How to Use Google Analytics to Help Shape Your Marketing Strategy

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, it can be a little daunting at first. With so much data available to dig through, it’s hard to know where to look to find the most important metrics.

Marketers that want to better understand their audience, and strengthen their marketing strategy, need to know how to best utilize all of the data available inside Google Analytics.

Without knowing which sections to pay attention to, you could spend hours digging through the platform and walk away with your head spinning.

Similarly, without analyzing your website traffic, it’s hard to assess the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy and know when it’s time to make a shift.

If leveraged correctly, Google Analytics can provide valuable insight into who visits your website, how they got there in the first place and what pages they spend the most time on; this is powerful data for marketers that can be used to enhance their strategy.

An Overview

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for brands, bloggers or businesses alike. Through use of Google Analytics, you can uncover a tremendous amount of data about your website that can be used to enhance your marketing and business development strategies.

The back end of Google Analytics is broken down into eight main sections: Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.

Almost all eight sections contain sub-sections that provide a ton of data, but not all sections are critical for marketers to pay attention to.

Before we dive in to the sections that matter most to marketers, let’s get familiar with some basic Google Analytics terminology:

• Users: These are people who have visited at least once within your selected date range, and includes both new and returning visitors.


• Dimensions: These are descriptive characteristics of an object. For example, browser, exit page and session duration are all considered dimensions.


• Metrics: These are individual statistics of a dimension, such as Average Session Duration or Screenviews.


• Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of single-page visits, meaning that someone left your site from the same page at which they entered; aka, they didn’t interact with your site.


• Sessions: A session is the period of time that a user is actively engaged with your website.

Now that you’re familiar with the Google Analytics sections and terminology, let’s dive in to the areas that you want to pay most attention to in order to save time and strengthen your marketing strategy.

Zeroing in on what matters most

There are three sections that matter most to marketers: Acquisition, Audience and Behavior.

The Audience section provides a tremendous amount of data about your website visitors. It contains multiple subsections that provide information about the gender, age and location of your website visitors. You can also uncover information about their interests, as well as the browsers and mobile devices used to access your site.

The Acquisition section will provide detailed information about how people arrive to your site. Digging in to the “All Traffic” tab will show you exactly how people are arriving at your website – whether it be a search engine, social media site or blog that you’re a contributor for.

The Behavior section helps you understand how people are interacting with your site. You’ll visit this section to better understand which pages on your website are the most popular.

Focusing on these three sections will help you save time when digging through Google Analytics.

When used together, the information uncovered can help you make decisions about which marketing efforts (be it guest blogging or social media posting,) are most useful in driving website traffic.

Analyzing these sections within Google Analytics will provide you with insight that will enable you to make smarketing (smart, marketing) decisions about the type, tone, and placement of content that you use on your website.

Traffic Channels

Before we dive into who exactly is visiting your site, it’s important to understand how they’re getting there.

To see your various traffic sources for a set period of time, go to the Acquisition tab and click the “All Traffic” dropdown. Select the “Channels” button, set the time period at the top of the viewing pane and scroll down to see the results for the give timeframe.

Here’s a simple breakdown of what these different channels mean:

• Direct: Visitors that came directly to your website. They either typed your URL right into their browser, clicked on a bookmark or clicked a link in an email. Direct traffic is a strong indicator of the strength of your brand.


• Organic Search: You can thank search engines like Google and Bing for these website visitors. An organic visitor is someone who got to your website by clicking on a link from a search engine results page. A lot of organic traffic is a strong indicator of the value of your content and SEO strategy.


• Paid Search: You’ll find any paid search (think Google AdWords) campaigns in this viewing pane. A lot of paid search traffic means that you’re Google AdWords are working well.


• Referral: This represents visitors that clicked a link on another site to land on your website. Years ago, before social media was what it is today, all other traffic (that wasn’t direct or organic) fell under the referral tab. Within the past few years, Google created a separate tab for social traffic, which makes it easy for marketers to focus in on just the websites that are driving traffic to their site. If you guest blog, this is the section to visit to see how much traffic is being driven to your site from your guest blogging efforts. A lot of referral traffic means that you’re being talked about (and linked to) from multiple other websites.


• Social: As a social media marketer, this is my favorite section within Google Analytics because it shows me exactly what social media channels drive the majority of traffic to my site. This data can be used to shape your social media strategy.


• Email: The number of visitors that came to your website from an email campaign. If you do a lot of email marketing, you’ll want to dig through here to see how effective your campaigns are.

Looking at the traffic channels will allow you to see which channel is the largest driver of traffic to your site. You’ll notice that the Channels are listed in order of driving power; the Channel at the top is the one that drives the majority of site traffic.

To dig deeper into the data, click each Channel to see more information.

For example, when I click Social, I can see the entire list of social media sites (again, listed in order of most to least powerful) that drove traffic to my website during the selected timeframe.

Analyzing the power of different channels will help you decide which efforts to focus on, and potentially spark ideas to increase traffic from other channel types.

Get More Out of Analytics With Kissmetrics!

Make better marketing decisions by knowing who is sending you signups, not just which channels are sending traffic. Request a personal demo of Kissmetrics to learn more.

Here are a few ideas to increase traffic across all channel types:

• Direct: Share the link to your website with friends and family the next time you’re with them. Tell them to type it directly into their browser and voila! You just got a nice direct traffic boost.


• Organic Search: Make sure that you’re utilizing H1 and H2 tags, meta descriptions and keywords in all of your website pages and content updates. The stronger your SEO, the greater likelihood that someone will find you on a search engine.
  
• Paid Search: Try adjusting your keywords and/or targeting options to make your ads more relevant.


• Referral: Start reaching out to popular blogs and forums in your industry to see if you can guest post or perhaps be featured on their site. Contributing content to other sites is a great way to increase your referral traffic.


• Social: Increasing the frequency of your posting, and the number of links you share on social media will undoubtedly result in a boost of social traffic. I recommend increasing your efforts on one channel at a time to see what drives the largest impact. For example, make February your Twitter month; aim to tweet a lot of links that drive back to your website and at the end of the month, analyze the website traffic. Then, come March, turn that attention over to Facebook and see which social channel drove more traffic. (If you want to learn how to see which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website, refer to this Kissmetrics blog post that I wrote on setting up Advanced Segments.


• Email: Start including more calls to action and links in your email campaigns. Make sure that your calls to action stand out in your email templates and serve to drive people back to your website.

Once you’ve implemented some of these ideas, take the time to review the Channels breakdown again to see the impact of your efforts.

If your efforts to grow traffic from one channel go unnoticed in your analytics, try a different one!

For example, let’s say you have a ton of referral traffic and very little organic traffic. If your attempts to improve SEO and grow organic traffic have little impact, it’s probably not worth the effort. You’re better off continuing to guest blog, as it’s proven to be a critical marketing activity that is worth your time and effort.

Audience Demographics

Understanding who is visiting your site in terms of their age, location and gender is the best way to tailor your site to suit their interests and preferences.

If you want your website content and imagery to appease and resonate with your audience, you need to know who they are.

To find this information, head over to the Audience tab. You’ll want to focus on the sub-sections of Demographics and Geo.

First, let’s look at the Demographics of Age and Gender.

As you can see, the majority of my website visitors are aged 25-34, followed by those aged 35-44.

Knowing this, I aim to create content that is geared towards, and valued by, young professionals. Some examples are tips for professional development and advice for managers leading a team of employees.

Understanding how old your website visitors are, and whether they’re male or female, is helpful if you’re looking to capture their attention when they land on your site.

For example, if 90% of your website visitors are women, you could deliver a more personalized website experience for them by starting your “About” or “Welcome” page with “Hey ladies!”

Through analyzing the Gender section, I can see that the majority of my site visitors are female. It’s not skewed too heavily though, so I don’t want to tailor my site to females only. That’s why I’ve chosen my website colors to be black, white and green; I wanted to create a sleek and clean aesthetic that would be appealing to both men and women.

Digging in to the age and gender of your website visitors is useful if you want to craft creative content for your blog posts and website pages that captures their attention and gains their trust.

For example, telling your fans to “Treat yo self” to a free guide on your website isn’t going to resonate with individuals in their 60’s. However, it WILL get a chuckle from millennials.

Finally, you want to look to see where your website visitors are from. Looking at the Location tab under the “Geo” dropdown will show you the countries, states and cities of your website audience.

When you first click “Location” you’ll be shown the list of countries. Not surprisingly, the majority of my website visitors are from the United States.

Looking at the different states is a great way to gain insight that can be levered for any AdWords or paid Facebook campaigns you’re going to run. You want to target those states and cities that you see are frequenting your site.

I can see that New York dominates the results by a large margin. That’s not surprising since I live there and the majority of my mentors, friends and family live in New York as well.

Clicking on the individual states will bring you to the list of cities, within that state, that your website visitors come from.

Since I currently live in Buffalo, I’m not surprised to see Buffalo and other Western New York cities at the top of the list. I also see New York City, which is expected since that is where the majority of my friends and family reside.

If you don’t see your city as the top city, you might want to consider shifting your marketing strategy, and content, to target those in your geographic area.

Content Drilldown

Last but not least, it’s important to dive in to the content to see which pages people spend the most and least time on.

To do this, click the Behavior tab and go to the Site Content drop-down. You’ll want to look at the Content Drilldown, as well as Landing and Exit Pages to see which pages are most viewed on your website.

Content Drilldown is the overview of which pages on your website are visited the most.

Seeing which pages, and blog posts, are most viewed by your audience is helpful in guiding your web development strategy; you want to create more of what works.

Through analysis, I can see that my homepage and services page are the most popular. I can also see that the page on my site that has all of my marketing blogs is more popular that the blog page itself, which shows me that my audience values marketing content.

Now, you want to head over to the Landing Pages view in order to see what pages people are landing on when they get to your site.

The Landing Pages view is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your social media and promotional strategy, as you hope to see the blogs and website pages promoted most at the top.

For me, that would be my homepage, services page, free social media guide page and Bravery Beats blog post. Those pages are the ones that I promote the most, as they provide the most value and information that I find relevant for my audience.

It’s important to me to see my free social media guide at the top of the landing page list, as this page is a free giveaway that I’m using in part to provide value, and in part to build my email list.

Analyzing the traffic of this page is a good way for me to assess both the value and popularity of the giveaway.

If you don’t see your most important and/or promoted blog posts and website pages in the list of the top ten landing pages, it’s time to either reevaluate their value and/or your promotional strategy to ensure you’re driving traffic to those pages through social media and email marketing campaigns.

Spending time in the behavior section will allow you to develop an awareness of what content your website visitors find the most valuable. You can use this as a guide for what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to blog topics and page types.

For example, if you notice that the top visited pages are all blog posts about social media, yet none of your design blogs are ranking in the top, you want to spend more time blogging about social than you do about design.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool.

By paying attention to the demographics of your audience, you’ll be able to create content and imagery that you know your audience desires. This allows you to craft a customized and relevant site experience for your audience that will keep them coming back for more. (Thereby increasing your direct traffic!)

When you start monitoring your referral traffic, you’ll start to see which guest blogs are helping to increase your online visibility. This will help you save time by focusing only on the guest blogs that provide a return (in the form of website visits) on your content creation efforts. Similarly, by diving in to your social referrals, you’ll be armed with data to decide exactly which social media channels are the best to share your blog posts on.

By utilizing, analyzing, and focusing on these various sections within Google Analytics, you’ll have a deep understanding of who your audience is, what they want and how they find you.

About the Author: Julia Jornsay-Silverberg is a social media marketing consultant and coach with a passion for helping small businesses use social media to build brand awareness and connect with customers. Check out her free guide, “Socially Strategic” to help you get started strategically on social media. You can also find her on Twitter and Periscope.

The Five-Step Process for Writing Powerful Call-to-Actions By Reverse-Engineering Customer Mindsets

For me, growth hacking is more than just a mindset. It’s about the desire to take tradition and flip it on its head. It’s about leveraging the way we’ve always done things and manipulating those processes to achieve a much better result. It’s about the various interpretations of data and the creative inspiration we draw from them to solve problems and create opportunities.

If you’re growing a product or a startup, you’re probably already aware of the importance of testing which calls-to-action drive the most adoption. Without supplying a nudge for a user to take action, you might get no traction at all, even though your offering may be outstanding.

A call-to-action is the final frontier, separating the discovery of your product’s value proposition and the actual journey a user will take to experience it. It’s like the starter’s gun on track day. After you have attracted users (i.e., runners) who have found the start line, then you need to motivate them to run the journey to the finish line (being a point at which your business objectives are met, such as making a sale, hopefully repeatedly).

Where to begin, though? You could start with the usual “buy now” or “start today” and keep A/B testing to find the most frictionless point of entry. But that approach, even though it may be effective, assumes what you’ve seen elsewhere is “best practice” and therefore should work.

What if you had a starting point so powerful it was almost an unfair advantage? Enter the psych-dive.

How Did This Come About?

I sat down with a psychologist friend of mine the other day, and after all the pleasantries were exchanged, we got to talking about product growth and human behavior. While I’m sure most psychologists are used to putting people on the spot, it was an interesting sight to see how uncomfortable I made him with the question I posed.

I asked something along the lines of: “Michael (name changed to protect his professional integrity), you deal with people and data sets all the time, and you know all about psychological profiling and making educated assumptions in order to help people overcome compulsions, right?”

“Yes,” he nervously replied.

That was my green light. “What would you need to do to turn the tables? To use profiling and data-driven stereotyping to amplify a compulsion?”

He paused, conflicted, partially by the thought of flipping his power for doing good on its head and partially by the surprise of such a request.

What followed was a discussion of the process one could use to profile, generalize, and deconstruct marketers’ tendencies to create more impulsive calls-to-action.

Flipping the Way a Psychologist Cures Compulsion

The main building blocks for the way a psychologist helps someone out of their compulsive need to do something include the following: helping them understand themselves, their habits, and their psychological needs and helping them understand how they use an addiction to fill those needs in an unhealthy way. A psychologist then helps them find new, healthier ways to address those needs (like using exercise to feel better instead of drugs).

Cognitive Modeling of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Source Paul M Salkovskis, Elsevier)

Theoretically, to reverse-engineer that process and increase the likelihood that someone would become compulsive around a product, you would do the opposite. You would try to keep them from being aware of themselves and their habits. You would keep them out of touch with themselves, and encourage them to use an easy, quick-fix solution.

This is already happening in real life. People use Facebook unconsciously. Users have never made an active decision to start spending a lot of their time online looking at other people's posts and photos. It just happens.

People rarely say they LOVE Facebook, or that Farmville is the BEST. They probably say something like, “I waste waaay too much time on Facebook” or “I spend sooo much money on my farm.” This compulsive relationship, albeit seemingly invasive, is a sign the user has been drawn in to the experience and is there to stay.

Ethically, there also are a lot of questions to answer here. Yes, your business needs to make money. That's the bottom line. However, at the same time, each person and business has some decisions to make about "how bad" something is. Most of us wouldn't rob people at gunpoint even if it was rather profitable, because that's just wrong. But most of us wouldn't feel too bad about selling chocolate cakes, even though chocolate cakes are technically bad for people.

Somewhere on that scale is a place where it starts to get a little gray. Is it unethical to deal drugs to poor people who can't afford them? Or, are they the ones who decide to buy the drugs and you're just providing a service? In other words, how comfortable are you with your business model and the extent to which you encourage/market/manipulate people into wanting your product?

With that said, here’s how to immerse yourself in the deep workings of your target audience for better calls-to-action.

Psych-Dive Analysis for Better CTA Triggers

Different segments of society are compulsive in different ways. You have an aging demographic that was brought up in the era of glorification of cigarettes and alcohol (before cigarette companies started to pay out compensation for smoking-related impairments), just like you have a sector of the technologically-native young adults who take to Snapchat and Candy Crush as if they were the only things keeping them interested in life.

Here are four steps for how to uncover compulsions in your key target audience and craft better calls-to-action from the get-go.

Step 1: Craft a Survey

To craft brilliantly effective calls-to-action laced with compulsion, you need to get a solid idea of how your typical market segment thinks and acts with other things generally considered compulsive behavior. These types of assumptions are easy to guess, especially if you classify yourself as similar to the very users you’re trying to target. But, like most assumptions, it’s easy to get it wrong.

Clarity around how your users become compulsive can only be achieved with research. If someone else has already done the hard work and you find your answers via a research piece on Google, then great. But, chances are, what has worked for someone else might not work for you. If, like 99% of scenarios, existing data just doesn’t cut it, you need to take charge and source these answers yourself.

The most effective (albeit, most annoying to respondents) method is a survey. It’s important to be concise if you intend to get a decent rate of response. I always try to keep my questionnaires to a maximum of 10 questions, and largely base these around behaviors. Behavioral questions are some of the most powerful insights into your target market because they unlock answers about how the user’s mind operates. I also ensure absolute anonymity to increase the likelihood of natural responses.

Questions you ask here should serve the purpose of unlocking insights into the behavior of your target audience. These are questions that, once collated to create an overall persona, tell you exactly what motivates their actions.

With limited bandwidth, each question in your survey needs to count. So how do you decide what to ask? Humans, regardless of demography or psychography, always “want” something. Generally those things include elements of personal, social, and career life. Here are three things to consider when formulating questions for your survey:

Biological Compulsion

It’s easy to understand and relate to biological urges to eat and sleep. Questions that relate to demand-based acquisition of biological needs and desires that truly make us “human” can unlock a lot about what intrinsically motivates a user. Biological compulsions cannot really be switched off, and they drive our very existence.

Primal instinct at its finest. Deliveroo’s “Find Food” call-to-action says it like it is.

Experimental and Social Compulsion

Another great avenue for discovering compulsion is to explore things like relationships, social interactions, and drug and alcohol use. These types of insights can tell you if a user relies on external influences to trigger a decision. A great CTA in this instance would be something like “Join your friends” or “Let’s socialize” because these tap into urges to be “connected.”

When all you want to do is belong, click Meetup’s “Start a Meetup” call-to-action.

Aspirational Compulsion

Finally, studying attitudes about money, career, and material things can help you understand how a user may be motivated to part with their money to make a pain point go away, as well as what their end goals are in life. This assists with understanding what angle you need to take in order to get a user to believe they “need” your product. If you’re aware that your target audience is driven by the desire to excel in life, you’ll be able to create a CTA that reflects this, like “Make money now.”

By tying in the money aspect, Uber’s call-to-action attracts exactly the type of driver they want.

It’s also a good idea to provide an incentive for completing the survey. This method may be frowned upon by market research experts who argue that an incentive will skew results. But I’m of the belief that, with enough responses, those that are skewed positively or negatively will be outweighed by the respondent majority. SurveyMonkey has a great little guide to calculate how many responses you need for statistical confidence.

The incentive could be as simple as offering use of your product for free for the first year, or a substantial discount, or a limited early access. Alternatively, it could pay to supplement your survey with incentives of products or services that target the same market segment you do (for example, a free three-month trial of a non-competing and popular SaaS product).

The way to do this is to include an optional field at the end of the survey that asks for an email address and stipulates that the email will only be used to notify the person about their eligibility for your incentives.

Step 2: Find Your Market

Once you have your survey and incentives ready, it’s time to get your target audience to actually take your survey. Finding people to complete it can be hard. If your target audience is easy to locate physically, try going there and asking as many people as possible to take it. If you have contacts that are highly influential in your target market, try to leverage them.

Alternatively, you can always post your survey to an online medium that your target audience uses prolifically. Or, you can demographically and geographically target your audience through paid advertising.

For example, we compiled a survey at GRONADE for a recruitment startup. Once the survey was ready to go, we sent it out to the founder’s existing database. We supplemented those responses using LinkedIn’s ad targeting system, targeting by job role, seniority, and geography, for better quality survey results.

Targeting the right audience for a survey using LinkedIn

Step 3: Supplement Your Data

When you’ve collected your responses and have an idea of what the general consensus is about the behavioral activity of your target audience, it helps to get extra context. A good idea is to take your target market criteria and search for census and journal research data that provides supplementary information about your target audience.

For example, if you’ve discovered that your dominant target market is entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, it might be beneficial to also search for information about what they earn, how uncomfortable their living arrangements are, or even how well they do at mathematics (see page 45 of the 2015 Silicon Valley Index). This helps you build a complete profile of your audience and helps you make better decisions about what might motivate them to click your call-to-action.

Searching Google for related journals on the survey topic

With census data, you get a very particular insight into household, employment, financial, and cultural information. Some journals and other market research (which has been made public) might help you understand saturation data around device and app usage, and maybe even motivations for what makes a specific user set purchase.

Step 4: Create Hypotheses about Your Market

So now you have your collected your survey responses and supplementary data. This collection of knowledge about your potential user base is pretty powerful. With this information, you’re able to create hypotheses around what makes your audience “compulsive.”

In any particular demographic, you're not often going to have just one psychological profile, but many. Every person has a pretty unique cocktail of needs, wishes, and desires based on who they are, how they grew up, and what's on their mind.

Here are some example assumptions from previous research we performed at GRONADE. If we were to address a segment of Australian males aged 18 to 21, some common threads we could leverage are:

• Isolation: They feel lonely and want to be closer or more connected to other people. It’s the same reason people do ecstasy (which promotes feelings of closeness) as a drug and use Facebook – it makes them feel as if they’re bonding, they have friends, and there’s some kind of common ground.


• Boredom: Life doesn’t seem interesting. Their job is boring and nothing new is happening. They need to find something to keep themselves entertained. This is where the thrill of trying something dangerous, like drugs at a wild party or solo skydiving, comes in to play. It’s also the driver of many television successes like House of Cards and Breaking Bad because they can immerse themselves in something far more exciting as an escape. They live vicariously through television characters.


• Distraction: Things aren't going well. There is a problem at work, at home, with relationships, or they just doesn't feel good about themselves. They feel anxious, stressed, or worried. Something offers a distraction, often one that numbs or soothes the pain or stress. They’ll use any means to distract and relax, such as scrolling through Instagram, instantly responding to snaps via Snapchat, or they'll smoke. It’s a way to deal with anxiety at the expense of productivity.


• Lack of purpose/accomplishment: They feel they are not achieving anything and not getting anywhere. Some habits, like playing World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or Angry Birds make people feel as if they’re really getting somewhere or making a difference (like saving lives and becoming a war hero) and that makes up for the fact that their real lives don’t offer much sense of accomplishment.

Most people aren't very aware of their own psychological needs. If you ask someone why they bought a Ferrari, they will say, "because I have always loved cars" not "because I feel unaccomplished and having an expensive car makes me feel important and powerful" (i.e., it's signaling my status).

You could guess at someone's inner needs through lots of clues (such as appearance, behavior, and purchasing habits). Someone who buys expensive brand name clothing might be giving a clue that they care a lot about looking important. Or, it might be a clue that they care a lot about fitting in, so they buy what all their friends are buying.

Step 5: Call-To-Action Logic

Brainstorm a list of words that come to mind when you assess the results you have. When you have a healthy list of around 10 to 20 words, use Thesaurus.com to expand the set of keywords to a list of action words you feel will have the greatest impact.

Use a thesaurus for alternative keywords to impact assumption trigger words

Select five of your favorite, most evocative keywords to kick-start your initial A/B test batch of calls-to-action. This is a good start for your experiment to learn the most effective call-to-action to use.

The best approach to find a CTA that works is to tap in to the fears and attributes you uncovered in your research. If we use the commonalities I mentioned above for middle-class Australian men aged 18 to 21, we could assume the following five calls-to-action would be a good foundation group. Of course, these should be tailored to the actual product you’re offering, though in these examples, I’m representing the most obvious results based on the research:

1. Be Together, Now (playing on the isolation aspect and the longing for connectedness)


2. Your Thrills Await (a counter to the boredom aspect)


3. Escape Today (a ticket away from the mundane)


4. Make a Difference (a way to satisfy the desire for accomplishment)


5. Take Control (a real power move in a world where sometimes all seems out of control)

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you still need a compelling offer. If your product sucks, no psychological trickery is going to vacuum fat stacks out of someone’s wallet.

Apple never says, "If you use Apple products, you're smart, creative, and stylish.” It’s just implied.

If you have something people will feel good about using or buying and you can create a compelling action-point for your core target audience to begin the journey and use your product, it’s a much stronger position to be in.

To do that, you need to become intimate with who your target audience really is, how they behave, what makes them feel compelled to take action, and then speak their language to engage their trigger finger. If you can do that enough times and can keep them happy, engaged, and converting repeatedly on specific business objectives, that is a sure-fire recipe for growth.

About the Author: Tomer Garzberg is the CEO and Founder at GRONADE Growth Partnerships. They grow seed- and venture-capital-funded startups and enterprise products. GRONADE is a blend of man and machine on a mission to systematize growth. Say Hi on Twitter @TomerGarzberg.

Why Your Team Can’t Afford to Ignore the Data

A Teradata survey unveiled that 87% of marketers see data as the most underused asset in their cohorts, and 50% desire to extend the use of big data to support their digital marketing efforts.

However, ecommerce marketers are still experiencing difficulty with gaining insights from analytics. They struggle with integrating data into their everyday operations, like competitor analysis, branding strategies, and sales techniques.

Instead of suffering from analysis paralysis, marketing teams should focus on the bigger picture. Major gains are made when marketers concentrate on creating a better customer experience.

So, stop disregarding the data. Move forward by sharpening the following four key areas:

1. Monitor the Competition

Data gives SaaS teams an inside track of how to strategically outdo the competition. With keyword tools, you can measure your methods amongst other market leaders.

SEMrush monitors your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building. Knowing the competition’s unique keywords will help you discover unknown search terms.

Moreover, by improving your content with new keywords, there’s a greater chance to emerge in the SERP next to your competitors.

Image Source

Social data also offers an inside track of how competitors interact with customers. Platforms like Rival IQ and Mention can help you size up the competition.

Image Source

For example, on Twitter, observe other brands’ mentions, followers, and engagement rates. Know when they outperform you, and vice versa. Then, analyze the content promoted.

What content stands out? How many times was it promoted? How did customers respond?

The purpose is not to mimic your competitors but to learn from their successes and failures. If a particular tweet does well for them, it may have a similar result for your business.

Keep the following points in mind when measuring your brand’s presence:

• Identify insights that can contribute to your plan.


• Learn what and when to post to produce more engagement.


• Pinpoint substantial spikes in impressions.


• Distinguish between what’s working and what’s not.

Mold your strategy with benchmarks, and build marketing campaigns that outwit your competitors.

2. Craft a Personalized Brand Message

Data helps ecommerce marketers create customized buyer personas. Knowing your audience means more personalized messages to segmented groups.

Forrester’s report on Competitive Strategy in the Age of the Consumer emphasizes moving away from consumer historical data. Rather, focus on the here and now.

Try conducting customer surveys, and use open-ended questions. That way, you gain actionable insight beyond the constraints of yes/no questions.

The goal is to understand customer behavior, including the roadblocks that hinder them from making a purchase. So, seek outside the usual interests and needs, and aim for actions and reactions.

Conversion copywriter Jennifer Havice suggests asking these survey questions:

• When did you realize you needed a product/service like ours?


• What problem does our product/service solve in your life?


• What doubts or hesitations did you have before buying?

Your team also may want to gather data from phone interviews. While time-consuming, you will capture specific keywords from your customers. And that may be worth your efforts.

Just be mindful that these customer interviews aren’t sales calls. Instead, listen attentively.

“This is an opportunity to gather symptoms and a prospective customer’s perspective on their needs with respect to a specific problem or capability,” says Sean Murphy, CEO of SKMurphy.

In addition, enlist aid from your online community managers. These folks are pros at finding the most important conversations. Your community forums could uncover new clues about your consumers.

It’s up to brands to offer experiences that cater to their customers. To do so, businesses must look at the real-time data to match customer motivations with personalized products.

Get inside your customer’s heads. Create accurate buyer personas.

3. Acquire Sales Leads

Want to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads? Use data to produce targeted lead generation campaigns.

But in order to do that, sales and marketing teams must be aligned. A common issue amongst these departments is disagreement about lead qualification. Without a set definition, some organizations witness a stunt in their growth.

Research tells us that “highly aligned organizations achieved an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth – while their less aligned competitors saw a 7% decrease in revenue.”

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Marketing and sales centers around lead quality. So, to start a rewarding partnership, use consumer behavior data.

Marketing automation tools were essentially created for this purpose. Work with sales to select which leads deserve a follow up. The data will determine which prospects need to be nurtured and handed to the sales team.

The key is to eliminate missed opportunities. The collaboration should help both teams address the right leads at the right time.

Also, remember to clean your databases. Archive or delete prospects that don’t meet the lead qualification criteria.

Quality trumps quantity. Three super-qualified leads will always surpass 20 disinterested leads.

Set up your parameters. Then, filter for things like:

• Fake email addresses and phone numbers,


• Information-seeking job titles, like “student,” and


• Low annual revenues.

Failure to properly process data is one reason companies don’t generate more leads. Be better. Move data to the forefront to boost sales leads.

4. Retain More Customers

Data identifies holes in the customer experience that may lead to high churn rates. Extend your customer lifetime value by predicting consumer behavior patterns.

By analyzing data, marketers learn their customers’ needs and preferences. Leverage those insights to understand why customers discontinue their services or try other brands.

Is there a disconnect in customer service? Or is your onboarding process complicated? Look for patterns and discover the reasons for your churn issues.

Researchers found that “96% of unhappy customers don’t complain; however, 91% of those will simply leave and never come back.” That’s why it’s so important for your team to be proactive.

Keep an open line of communication between your company and customers. This means promptly addressing concerns and following conversations via social media.

Effective data-gathering doesn’t have to be difficult. Below is an example of how new users sign up for Pusher. The company received a 16% reply rate.

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The real challenge begins when your customers start responding. How will your team correct mistakes? Will you add more value to your services?

Incorporate customer comments into your retention strategy. Find new ways to deliver on your promises, like initiating a rewards program.

Examine the data points that increase your churn rates. Then, develop programs to exceed customer expectations. Build a brand loyal customer base.

Heed the Data

Data is your friend. Shying away from analytics will do more harm than good.

Use keyword tools to monitor your competitors. Develop customer surveys to help with buyer personas, and align marketing and sales to create more qualified leads.

Data is valuable. Think twice before you ignore it.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

How I Got 1.7 Million Pin Views to My E-commerce Pinterest Account in 2015

Visual content isn’t the future of content marketing… it’s here now. And Pinterest is currently one of the top social media channels for visual content.

Shareaholic published a study that showed Pinterest as the #2 social media traffic referrer behind only Facebook driving more than 5x as much traffic as many referrers as Twitter.

Pinterest isn’t just for arts & crafts, clothes and recipes. It’s relevant to more niches than most people realize, including niches like real estate and even online marketing.

In fact, the two most shared posts on the Kissmetrics blog get most of their shares from Pinterest. Check it out:

• The Art of Color Coordination (46,000+ Pinterest shares)


• How do colors affect purchases? (16,000+ Pinterest shares)

Last year, my e-commerce Pinterest account generated over 1.7 million views and I’m getting close to 10,000 followers. My account is also ranked consistently in the top 2 for the competitive term “baby shower” and my boards and pins are also ranked for other related keywords.

The best part is that I typically only spend just a few minutes a day on Pinterest and it’s kind of fun.

Want to know how to grow your presence on Pinterest? Here are some tips.

1. My #1 Tip for Growing Your Pinterest Presence

The easiest thing you can do to grow your presence on Pinterest is to get into the habit of pinning consistently. While this tip may seem simple, it’s where most people fail with social media marketing.

Pinning consistently will allow you to grow your views and followers over time, similar to how blogging consistently will send you more and more long tail SEO traffic over time.

It also keeps your followers engaged and it only takes a few minutes each day.

My Pinterest account outranks a lot of bigger players including established brands like Huggies. The simple reason I was able to outrank them was because my account has a higher level of engagement since I pin regularly.

A couple of other things:

-If you’ve been reading about Pinterest, then you’ve probably heard that the ideal time to pin is in the evening.

However, ideal pinning times are a distant second concern now that Pinterest has implemented Smart Feed algorithm, which displays pins to users long after they have been pinned.

– Although I try to log into Pinterest each day, there have been periods of several days where I didn’t check it.

It’s okay to miss a day ever so often, but pins can now be scheduled with Buffer. If you want to stay active on Pinterest, there’s really no excuse not to.

Consistency is the key to succeeding with so many things and although it seems like common advice, many people that aren’t successful are failing simply because they aren’t consistent. Identify the barriers that are preventing you from being consistent and eliminate them.

2. Follow Other Like-Minded Pinterest Users

Following other Pinterest users is another tactic that can help you grow your own following.

When you follow someone on Pinterest, by default, Pinterest will send an email notification letting them know that they have a new follower. Some people will follow you back if they find you interesting.

You can view these followers by finding similar pinners and then clicking on their followers tab.

You can also use Pinterest search to find people that have created boards and pins pertaining to your topic of interest. In this example, I search for the term “baby shower food” and then click “boards”:

Then I can click on any board that I want to take a closer look at. When viewing the individual board, I can click on “followers” to view the board’s followers and then I can click the “follow” button next to each person I want to follow.

One huge benefit of following a good number of like-minded people is that you can see what visual content is popular in your niche. Finding content to re-pin also becomes easier if you are following other users that pin similar images.

3. Optimize Your Boards and Pins for Search

Another important thing you should spend time on is optimizing your boards and pins for Pinterest search. Users can search for boards, pins and other users using Pinterest’s search bar so ranking well for your keywords can be helpful.

If you’ve done SEO, then you’ll be glad to hear that optimizing for Pinterest is much easier than optimizing for Google. It mostly involves keyword research and incorporating those keywords into your boards and pins.

Google Keyword Planner can be a good starting point, but you should also do keyword research on Pinterest. Here are the steps I take:

Step 1. Start typing your target keywords into Pinterest search

Pinterest will suggest keywords that other people have searched for. These keywords can be good target keywords to include in your boards and pins.

Step 2. Check the search results to see what boards and pins show up

Do the boards that show up have a lot of followers? Are the other boards that are ranking targeting that keyword phrase?

If the answer is yes to these questions, then you may want to create a board for that keyword phrase.

You don’t have to go crazy over keywords for your pins. Rankings for pins can change daily and most of the search traffic from pins will often come from long tail keywords.

Pinterest tries to keep pins fresh based on what is popular and getting re-pinned and favorited. But you should still try to incorporate some keywords from time to time so that your pins have a chance of coming up for pin searches.

Step 3. Engagement is important, so stay active

If people are pinning images from your boards, then Pinterest will rank those boards higher. You don’t have to add new pins to every board every day, but try to pin new images to boards regularly.

4. Focus on Creating a Valuable Resource for Your Target Audience

One common mistake that people make on Pinterest is only pinning their own stuff. Be sure to take the time to follow other pinners and pin images from other people that your audience might be interested in.

Identify your target audience and focus on creating a useful resource for them by creating boards that they will find interesting. Update those boards with regular content.

Taking this approach will allow you to grow your Pinterest following faster than if you only pin your own stuff.

5. Pay Attention to Seasonality & Trends

Be sure to also pay attention to seasonality and trends. If you are active on Pinterest regularly, you may notice people pinning different images based on trends and seasons.

For example, when Halloween approaches, people in the party-planning niche will start pinning Halloween related images.

When I first noticed this trend, I created a Halloween board and started pinning Halloween related recipes and images to it.

You can view your analytics by going to the Pinterest analytics tool or by clicking on the “Analytics” link on the top left in the header area. Here’s a screenshot of the traffic increase to my Pinterest account after I started my Halloween board in 2014:

I noticed that my other competitors didn’t change their pinning activity during the holidays. Don’t make that mistake!

Conclusion

To sum it up, Pinterest is an important social media channel and being active on it consistently is key to growing your Pinterest views and followers, even if it is just a few minutes a day.

Connect with other like-minded users, do your keyword research and pay attention to trends and seasonality. And most importantly, focus on creating a useful resource for your followers.

E-commerce isn’t something I focused on heavily in 2015, but in the future, it makes sense to create more visual content on my e-commerce blog so that more of the traffic from Pinterest will end up going to my website.

I’ve spent much less time on my Pinterest account for Small Business Ideas Blog, but I noticed an uptick in traffic to my account from infographics getting pinned by other Pinterest users.

Here’s a screenshot of my Pinterest analytics for that account:

So what do you think? Is Pinterest an important part of your marketing plan?

About the Author: Brian Lang is the founder of Small Business Ideas Blog, where he shares tips and ideas for business and marketing. Feel free to download his free resource, 50+ Free Tools to Market Your Business and read his content marketing guide.