How to Use Insights and Analytics to Grow Your Business – Episode 120

by | Apr 22, 2021 | Marketing Strategies, Podcast, Small Business Help, Social Media Conversations | 0 comments

Hey there – and welcome to episode 120 of the Small Business Made Simple Podcast.

Thanks for leading me your ears today – I know you have lots of choices out there and I appreciate you making me one of them.

I’m Jenn, the host, marketing thought leader and digital strategist and coach for small businesses.  And just an all-round small business lover with one goal in business – to make every small business I come across to make marketing a priority in their business – because if you want to grow, you need to market!

It’s that’s simple – not easy, but simple for sure.

Just before we head into this week’s episode, I wanted to quickly let you know that now you can sponsor my podcast!  Yep, I am taking sponsorship for the podcast.

So, if you have a product that you want to get your business or your message in front of about 1000 small business owners, for less than a radio or a newspaper ad, then this might be just for you!

What I love the most about sponsoring a podcast episode or two is that the content lives on forever.

A radio or tv ad is only on until you stop paying and a newspaper ad is gone in the days afterwards, and becomes recycled – such a short time frame to grab your people’s attention.

Podcasts – they aren’t like that.  I still have 200 odd people who download my very first episode – every month.  That episode was done in January 2019 and yet people are still listening – that’s the power of using podcasts as part of your marketing spend.

If you’re interested, you can go to www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au, find the podcast tab at the top and see “Sponsor a Podcast”.

But let’s get into today’s episode – Social media insights and google analytics is what I am chatting with you about today.

If you’re on social media, you have insights.  If you have a website – you should have google analytics – if you don’t GET IT TODAY! Don’t wait another minute – go sign up, connect your website and start collecting data.

The most common questions I get from people are around are:

  1. Who is my target market?
  2. Am I attracting the right people?
  3. What platforms should I be on?
  4. What do I post about?

All these questions, yes ALL of them can be answered, with statistically, can’t be argued with, data.

This is the reason why I LOVE digital marketing so much.

In Mathematics, there is almost always a definitive answer.  With digital marketing, like Maths, the numbers and stats don’t lie.

THIS IS YOUR SECRET WEAPON in business.

So, my question to you is –

Are you using your secret weapon?

Why is it your secret weapon – well because it can tell you what you want to know – it can answer the 4 questions we just went through.

It can help you grow your business, show you where you should be spending your marketing time, energy and money AND can tell you what to post – what your audience wants to see more of!

My guess is that most small business owners don’t even look at this data – I hope that’s not you, but if it is, take this episode as your nudge to start looking.

How often should you look at your insights and analytics – fortnightly would be great – monthly at the bare minimum.

Recently, I had a client who had google analytics connected to his website – his website is about 4 years old, but he’d never been in there – his web host sent him an email every month outlining the results of his google analytics, but he didn’t really read those either.

As a leadership coach, he spent the majority of his time emailing his clients, writing blogs and hanging out on LinkedIn – occasionally Facebook – but mainly just re-purposing the LinkedIn content.

What is Google Analytics told us was

  • Most of this traffic was direct traffic – great, email marketing is working and Facebook – what???? was of course his reaction!

But I’m rarely on there – how could that be?

Unless there’s something wrong in the connection of your analytics – this data is real – it’s no lie.

So, guess what our next lot of planning around marketing looked like? Yep, a lot more Facebook and a deep dive into the strategy of the emails he was sending.

We didn’t stop the LinkedIn marketing – but we did pay attention to the other bits.

Marketing is about test and measure.

So, given what we saw in his analytics – something he’d never considered, it was time to do some different marketing activities and start measuring over the coming months.

It wasn’t about scrapping what he’d been doing – it was about testing other things and making good decisions when we have that data too.

For me, during 2020 – probably not the best choice of years looking back – I put into place a Pinterest strategy for my business and paid someone to do my Pinterest.

With so many blogs, podcasts and freebies on my website, I wanted to drive more traffic there.

After 12 months, Pinterest is still 4th in the Social section of my google analytics for traffic to my website. So is paying someone to do my Pinterest getting me a return in investment – probably not, to be honest, but before I make too many decisions I’m going to have a look at my Pinterest data too – not just Google Analytics data!

What if you were spending 90% of your social media time on Instagram but LinkedIn is what’s driving the most traffic to your website?

That might be a significant push to spend less time on Instagram, but you might also look at Instagram data and go, no, I actually sell via my DMs on Instagram – the traffic doesn’t need to go to my website to make the sale.

Either, either, you need to analyse the data to find all this out!

Last year I did a marketing strategy session with a client around hashtags on Instagram.

They were posting on Instagram but didn’t really have a strategy around it.  Didn’t understand how it all worked.

So, we worked through the strategy, put a hashtag plan in place and implemented it for 4 weeks.

Looking at her insights, 4 weeks later, we could see that an average of 32% of people who interacted with her posts over those 4 weeks, didn’t follow her and 43% of those people found her content from the hashtags she was using.

Using the right hashtags for her business and that particular post was helping her grow her audience in ways she hadn’t considered before.

This data came from checking the insights of her page and subsequently her individual posts.

Your insights can break down your audience into

  • Age
  • Location
  • Gender
  • Most active times and days

So, you might have a target audience of women who are 40 who live in Melbourne but find your data is telling you that you are actually attracting women aged 25 who live in Perth.

As a business consultant, we would then look at your messaging, funnels and so forth to see if you need to change some of that, or whether you are attracting the exact people you need to, they just aren’t who you THOUGHT you needed too.

Your social media insights can also tell you what posts have done well, not so well and tanked.  Therefore helping you create more content around the information that your audience wants to consume.  Takes some of the “what to post” pain away already knowing what people love to see from you!

I hope you are starting to see the power of data about now through these examples and ideas.

Digital data is really, truly your secret weapon in business – and it’s free and all yours for the taking.

It can take away so much business pain and “busyness” from you, that once you start looking, analysing and seeing patterns, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without all this knowledge.

But if you’re listening to this and thinking Jenn, numbers aren’t my thing – I get bored just thinking about them.

Then don’t think of them as numbers – think of them as tools to help you make more sales – and who doesn’t want more sales!

Think of them as a way that will make you smarter and more efficient at what you do – therefore helping you grow your profit, brand awareness and audience.

That’s got to make you skip a little happiness!

Here’s what I want you to do – because you know I love action – the world needs more action takers – not “thinking of doing it one day people”!

  1. Firstly, put in our diary a fortnightly and/or monthly task or reminder to look at your insights – cross out 30-60 minutes in your diary
  2. Take time to look at the data and don’t be afraid of it – perhaps you thought you were doing all the right things but the data shows you that you weren’t really reaching the people you thought, for instance, that’s ok – there’s power in knowledge – so much power!
  3. Take note of some of the things you see or find – so you can compare to next month
  4. Make subtle changes to your marketing – test and measure. Not necessarily BIG sweeping changes, just small trackable ones and see what results it brings.

At the end of the day, we want to use this data to bring more people into our world, more buyers into our world, and have those buyers buy from us in fewer touchpoints – less time – because our content, messaging and methodology is just that good!

Sound fabulous? Ummm heck yes!

If you found this episode a little heavy, just make me one promise and that’s that you’ll start to look at the data – if you’re nervous about what it will tell you or making changes from it, that’s ok, you’ll get there, just promise you’ll start.

What does Zig Ziglar say “you don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great”.

But that’s it for episode 120 – I’ll be back for 121 next Thursday – look forward to chatting again then.

Have a fabulous week, whoever or whatever it brings.

If you’re enjoying this podcast, which if you have listened to here – you hopefully are, don’t forget to subscribe, share this episode with another superstar business owner who’s doing the daily grind and would appreciate someone making their business simpler, and leave a rating or review to show how much you are loving this free weekly content and my fabulous guests!

See you next week

But whatever you do,

……..remember small business peeps, as my opening song says, there’s no point in dreaming small!

 

I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land, the Yorta Yorta People, on which I record this podcast and conduct my business today and pay my respects to their Elders past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.

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Brilliant – it’s on its way – thanks!

 

Brilliant – it’s on its way – thanks!

 

Brilliant – it’s on its way – thanks!

 

Brilliant – it’s on its way – thanks!

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