Data To Drive Marketing Decisions

Data To Drive Marketing Decisions

Not ready to give this episode a listen just yet? Below is a rough transcript of today’s episode

This is owners. Tell me they feel like they need a crystal ball to see if
marketing tactics are going to work or not. They hesitate. They worry,
they frat. what I tell them is that you don’t need a crystal ball. What you
need is data. so today let’s talk about how to figure out. If you’ve picked
the right tactics, determine if they’re working, they’re not working, how
you make them better.
Spoiler alert the answer to all these questions is always going to be
data. So before we get into the meat of this episode, let’s talk a little bit
about housekeeping. And if you listen to past episodes, this is where I’m
going to tell you everything that you want. As far as followup is going to
be in the show notes.
We have links to all the episodes I’m going to mention. I’m also going to
be mentioning quite a few products and tools that we use. and so if you
want to use them or learn more about them, there’s links to those in the
show notes as well. And then if I ever, list things out, sometimes I put the
list in there too.
So definitely when you get done listening, go take a look at the show
notes. when I start talking about data, the reaction I get is almost the
same as when I talk about search engine optimization, that glazed look
of horror and confusion, that queasy look, but unlike search engine
optimization Data is the fuel to grow your business, how you act. let’s go
over that. And I’m going to start with an example. So let’s say you have a
house painting business, home houses, and your goal is to grow your
business through referrals from real estate agents, because you’ve
realized that for every real estate agent that you build a good
relationship with them.
At least five or six referrals to customers to have their interiors, their
exteriors painted, especially if they’re a big seller agent, Cause they’ll
come in and they’ll make recommendations on what needs to get
painted before the house goes on the market. So the tax. Based off of
that goal is that you want to talk to more real estate agents via email
marketing, right?
There’s tons and tons out there, and you don’t have the time to
personally call or email them. So you want to do email marketing
campaigns to introduce yourself and your business. you can set up sales
funnels. Build lists organically do digital advertising, or maybe you get a
list of agents through a group that you’re part of, if you’re a home

sourcing type of group and there’s a lot of real estate agents in the
group, or you may decide to buy a list.
There’s a lot of the B to B email lists buying our worst box. Because of
the fact that it’s more of an open standard. Like we, as business owners
know that our email addresses are part of the public domain. and then
sometimes we do want to be solicited for products and services that will
help us grow our business.
I think that it’s acceptable to do list buying for that, consumers, not so
much, but definitely for B2B. And by the way, small tangent here, if you
are going to buy a list, or if you get a list from another source where the
people didn’t sign up individually themselves, I strongly suggest that you
scrub those lists before you upload them to your CRM system.
Many of the CRM systems protect their send process. by, if you start
sending emails that shouldn’t be sent to their invalid or something, they’ll
actually shut your list down for awhile and make you jump through hoops
to get it back to kind of ban you. I like using a product called zero
bounce at link is in the show notes to scrub my list before I put it into my
CRM system where my client’s CRM.
And zero bounces. Awesome. Cause it will categorize your entire list
and say, these are good. these are skeptical. These people are on, do
not send lists. and then it takes it and then it creates separate CSV files
for all of them. So you can just grab the right one and upload that and
get rid of the others.
So highly recommend that I have been burned by the ban in that’s why
we use zero bounce. so let’s say you set up your sales funnel to talk to
them about how you’re different, how your painting company is different
and an offer. call to action is meet with us, get connected.
Let’s talk. So the question is, how do you know if it’s worked right. This is
where data is important. Most CRM email systems, and definitely my
fave MailChimp have campaign, very detailed, robust campaign reports
that will help you determine if it’s working, if it’s working well, or if it’s not
working at all, and places to figure out how to change things and
different tactics.
So let’s dive into that. so on average, when we look at email reports for
our clients and for ourselves, if you have an open rate of 5% or greater,

you’re doing good, That’s actually really, really good. And then click
through rates between one and 5% are awesome too. especially for
service-based businesses that are maybe not really overly popular.
And especially if you’re doing this B2B. And you can dive deeper into
these reports as well. So they’re going to give you the, open rates, the
click through rates, but the nice thing is you get to see exactly by user
who has done what Jane opened this 10 times. but John opened it once,
but he clicked through, right away.
You got to click versus just to know. And so those are really good
indicators to see if your content is engaging and what the audience
wants. so let’s say you didn’t get your 1% click through, or you got less
than a 5% open rate. Now you gotta ask yourself the question why, and
when you look at that data, So for open rates, typically, if you don’t have
a great open rate, your subject line, isn’t resonating with the audience.
think about it. If you are a real estate agent and you see the title, come
into your inbox,work with great painters that are gonna make you look
like a rock star to your customers versus, Hey, try out our painting
services. Which one are you going to click on? One, you’re asking for
something the other one you’re telling them what you’re going to do for
them.
I bet you’re going to get. A better open rate for a, than you will with B.
And so speaking of a, B. There’s AB testing where you can actually test
content and subject lines against each other different language to see
which one’s getting better results. So if your first version doesn’t do great
consider creating AB testing versions.
And we have an episode about AB testing, that you can listen to, to learn
all about that and get excited and all those things and, MailChimp.
Absolutely. A hundred percent supports AB testing natively at. Signup
level. So it’s sitting right there so that you can get the results that you
want, even if your results were good, maybe you’re the type of person.
I want this to be better. You can start tweaking things, tweak different
pictures, different language, call the action button, colors, all that good
stuff to get yourself to the next level, with these open and click-through
rates. this is why the data is so important. It helps you figure out what’s
working.

What’s not working. If it is working, how to make it better. And at least a
general idea of where to change things. And really, you can only answer
these questions or know what’s going on. If you’re looking at the data.
And so you use this data to measure against your strategic goals, right?
So if you say, I want to do this and you create tactics, and then you look
at the data and if you’re not meeting your goals, at least the data is
telling you that. So I’ve got a personal story for you. I think that kind of
what put me on my soap box of data and this happened quite a few
years ago.
actually, it was year one or two when we opened the agency. so I had a
client, one of my first clients. I was so excited and we’re doing digital
advertising for him and he’s a service-based company and they clean
homes and they clean commercial buildings. and so we did all the ads
and everything and his business was doing well, but then he comes to
me six months later and says, you know what?
I don’t want to do digital ads anymore. I’m going to go try doing this. I
think he tried. Postcards or some other type of outbound marketing
tactic. And I was like,why he’s like, I don’t know. You know, like he got
bored and then he saw the latest, shiny object. And I had no way of
saying, but this is working for you.
His business was. He was doing well. So it wasn’t about not spending
the money. It was finding a different place to spend that money. so I
went and I dug and I looked at the data and, what I realized is in fact, we
were doing really well for him. Like we were a really great source. But I
never told him that I never looked at the data before.
because of that, we have implemented like right from then reporting for
every client that does any type of ongoing marketing with us data reports
that we review with them on a monthly basis. It is a base part of all of our
packages. And so every month I go through with clients and I say, here’s
your daily.
Here’s what I think is good. Here’s what I think we need to fix. And then I
follow up with that because they’re my client, here’s what I’m going to do
to make it better, to fix it, to do these things. And since we’ve
implemented that, we’ve made it better and better, and we don’t lose
clients to tactics not working and they go chase other shiny objects,
right? Honestly, we lose them if they don’t participate in the meetings

because they’re not interested because they’re looking at something
else, they get really distracted and I can’t get them to engage or
something else happens. The business shuts down, they go in a
completely different direction, all those weird reasons, but not because
we couldn’t prove that what we were doing was beneficial to.
Okay. I can hear it loud and cleared in my head. but how do I get the
data, Audrey, I want this data. I understand this can help me, but how do
I get it? This is the big barrier. So let’s walk through. A few data sources
because there are zillions out there.
And depending on what tactics you’re focusing on, that’s going to help
you decide which data sources you need to pay attention to. And they’re
all in different places. Right? Different data sources, different places.
We’re going to talk about them individually. But the last thing I’m going to
talk to you about is how you can aggregate them and look at them all in
one place.
So fear not, you are not destined to go nine different places to get all of
your data to make sense of it, because I certainly don’t do that for my.
So your data sources will depend on your tactics, right? that you’ve
implemented based off of your strategies and goals. So make sure you
go and listen to episode one, which is,strategy versus tactics.
They’re not the same thing, really great overview of what they are and
make sure you have both. So this is easiest. If I walk you through an
example of, Tactics and data sources associated to them. So let’s
pretend, for your business, here are a few tactics. you’ve built a website
that drives leads, right?
They come to the site and your imagery video copy is compelling to get
them to take action, sign up for something, fill out a form, schedule a
meeting. Buy something. And then you’re also using search engine
optimization to get them to the site, as well as Google digital ads to also
drive traffic to the site.
So that’s paid traffic versus organic traffic and you’re using both. Then
once they get to the site, if they don’t buy right away, you have a
wonderful little. Sign up or offer or giveaway. You can have three to four
of these to get the leads, to keep them warm. And then a reoccurring
newsletter that goes every month, twice a month, to stay in front of these
people.

So that six months down the road, if they’re ready to buy, they remember
you because you’ve been in there. Often. So with these four tactics,
there are four data sources and let’s go through what they are and what
they’re called. So for website data, Google analytics, right? Google’s the
number one search engine.
They are the ones that are gathering the most data for you. And it’s a
very robust tool and it’s free. So for search data, I like Google search
console. Again, it’s a Google product. We’re doing most of our searching
on Google. So it’s needed. It’s. Search, collection system and it’s free.
you may see ads and stuff for these, paid services that tell you what
keywords your site’s ranking for, but they’re all pulling their data from
Google.
And they may be doing secondary sources where they’re pulling it from
being or other ones, but like 99% of your data is coming from. Source
number three is your Google ads manager for your digital advertising
data, right? That is also the tool where you create the ads. And so the
data sits inside the same place, which is convenient.
That is also free because Google wants you to build ads. And then the
next source for this is your email CRM system. So if you’re using
MailChimp or constant contact or some other mail system, You create
the emails and you send the emails and your list is in there. You’re
reporting data on how all of that is doing is also inside that same system.
So your four data sources and where they’re located. So now let’s talk
about what you want from each of them to make this a little clear. So
your website data, there’s tons and tons of data there, right? You could
get lost in that day. So the main things that I want you to pay attention to
is how many visitors your site’s getting.
And then the average page views per visitor. You want to see the
visitors increase month, month, and then you want your page visits to be
on average, more than one page. If it’s two pages, three pages great.
That means they’re clicking around and they’re browsing your site.
They’re not just coming in. And that shows an engaged audience. The
other thing you want to look at is the source of where your visitors came
from. there’s a source section it’ll save referring source and it will tell you
that, so many of these visitors came from Facebook. They came from
LinkedIn, they came from your Google digital ad.

They came organically. They typed your URL into the search bar. That’s
called direct. You want to know this because this is going to help you
decide where to put material out into the internet and the social world to
get people to come. So let’s say one of your top sources is LinkedIn and
maybe Facebook’s not doing so great.
Put more content on LinkedIn and less on Facebook, especially if you
don’t have the time or money to do all of them. Also with visitor data.
Keep in mind that if you have a seasonal business, it’s going to be
reflected in your data. So don’t get worried or wigged out. If you have a
low. especially if you’re expecting to have a low month.
So let’s take an example. Let’s say you own a gym. You know,
December your website data is probably going to be flat or go down,
probably starting in November, actually Thanksgiving, Christmas, that
kind of stuff. People are eating, not talking about going to the gym, but in
January when new year’s resolutions happen and people want to get off
that winter weight, we see traffic to gym websites spike, right?
So know your season, and then if your data correlates with your season,
then you’re doing okay. Search data. So the search data shows the
search terms that people are using to get to your site. Or to get your site
to show up in search is probably the better way to say that. So it’s
impressions, clicks, and your average position on the search page is
what you want to, look at.
And this data is really good. If you have a blog and if you’re focused on
search engine optimization, you absolutely want to have a blog because
that’s where all your rich keyword, what they call long tail keyword
phrases come from.
And of course, your business name and your products and your
services. So this data helps you figure out what to write about, right?
Whether it’s a social post, a blog article, or helps you figure out what
content that you’ve created in the past that you need to resurface,
because if you’ve got evergreen content, exercise content from last year
in January may still be relevant and useful.
Again, this January, you just need to spruce it up and bring it back to
the. So an example I’m going to give you is I have a client, they do in-
home senior care. They send nurses and aides to seniors that live at

home that needed a little extra help. and someone to check in on them
or, give medications and that kind of thing.
And this is a locally owned, small business, and there are franchised
competitors all over the country and not just in their area. So for them,
it’s hard. To rank on,in-home senior health care, compared to these
other guys, but where we rank them is in their blog content. And one of
their best search terms is night terrors and seniors or senior citizens.
And we have multiple. Articles out there for that, that rank really, really
well. And what’s nice is someone will click through that, read the article
and then go and look at the services, go click on the calls to actions. And
then certain times of year we resurface that content. Usually when
daylight savings kicks in and the days get longer and there’s more
nighttime, we usually see a spike in.
People searching for this term because that’s when, the night terrors can
crop up. Or if they’ve a change in medication, we’ve got all sorts of
articles about that.
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So now let’s talk about digital advertising. The things you want to look at
for digital advertising is impressions, clicks, video views.
If you have a video attached to your,ad, or if it’s a YouTube ad, right?
Like a commercial, you want to see how many people are actually
watching. And the other thing is you have to set them up, but you want
to track conversions. This is gold, right? That’s how you’re really going to
tell if your ad is doing what you want it to do.
So if it’s an awareness, ad impressions, clicks, and views. Great. But
what if you want to generate leads? So in this example, we’re trying to
get people to come to the site and do something right. and become a
lead. so for. Purchases and online store, that’s pretty simple, right? You
buy the things.
service-based businesses. Here’s what I like to do. What I do for them
that generates and gets counted as a lead or people that click on
telephone numbers, The click to call feature. They click on links to
schedule the appointment. If you have an appointment scheduler, fill out
a contact form or even sign up for the newsletter.
I confirm with the client that we can use one or all of these, depending
on what is on the website and agree that yes, that can be considered as
a lead and therefore a conversion. So when we look at the data for
advertising, if we see in a month, The 20,000 impressions, 5,000 click-
throughs 10,000 video views.
And then we have 10 conversions. We know that from all of that, 10
people, took an action that we think are as a lead because we collected
something from them, and so the last one is the email system. And so
here, we’re looking at subscribers, open rates and click through rates.
, so if you have an email capture mechanism on your website, signing up
for a newsletter, a high value download to give us your email address
and you put them through a sales funnel. Look at your subscribers,
systems like MailChimp on their dashboard will show you. Any given
timeframe, if you have increased or decreased, your total number of
subscribers decrease would be, people are unsubscribing.
They don’t want your content anymore. New subscribers are coming in
from your website. but you can actually have people coming in through
digital advertising. You can run ads to get people to sign up for stuff, or

on your social. And so when you click into these new subscribers, you
can see where they came from.
The source is located, which is extremely helpful because then you
know, better where these folks are coming from and then signing up for
your, emails. So when you send an email, we talked about this, your
open rates and your click-through rates are important. Open rates are
going to tell you if your subject lines are working right, because that’s the
reason why people open emails, your click-through rates are going to tell
you whether or not your content, your imagery, your buttons are
compelling enough and getting them to digest the material for them to
take the actual.
And then depending you may have two or three different areas they can
click through to what are they clicking on? MailChimp and a lot of the
other, like constant contact they’ve implemented, heat maps. so you can
see little dots on the email where they clicked. So it’s a visual
representation kind of, cool.
MailChimp also has a really cool industry average feature. So when you
set it up, if you put in what your industry is, and hopefully they have your
industry, cause they don’t have them all, they’ll actually show you how
you’re open and click through. And unsubscribed rates are doing
compared to other people in the industry that they have data for.
which is good. If you’re brand new, this helps you, but over time, you’re
going to want to compare yourself to your own data because you are.
Company you are list, what you do, how you do it, where you do it is
very unique. And so the industry average data is only going to take you
so far. So in this example, I talked about four different tools.
You got to go to four different places. And pull all this different data and,
that’s a little mentally taxing and it takes a lot of time. And so what I do,
and what I prefer to do is to pull all that high level data into one place. So
where I can look at it. And then if I’m like, oh, I see an anomaly.
in Google analytics, I can go deep dive and search out that one thing,
but that’s my choice, but the rest of it’s together. And so we use Google
data studio. As the aggregate report builder, and it lets you slice and
dice things all in different ways that is free. And then to pull the data,
what we call, aggregate the data source.

We use a, service by a company called Supermetrics, where they have
all those data sources and you connect it to Google data studio and it
pulls your data in and it’s real time and it’s, live. About 24 hours old, It’s
not real time within the minute, but it’s really cool. So you can do graphs,
charts, lists of data, and then you can play with timeframes. You can
look at six months, you can look at one day, you can look at four days
and it’ll pull all that data in and then you can. Things correlate so for an
example, one correlation that we like to look at for all of our new clients
is, search engine optimization to digital ads when trying to drive traffic to
a website. So everybody wants traffic right away and digital ads are the
way to do that until the SEO kicks in. and so what we look for in the
source data of Google analytics in a report is if we know that the ads are
doing well, and then we see search engine terms, start coming up, we
should start seeing in the analytics data where,the organic referral line
becomes a larger number.
More people are using that than what’s coming through the digital ads.
And then we can have that conversation with our. To see if they want to
continue to run the ads or not. or do we focus and run different paths. So
pretty cool. So now is the for you to take some action with all this
knowledge.
So number one, determine your data sources for each of your tactics
and go through the process like I did. If it’s website, you need this, and a
lot of the services that you paid for. Reporting is included. So,a lot of it’s
built in, but for website, Google analytics, search, Google search
console, and then if you’re running ads, the data’s inside the ad.
So if you’re doing Pinterest ads, your Pinterest ad data is going to be
inside the Pinterest ad creation tool, learn your data source tools and
how to read the data. And every single one of the major ones they’re
going to have. YouTube videos to help you figure out what you’re looking
for and how to look for it.
And then third, if you get into this and you’re tired of looking at all the
data sources individually, utilize Google data studio, and Supermetrics,
we have a link to Supermetrics in the show notes for you to link through
and you can sign up that way you can look at and correlate your data all
in one place.
So my final thoughts. Is that setting this up is going to be challenging. It
took us years and we’re constantly refining what we’re doing and how

we’re doing it for clients. But you’ve got to start selling. So this is going to
be challenging and because it’s challenging, it’s the reason why most
business owners ignore it and don’t use it.
and then they hope that their tactics and strategies work hope is not a
good marketing strategy. the really great successful business owners,
they embrace data. They figure out how to use it and they use it to make
really good business decisions. And so. what I’m going to share with you
now is you don’t have to set this all up yourself.
You don’t have to become a data studio expert. You don’t have to
become a Supermetrics expert, reach out to me or someone like me
that, knows how to set up data reports and get all that set up for you and
have them teach you how to look at it and how to interpret it. You don’t
have to hire them for a lifetime.
It can be a one-time project, which is cost-effective. but I do recommend
that you do it. So don’t skip this. Here at Inca moat. We like to give back
to the business community. I provide a free 45 minute consultation to
any business owner. Maybe you want to talk about Google data studio
and Supermetrics and how that gets set up or how to interpret
something that you see in the search console.
We are here for you and can answer those questions for you, or maybe
you want to talk. Setting up your dev environment and Shopify and
taking us up on our offer for a free dev environment that 45 minutes is
for you and what you need. just go to our website and come on.com I N
K Y M a.com. And in the upper right hand corner, there’s a button to
schedule your marketing evaluation, pick a date and time, and we are on
the calendar.
I hope you found this information, not so daunting and useful and
informative and hopefully inspiring. Please share this with other business
owners. especially if they’re your friends and your family, because all of
you want to do well. and this is one of those things that’s going to
separate you from the other business owners, especially your
competitors.
And so when one business grows and helps another business grow, we
all grow and thrive. And that’s what we’re here for. So thanks for listening
and have an amazing day.