Smart Marketing – Free & Easy Customer Analysis .

When it comes to digital marketing one of its key benefits is the amount of current data available at your fingertips. Most information is freely available it just requires time to extract and a little knowledge of how to use it.

Due to the emergence of more and more social channels, smarter phones and digital reliance day to day, people are getting smarter and more demanding on what they want to see (or don’t want to see).

Therefore we need to make sure we know who we want to attract and how best to keep them happy.

So where do I start?

Gone are the days when throwing large budgets and reaching as big as audience as possible is enough. Consumers want to see information that is relevant and interesting, when it suits them.

There a few free tools that can help you understand your website audience; whether that is what products or services your customer base is interested in, how previous marketing campaigns have performed or understanding demographics and buyer behaviour.

Below I have identified some interesting and insightful ways you can use different tools to find different information. There are thousands of other interesting things you can find when you start delving but here are some starting points.

Google Analytics

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/

When do most visitors come to my site?

Here you can see the most popular hours of the day that enquiry forms are submitted through the website. There is an obvious peak between 9am-12noon and again at 2pm and 3pm. This can be useful for targeting peak hours of the day as well as knowing the key trading times (and scheduling maintenance).

Create this report by using the ‘Customisation’ tab in Google Analytics. Add your metric (e.g. Sessions, Goal Name) and then Dimension Drilldown (e.g. Hour, Day of Week Name).

What days are users most popular for form submissions?

Below you can see the most popular days of the week for form submissions. The following days; Tuesday, Monday and Wednesday account for nearly 60%. If you are looking to target specific days rather than the whole week, this data could possibly help lower your cost per acquisition.

Create this report by using the ‘Customisation’ tab in Google Analytics. Add your metric (e.g. Sessions, Goal Name) and then Dimension Drilldown (e.g. Day of Week Name).
Another fab report is finding out the device usage (mobile/tablet/desktop). This is really useful tool for working out what types of ad format might work best when using Facebook Adverts. This data can be found on the main left hand menu, under Audience>Mobile>Devices.

Facebook Audience Insights Tool

https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights

Understanding my market

Facebook Audience insights allows you to understand your market more, through geography, demographics and purchase behaviour.

What can I find out and how?

There are few ways you can find out this data, my favourite is number 3.

Review People on Facebook (you can look at certain areas or ages etc)
Review the people connected to your page or event
The BEST way, if you have an email database then upload your data and create a custom audience. This tool will analyse those email addresses linked to a Facebook account. That way you can see your actual prospects or customer profiles.

This is some of the information that you can find, great if you want to see what types of people are interested in your product/service and how you could shape your future marketing.

Demographics — Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size
Page likes — The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports
Location and language — Where do people live, and what languages do they speak
Facebook usage — How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on
Purchases activity — Past purchase behaviour (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)

Reference: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/audience-insights

Google Trends

https://www.google.co.uk/trends

What are the market trends?

If you have noticed a downward trend in sales for a particular product or category, especially over a long period of time, then perhaps check Google Trends and see if this is reflected in the online search behaviour?

It could be that it may be a seasonal trend or highlight that there are other categories that are worth focusing more of your marketing efforts on.

Google Trends is a fun and easy tool to play with. It helps you stay up to date and suggests trending searches or subjects to explore if you have some free time.

So how does having extra data help?

Use the data to find out how to find out who your audience is, are there certain segments who convert quicker or have higher value orders? Probably.

The main lesson to take away is; Don’t be lazy, spend the time and effort to work out your audiences and your goals before you spend your money on PPC. Or ask Sagittarius to help!

Whatever your business, be it a regional or global brand, the content you produce plays a vital role in your success. You know that… hence you’re reading this.

A well formulated and executed content strategy not only drives more traffic, at the core, it defines what your business is and helps build a strong connection between you and your audiences.

So let's quickly look at why developing a coherent content strategy is important and how setting clear goals and understanding your audience will elevate your online performance.

What is a Content Strategy?

It's basic right? Content is at the core of how you define the way your business presents itself and an effective strategy should look to ensure that tone of voice, messaging and the core values are surfaced across all channels, from service or product pages on your website, to blog posts, through social media updates blah blah blah.

But let's keep it simple - your content strategy should be a clear roadmap that connects your marketing activities to your business goals. Align to your customer’s wants and needs and engage them at every interaction point and boom, you're in business.

Who are my Audience?

You likely start all your projects with this chalked on the wall because your business knows “exactly” who its customers are right? Sounds obvious but we often find its not been done forensically enough (not based on data), is too old (more than 12 months ago - forget it) or its a spin off from some brand work that was legitimately aspirational but doesn’t face the reality of who you your business is actually engaging today.

So start (or circle back) with audience research, building out those personas to understand their ambitions, their lifestyle, their pain points or concerns, and crucially their wants and needs - in your context.

Do I need to tailor content?

As part of your research find out where your audiences spend their time online and how they interact with content: Some may spend time thoroughly researching a product or service, whereas other audiences may want their content to be quick, snappy or easily digestible in the form of a video, infographic or short blog posts.

Ultimately, the key is to produce a strategy that creates the type of content your customers want to see:

What are the problems that your product or service will help them solve?
Who are they most influenced by?
What voices influence their behaviour?
What type of content do they consume?
Where do they consume content and engage with brands?

Different Content, Different Objectives

All content is not born equal: When producing your strategy, it is important that the objectives for each individual piece are defined, that these fulfil your marketing objectives and tie to the overarching goals for your business.

There are various content frameworks that exist to aid content development in this way, but one that is popular and effective is Google’s hero, hub and hygiene method: It provides a framework on developing content to achieve different goals and gives guidance on the effort needed to create each type of content.

Hero Content

Hero content is essentially campaign content, it is big splash ideas designed to appeal to a large audience with the aim of telling your brand’s story at scale.

Ways of measuring hero include the amount of PR mentions or links from authoritative domains plus social interactions and mentions of your brand across all channels.

Considering the scale of hero campaigns, this content is not regularly produced and is reserved for peak promotional times where it’s important for a business to stand out from their competitors.

Hub Content

Hub content is the stuff that keeps your audience engaged, it expands on the themes of product or service level content, educates users and helps create a connection between themselves and your brand.

Hygiene Content

Hygiene content is the bread and butter of any website, it is the BAU content for products and services, it is SEO focused and targets important keywords at a product, service or guide level.

How do I manage all this?

Content development is only one part of the ongoing work needed when working with an effective content strategy. We call it “feeding the beast” because it really is the fuel in your brand vehicle and once you start you really can’t stop (if it’s delivering results) but that’s where performance measurement comes in.

Your greatest gift in managing the outputs from your hero/hub/hygiene style efforts is to understand If your content is working. To truly deliver results your business must first understand the objectives and goals of each piece of content to effectively measure its success. That as a guiding light from day 1 will let you slow down, speed up, stop or start new content briefs and projects.

Remember - content strategies are not set in stone. They are living breathing things and should adapt and pivot as insights become available and your brand naturally evolves.

If ever you want to chat content and explore new initiatives we’re always here to help.