Leveraging Analytics for Your Business

Whether you realize it or not, analytics are extremely important for your business. If you don’t pay attention to the results that you are achieving from your online efforts, how will you possibly understand if your efforts are paying off or if they are not working for your business? Analytics allow you to track what you are doing and to identify trends and patterns that are essential to your business.

Jumping into analytics

There are several analytics programs of which you can take advantage; however, Google Analytics is one of the most common services around and you don’t have to invest money to get what you need out of it. Gathering analytics allows you to gain a deep understanding of exactly how your efforts are paying off (or not paying off). Surprisingly, there are many business owners who not only don’t understand who to use analytics programs but also don’t understand why it is so important for business to gather analytics. 

Believe it or not, many business owners don’t understand the need for online marketing. They feel that all they need it to go the traditional marketing route. Well, traditional (outbound) marketing was, is, and will always be an essential (and important) part of a business’ marketing efforts. The results that a business experiences will be far more effective (and advanced) if the business employs a combination of traditional and inbound marketing. Inbound marketing, unlike traditional marketing, is an approach in which you get your prospects and clients to come to you. In traditional marketing, you go after your prospects and clients. That approach is not usually as effective as it once was. In days past, traditional marketing worked very well, whether that meant print ads, television ads, etc. However, the prospects and clients are much more sophisticated than they ever were in the past. Nowadays, they have all sorts of ways to block your marketing efforts.

When it comes to inbound marketing, you (as the business owner) get your prospects and clients to come to you. In that case, those people are prequalified and they have chosen to interact with you and to embrace your brand and your offerings. In other words, they are with you because they want to be with you. In that case, you have a wonderful chance of getting those people to become loyal followers, which is one of your ultimate goals.

There are several different areas that you should consider capturing with your analytics service.

• Traffic: You will want to capture the amount of direct traffic that is visiting your website. That number will allow you to understand how your marketing materials are positively influencing people who read what you have written and shared. This is a good example of how your online and offline marketing efforts affect the online aspect of your business. Your analytics will show increases in direct traffic as a result of the links that you embed in your content. You can determine, based on timing, how and when people react to what you are feeding them. If you make a certain effort and then you see an increase in direct traffic, you can safely assume that your efforts have affected that increase. 

• Interest in your brand: The truth is that the traditional (offline) side of your marketing efforts will lead to people searching for your brand online. If people don’t remember your web address, they will most likely still make the effort to learn about your business. You can track the searches that people perform based on your marketing efforts. It is important for you to understand clearly that your online and offline marketing efforts are closely tied together. 

• Customize your marketing materials: Different people react differently to marketing content. Some people are visual and some people react more to the written word. As you are gathering your analytics, you will start to see how important it is to track the results of your Email marketing materials. With this aspect of your analytics gathering, you can extract all sorts of data, such as contact information, reactions to your Email marketing materials, etc. That information is useful now and it will be useful in the future, when you want to send out additional Email marketing materials.

• Create customized URLs: URLs are obviously extremely important for all businesses. In fact, they are important for all people. You can use those customized URLs to categorize your online connections. You should feel free to use URLs as much as you like. They are your direct link with anyone and everyone who wants to interact with you and to take advantage of all that you have to offer.

Conclusion

Analytics services give you many different ways to track your marketing efforts. If you are not using some sort of analytics service, you are shortchanging your business. You should consider your business’ analytics as part of the foundation for all of your marketing efforts. Your analytics will help you to determine why people are interested in what you have to say. If you determine that your analytics are not yielding the results that you are seeking, you will have to make adjustments to achieve those results.

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