There’s a classic scene in the movie The Patriot where the main character is teaching his son a life saving lesson. What he says is aim small, miss small. That phrase is great for a movie, but it exposes a bigger mistake that companies make when it comes to their marketing.
We all want to grow our business, but that doesn’t mean that we’re focusing on the right details to move the needle. We are going to walk through how to make data driven decisions for your company based upon reporting & analytics.
What does aim small, miss small mean?
Aim small, miss small is how we measure our marketing. When we speak with clients, they come to us and they say they want to grow by 20%, but when we ask them specifics on where they want to grow and how they want to grow, they don’t know the answer. Those details actually really matter.
Something we’re famous for at Farotech is when people say “don’t sweat the small stuff”, we believe those people are not in marketing. Sweating the small stuff is the game in the marketing industry.
Sweat the small stuff
If you’re a good marketer, you’re going to measure every single detail.
We might do AB testing and get a 5% increase on a KPI in January. It may seem like 5% isn’t that big of a deal. But, what is 5% improvement times 12 months, three years, five years? The details matter. Aim small, miss small.
When you’re in a meeting with your marketing team or agency before you start, you have to ask some hard questions. You want to know what your macro growth and micro growth numbers are. This does not mean just your growth numbers though.
You want to know what your growth numbers are per product line and your traffic goals for that same product line. If you work in different verticals, you want to know the traffic goals per vertical and the leads goals per vertical.
At a macro level, you want to know how many leads are coming in. At a micro level, you want to know how many leads are coming in per product line or per vertical. Start from macro ideas and get smaller and smaller and smaller.
Client dashboard
The client dashboard are types of analytics that our team at Farotech look at on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and a yearly basis. Our dashboard is on HubSpot.
By looking at a dashboard, you want to eliminate all the “death by data” stuff. It will show you your most important business analytics to focus on. Here are some examples of analytics to look at:
How much traffic is coming into my website compared to my goals?
How many leads did I get on my website compared to my goals?
How many clients did I convert compared to my goals?
You want to be able to do that product line by product line and vertical by vertical.
To take it one step farther, all in one place, we are able to measure the sources for where my leads came from. You want to know if leads came through organic search, direct traffic referrals, social media, email marketing, paid search, paid, social, etc.
Storytelling through data analytics
These details tell us a very important story. The goal of analytics is to tell great stories, but we’re going to tell those stories through data.
What we’re hoping to do with our analytics is to help make data driven decisions about your marketing. Using a data-driven approach to tell your client’s story allows for more information to be highlighted. The more data we have, the easier it is to know where and when to pivot. It also helps us to make informed decisions on what areas to double down on.
Tracking technology
Another thing that we do is we try to implement as much tracking technology into our approach. The goal of tracking technology is to be able to put a cookie or tracking code onto our potential clients computers or phones, to track their engagement. This information gives us valuable insights.
What you see here is every time a user has engaged with our clients’ marketing. We’re gonna be able to know a number of different things, we’re gonna be able to know what pages that they visited, what drip marketing emails they opened, did they watch videos or engage with social media, etc. All of these engagements are measured.
In fact, we take it one step farther, by tracking all that engagement, and put it into a certain rubric that we call a lead score, so that certain engagements have more value than other pieces of information.
For example, if you come onto my homepage, and you watch the entire video, that is going to give you more points on your lead score, then liking a Facebook page.
By using this rubric, you are able to lead score potential clients. From this score, your sales team is able to measure what is hot and what is not based upon their user engagements.
After I collected all of this data, you will look back at your ideal leads. Now you can count how many touches it took for those ideal leads to close. Then, look back to your existing leads and figure out, if they haven’t closed yet, how many touches do they have. Using this analytical approach will give you a ranking system for your leads.
If you are thinking the lead is getting cold or it’s dropping off, you might need to nurture them to get more touches so that they engage more. The more they engage, the more touches that are counted. Once they get to that ideal spot, the likelihood of converting is really high.
Predictive Analytics
Our favorite thing to do with data is predictive analytics. Predictive Analytics allows me to do a number of different things. We will be focusing on visits converting to leads, which convert into clients. Therefore, you can know how many site visits turned into clients.
This type of business strategy allows for your conversion rate to be high by making informed decisions using the data that has been collected.
So what did we learn?
First off, we learned to aim small, miss small, meaning the details matter. This should be a mantra for your business’ marketing strategy
The next thing we learned is the importance of using tools to make data driven decisions about your marketing. The data driven decision making process has proved successful when done correctly.
And finally, how to use predictive analytics to quantify how many site visits could ultimately lead to new clients. Getting data-driven insights ensures your lead to conversion rate will soar.
So here’s my question for you: How are you using analytics to make data driven decisions for your marketing?
We hope you enjoyed today’s lesson and learned something new! Focusing on the wrong details can risk losing clients. Please contact us with any questions about making data driven decisions for your business.