Get to Know Analytics, Digital Marketing 101

Disclaimer: This will be  a seven minute read approximately.

If you are an entrepreneur, you have experienced breaking the boundaries of fear in order to catch opportunity. Yes, you have done what it takes to start your business, and now you have created sales. That's awesome ! Not everyone has what it takes to do so.

At some point of your business, might be now, you start to wonder how will your business shape up in the future? Will you open another store? What's the risk? Which decision should I made? Don't rely on your intuition or sense alone ! Trust data. They will provide you with good information and sense of direction you should follow. One of the example is the move done by Starbucks Indonesia! You can read that article here if you have not.

Today I'm going to share with you the secret sauce that has taken companies sky rocketed. The utility of data ! And in this era, the utilization of data has become more important in a business growth. One of the way that I would recommend is by knowing the depth of digital marketing.

If your business is still considered a start up, it's going to take a while to learn digital marketing. The world of digital marketing is vast and the change happening is rapid.  Having someone who manage your social media account is good. But without analysis, your effort would be meaningless. Don't hate me, but when you have an advanced technology, you want to leave them at the hand of someone who's capable of  utilizing it well.

Squeezing the juice out of your lemon

I still remembered back in 2013, I was discussing on which phone should I get to replace my old blackberry. Remember those good old days chatting through blackberry messenger? My eyes were directed at the incredible Samsung Galaxy Note 2. However, to sustain minimum damage from social judgment from people with diverse background around me, I need to convince them that it is worth the price. I started to tell them how amazing the technology was and how good I would be at handling this marvelous device. Well, what's the purpose of amazing device if you could not handle them? The same goes with digital marketing. You need to squeeze as much as you can to enjoy its maximized efficiency and effectiveness.

Now you started to wonder, what kind of juice can you get out of digital marketing? So basically,  by using analytics tool on your website such as Google Analytics you can learn about your website visitor's behavior !

I will show you what I meant by some of this Google Analytics Demo Account that I got as  I finished my analytics course from google. Yes, you can learn analytics from google if you want to, for FREE! This is 2018. Let me know in the comment section below whether you are interested to learn more about google learning platform.

Through google analytics, you could see what device your users are using in order to access your website.

The picture above shows us the behavior of customer in accessing your website. To put it in daily life language, sessions are recorded when a user get into your website. From the data above, we can see that almost 75% of your users accessed the website through the desktop. How could this help you? 

1.If you are going to run advertisements on Google, it does not have to aim at mobile users. You may focus on the desktop users, as to search for your product, someone will likely use their desktop instead of their phone.

2.If your website is not mobile friendly, it does not hurt your company so much. Google's research shows that if a page did not load in 3 seconds, most likely people will end their session. How you design your website affect this, most of the website now are mobile friendly as most people access the web from their phone. But seeing this data, you can take your time making your page mobile friendly as 75% of your users use desktop.

Now, what we have done is turning data into insight. It helps you to make a cost saving decision right? We still have more juice to be squeezed.

Do you write blogs? How many words did you write in one article? According to Sparktime, the estimated time to read blog is 3 minutes, which cover around 750 words. In the picture above, you can see that most of your website only scroll through your page in less than 3 minutes ! Again, if you are a blogger, it is not a good sign. They don't finish reading your article. Your spider sense is tingling, it might be the content, it might be something else. This insight is valuable for you. If people only land on your page for less than 10 seconds what would it means? Your website did not load fast enough? Well, now you know the insight !

Sip the lemon juice by yourself

If you want to learn about the basic of the analytic world, you can try these 4 simple steps.

Plan

With your team,  identify the goal of your campaign. what is a campaign? a long term goal that you want to achieve by doing digital marketing activities such as advertising, content marketing etc. Make sure your actions are driven by a contingency plan that goes along with the direction of your company. For example, you own a coffee shop and you want to promote eco friendly drinking life style by reducing the usage of  straw by 25% by the next three month.

Do

It is the time for you to do something. You can go with the team, be it external or internal team and design the ads and launch the campaign. After  a few weeks have passed and you got enough insight, you can check by using analytic tools how well your ads are doing and whether it is working to reduce the usage of straw at your coffee shop. If the result is poor, it does not mean your digital marketing team is bad. As most digital marketing plan needs to be contingent, you should reassessed and optimized the improvements. 

Act

Remember about the plan that was not working and you tried to reassessed? It could be done by doing an A/B Test ! Shout out to Neil Patel for this amazing tutorial of A/B Test. You can do something that you might be familiar with, content marketing ! Choose the most optimal platform for you to spread the message and interact with your consumers. Most Indonesian Coffee shop like to use Instagram for good engagement. Pick a good design, make good copy-writing that engage with your followers and monitor its track. Remember, adjust with the best performance to maximize your effectiveness.

Check

You might be overwhelmed then, why? Because there are lots of data that you can use. Squeezing the lemon for a long time would exhausted you. Enjoy your lemon juice, sip the best performing data and utilize them well. Not every information should be used, choose the most related one to your goals only. However, you might want to periodically review the information that you have gathered. It helps you to be aware with your consumers behavior. Look for the anomaly in the data.

What will you do now?

Now we have known the usage of data in analytics. However, it takes time to learn and your business need to run fast as well right? What's the solution? If you have the resource, hiring someone with expertise to work as your digital marketer is good for you. 

However, if you are tight on the budget, you need to realize that it takes time to learn and more importantly the right person. As someone who has passion in digital marketing, I would say that the scope of digital marketing is moving rapidly. Therefore it takes solid effort in order to create a good result. Nevertheless, if you could not afford to create and develop specific digital marketing department, hiring an outsource could be the right decision.

Why? Because most company made the same mistake. They want they conventional marketing team to handle the digital marketing world without proper equipment. It is suicidal and would cost you more in long run. Traditional marketing already have a lot of scope to be done, adding more work load of digital marketing to your already running team would be unwise. remember, your business is not a sprint, it is a marathon !

You don't have to pay for a full time and experienced staff. Let's say a digital marketer cost you 5 million rupiah per month. The cost for one year would be 60 million. Getting help from digital marketing company might cost you less and you can see the impact in less than a year, resulting in lower cost to some point.

If you need my help or would like to talk more about digital marketing, you can reach me through the comment section or write me some e-mail.

If you like my content, you can support me by sharing this article to someone who might be interested or through your social media ! 

Don't quit, keep going !

#digitalmarketing