The Power of Analytics for Businesses: Cater to Your Audience While Preserving Your Time

Determining your audience is crucial to the success of your business, and yet, many business owners gravely underestimate the power of analytics to define that audience. Instead, they waste time, energy, and money trying to reach a group that has no interest in their product or service.

One of the biggest mistakes owners make is trying to reach EVERYONE. This is a lot like fishing in the pacific ocean. They cast their rod into the water just hoping for a bite from anything. In the end, they get small fish that won’t feed them or they get nothing at all. 

The key to success is knowing what type of customer you attract and the type of customer you want. This is much easier with the help of analytics

What Are Analytics?

Analytics is the statistical breakdown and analysis of data points for the purposes of formulating new strategies and approaches. This information is specifically important for improving and optimizing your marketing efforts. Here is some data to show the rising importance:

• 60% of companies are using analytics to boost process and cost-efficiency
• 57% of companies are using analytics to drive strategy and change
• 52% of companies are using analytics to monitor and improve financial performance

(via MicroStrategy)

As you can see, many companies are realizing the importance of analytics, as such, more companies are investing in those efforts.

If you are a startup company, or a company in its infancy, this may be more difficult as you may not have the data right away. You have to start from the ground up. But this is the stage where it is the most important to implement analytics tracking so that as the company grows you have already laid the foundation to make it easier.

Gathering Data for Your Business 

One of the most popular ways to gather data is through services such as Google Analytics. This is particularly relevant if you have a website that advertises your business and products. Through Google Analytics you can get to know your customers and enhance the user experience. The metrics you can gather related to your users are:

• age and interest of users
• the location of users
• the device they are using
• the time of day are they visiting
• the browser they are using 
• and much more

With Google Analytics you can also discover what pages on your site are doing best and which need improvement. You can also use it to develop your SEO and referral strategy. You can read more on this in the article here.

You can also gather data from social platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Similar to Google Analytics, you can also see the age, location, and interest of your audience. You can also evaluate your current social strategy by measuring the engagement and reach of your posts. This will be especially important to track if you are or will opt for paid advertising on any of these services. The same can be said about other social platforms such as Instagram and Twitter.

Once you have the data, you can then use it to discover trends in customer behavior and demographics of customers. You can then anticipate their needs, assess potential risks, develop products catered to them, and overall improve customer experience. 

You can use the data to perform customer segmentation, which is the process of dividing your customer base into groups where they share similar characteristics. 

With this information, you can enhance your strategy to cater to each group specifically. This may include changing your marketing so it is more appealing towards a certain group so you continue to grow that audience, or creating products or services that the group would be more willing to purchase. 

You no longer have to shoot in the dark with your marketing by trying to reach everyone, which is largely ineffective and can be costly. You can know who you are attracting, how you are attracting them, and discover ways to keep them coming back.

Be mindful that analytics provide pure data points, information. They do not tell you what to think or what to do with the information. But it makes your own efforts much easier.

How Analytics Can Save Time

Marketing can pull you in many different directions, but analytics can help you determine which tactics are working the best. You can then divide your day to focus more on that tactic and less on tactics that are not driving as many results. Being able to focus your marketing in the right places will not only save you time, but it will also save you money by minimizing efforts that are pricey, but not bringing an ROI.

You can also use predictive analysis based on the data you’ve gathered to anticipate upcoming changes. For example, if you discover through analytics that customers purchase a particular product more in the summer, you can then expect and prepare your marketing efforts to promote that product more leading up to that point. Or you can introduce a product that you can cross-promote with that item.

You can also evaluate your current efforts with our Marketing Test. This can give you valuable insight on other ways you can improve your marketing. You can also reach out to one of our certified Business Coaches for extra guidance.