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!