By Arina Smith
Did you know that 63% of businesses cite generating traffic and leads as their top marketing challenge?
We all want to boost our sales revenue. But let’s be honest: sales slumps usually have little or nothing to do with how well your product sells. Nor are sales slumps caused by a poorly performing sales staff.
Most often, sales slumps come when you run out of qualified leads. This is why smart small business analytics is one of the crown jewels of modern marketing.
Generating more traffic and leads is one of the primary advantages of data analytics. That’s why, in this article, we’ll reveal one of the primary benefits of marketing data in business: beating sales slumps.
Small Business Analytics Defined:
Small business analytics is the collection and analysis of customer behavior data. This data and analysis is then used to optimize marketing efforts.
For example, which pages do your visitors typically land on when they find your website? Which navigation links are they most likely to click on from your home page?
What are the top three performing pieces of content on your website? Which page (or pages) are your visitors most likely to be on when they fill in your lead forms? Which page(s) do most of your visitors leave from?
Which of the emails in your autoresponder series are most of your subscribers opening (or ignoring)? Which of your products have the highest conversion rates? Which have the highest cart abandonment rates?
More importantly, when a visitor returns to your website, do you still have access to the behavioral data from their last visit? If so, can you use this data to serve up a different variation of your content based on the visitor’s past behaviors?
Imagine if you had this information and could use it to customize and optimize your website content. Could you generate more traffic and warmer leads? Of course you could!
The Big Benefit of Using Marketing Analytics:
If you don’t know what your prospects and customers are doing when they find your content, it’s no surprise that you’re having sales slumps.
A stunning 79% of consumers say that they are only likely to use a brand’s promotions if those promotions are custom tailored to their past behaviors.
It should be no surprise that 88% of marketers report measurable results due to content personalization.
How can you create content based on your prospects’ (or customers’) past behaviors, if you have no way of tracking those behaviors? If this question concerns you, you’re not alone.
Only 22% of marketers claim to be achieving significant results with data-driven marketing initiatives. Less than half of CMOs say that they can even measure ROI.
Nearly 85% of marketers can’t even measure and/or report what marketing data and analytics is even doing for their business.
It’s a timeless and universal law of marketing that you can’t manage what you can’t measure; if you can’t measure something, how can you hope to improve it?
How Small Business Analytics Can Fixe Sales Slumps:
Again, sales slumps usually happen because you run out of qualified leads. And just think about how you qualify leads when you’re selling in person. You learn about them: their desires, their fears, their typical buying patterns, etc.
Likewise, small business analytics help you gather lead qualifying data as your customers are browsing your web content. It helps you gather data as your visitors click your links, fill in your forms, browse your products, add things to their shopping cart. It helps you monitor how they read (or delete) your emails.
If you’re not collecting this information, you have no idea why some visitors are leaving your website, or why others are returning. Likewise, every visitor who returns to your website starts off as a completely cold and unqualified prospect.
How can you guide your prospects to the right content, lead forms and purchase offers if you don’t know anything about them? Thankfully, you can solve this problem simply by leveraging the power of marketing analytics.
Why Small Business Analytics Is Essential to Modern Marketing:
The most obvious benefit of small business analytics is more traffic, warmer leads, and thus, dramatically higher sales numbers.
Your website is the sales and lead generation hub of your business. How can you hope to improve your conversions, when you’re not personalizing your content?
To put this into perspective, imagine walking into a store to shop for a new computer. You have a good conversation with a salesperson about the exact kind of computer you want.
After narrowing down your options to three computers, you leave the store to check a few other places. The next day, you come back to the store, where the same salesperson greets you. But they’ve completely forgotten your conversation. You have to start all over from square one.
This ought to give you an idea of what it’s like for your customers to come back to a website where they’re treated like they’ve never been there before.
How Small Business Analytics Can Give You a Competitive Edge:
Small business analytics can solve this problem by helping you:
- Anticipate customers’ needs and provide more personalized product offers.
- Create a warmer, friendlier browsing and buying experience for your prospects and customers.
- Optimize your website content and emails by creating the type of content your visitors have responded well to in the past.
- Increase the efficiency of your web site’s navigation features by tailoring them to fit your visitors’ typical navigation paths.
- Learn more about the common buying preferences of your general customer base.
Again, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and you can’t improve what you can’t manage. But, if you start using small business analytics today, you can gain a handy advantage over your competition.
Only 25% of marketers are collecting customer data. Less than 17% of U.S. marketers even use analytics to inform their channel marketing. A staggering 75% of B2B businesses lack the essential revenue information for the leads in their database.
These businesses are already falling far behind the times because they don’t have these essential practices in place. If you want to discover how small business analytics can put your head and shoulders above this crowd, read more here.
Learn More About Business, Marketing, and Data Analytics:
We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about how small business analytics can keep you out of sales slumps.
Remember, sales slumps happen when you run low on qualified leads. But smart marketing analytics can help you generate more warm leads by providing a highly customized user experience.
If you want to learn more about how to increase your revenue, check out our other articles. Our blog features the hottest topics in business, advertising, digital marketing and much, much more.
Read Also:
