In todays post I’m going to break down some of the seemingly bamboozling world of Insights and Analytics.
If you’re on social media, you have Insights.
If you have a website, you should have Google Analytics.
(That said, if you don’t have your website set up for Google analytics, GET IT TODAY! Don’t wait another minute – go sign up, connect your website and start collecting data!)
When I am talking about all things marketing and small business with my clients and audiences, some of the most common questions I get from people are:
- Who is my target market?
- Am I attracting the right people?
- What platforms should I be on?
- What do I post about?
All these questions, yes ALL OF THEM can be answered with looking at the statistical data that is available (and it’s data that is very hard to argue with!).
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 this:
Are you using your secret weapon?
Well, you might ask WHY is it your secret weapon – and my answer to that is because it can tell you what you want to know – it can answer the four questions listed above.
Reviewing your insights and analytics 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 with what your audience wants to see more of!
My guess is that many small business owners don’t even look at this data – I hope that’s not you, but if it is, take this blog post as your nudge to start looking.
How often should you look at your insights and analytics?
I recommend fortnightly, but you should really be looking at them monthly at the bare minimum.
Recently, I had a client who had Google Analytics connected to his website.
This 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. He sometimes posted to Facebook, but this was mainly just re-purposing the LinkedIn content.
What a review into his Google Analytics told us was:
- Most of this traffic was direct traffic – great, email marketing is working.
- And Facebook….
His reaction to the whole Facebook data was “What???? 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 – was 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 – it was time to do some different marketing activities and start measuring over the coming months. This was something he had never even considered!
And this review I completed with him 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 personally during 2020 – I put into place a Pinterest strategy for my business and contracted someone to implement this for me with creating the Pinterest posts and content.
With so many blogs, podcasts and freebies on my website, I wanted to drive more traffic onto Pinterest.
So reviewing my Google Analytics after 12 months of doing this strategy, Pinterest is still 4th in the Social section for traffic to my website.
In hindsight, paying someone to do my Pinterest possibly isn’t getting me a great return in investment to be honest, but before I make too many decisions I’m going to have a look at my Pinterest Insights data too – not just Google Analytics data!
So what do these two examples tell us?
If you were spending 90% of your social media time on Instagram, but your analytics and insights tell you that LinkedIn is what’s driving the most traffic to your website – what are you going to do?
That might be a significant push to spend less time on Instagram, BUT if you then also look at Instagram data to compare, you may see that you actually sell via DMs on Instagram – the traffic doesn’t need to go to my website to make the sale.
Either way – 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, and they didn’t understand how it all worked.
So, we worked through the strategy, put a hashtag plan in place and they 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
- 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, how do you actually use this data?
As an example, you might have a target audience of women who are 40 who live in Melbourne.
But when reviewing your insights and analytics, you 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 to market to!
Your social media insights can also tell you:
- What posts have done well
- Which posts have not done so well
- And which absolutely TANKED
This data helps you then create more content around the information that your audience wants to consume. It 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 “busy-ness” 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 reading this and thinking “Jenn, numbers aren’t my thing – I get bored just thinking about them!”
Then I would say 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 are the next steps I want you to take – because you know I love action:
- Firstly, put in your planner a fortnightly and/or monthly task or reminder to look at your insights – cross out a 30-60 minutes block of time.
- 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. And that’s ok – there’s power in knowledge – so much power!
- Take note of some of the things you see or find – so you can compare to next month
- 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 your world, more buyers into your world, and have those buyers buy from you in fewer touchpoints and in less time – because our content, messaging and methodology is just that good!
Does that sound fabulous? Ummm… HECK YES!
I know, it can seem overwhelming!
But, just make me one promise that you’ll start to simply 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”.
And always remember, I’m here in your corner If you would like some assistance reviewing your insights and analytics!
Please reach out to me! I have free discovery chats available, where we can have a look together how I can help you. Send me a DM or go to my website and book a call here: https://calendly.com/jenn-smm/discovery
And my Like Minded Business Owners Facebook group is a fantastic community of small business owners who have a wealth of knowledge to share – head over and join if you aren’t already a member! Or you can DM me on Instagram or shoot me an email jenn@jenndonovan.com.au
I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land, the Yorta Yorta People, on which I 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 reading this blog post today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR!
Jenn Donovan is a marketing strategist and social media extraordinaire, coach and mentor to savvy business owners. Owner and Founder of Social Media & Marketing Australia.
With a passion for making business simple, because it’s isn’t easy but it should be simple or at least simpler, she’s built a reputation for helping other small business owners simplify their marketing and businesses so they can reach their goals, be more profitable and live the dream (finding the freedom they set out to achieve when they started … the illusive small business owner freedom dream …!)
Jenn believes in giving before asking and that’s why she’s the host of the popular Small Business Made Simple Podcast.
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