just don’t know how to better explain this but you just to have dig into your numbers. Name your numbers into context. Explain what is the number telling you.