When most entrepreneurs approach a coach or social media manager for help with their business, they focus on everything else besides their analytics. Their marketing, brand colours, logo, website, and email list are top of mind when deciding on improving their business. But all of these things are driven by your analytics. What does your analytics say about your business?
And yes, all of those things are important. But one of the things I want you to also remember is that those things do not work in isolation. Your business needs to be very data-driven.
Every decision that you make in your business has to be driven by data. That is the information that you have collected based on what you have put out. So you want to look at all of the platforms that you’re on, whether you’re on Facebook, your Instagram, your LinkedIn, even on Twitter, whether you have an email list, a website, or a blog, there is a place where you can collect all of the data and insights. It will tell you certain things, and each one is going to be different.
So for your emails, for example, your insights are going to tell you which emails got opened, what day, or what time. It’s also going to tell you who is not opening your emails.
For your blogs, it is going to tell you how many eyes got on your blog, how many clicks you’re getting, how many times your blogs are being shared.
Your insights on your social media are going to tell you what date, what time, which image performed well, which messages performed well, what time it performed and who did it attract. How many times was it shared? There’s so much value in paying attention to those data points.
Because using that data is how you start to streamline your business. When you talk about marketing and sales, it’s very flexible. What you may have done six months ago may not work right now. And sometimes in very extreme circumstances, what you may have done last month might not work this month, because things are continuously changing.
Analyzing your data has to become one of those non-negotiable things that you do for your business. That’s why every Monday morning, my Virtual Assistant and I, really dive deep into our analytics. We look at all our data, our Facebook posts, our videos, and our Instagram feed as well. We look at our blog and our website, and we also look at our emails. And then we use that information to fine-tune the new set of messages that we have going out.
Based on these analytics, we can then determine, which message or particular topic, or theme my audience is responding to right now. Because it may be that at this point, this is what they’re struggling with. So I consciously decide to speak more about this particular topic or write more blogs around this topic. Or I may choose to write more headlines/captions that look like this, because this headline/caption, encourages my audience to engage or interact with it, or it encourages more of them to click on the link. Or, this time of the day, or this particular day of the week, is when I’m getting more people to open my emails because maybe my audience is more active on emails this day of the week or even this time of the day.
If I’m sharing particular types of images on Instagram for example, I can see what my audience is responding to. How they respond to particular images or videos.
Your analytics/ insights help you to make sense of your business. We’re not showing up every day, just hoping that somebody buys from us. Hoping that somebody lands on our blog, or our email, or even on our news feed. We’re not building a business on hope. We’re building a business based on data. Based on the information that we have collected.
Now, if you are now starting and you don’t have a lot of content out there, and your visibility is not high as yet, do not worry. What I would suggest is just start. And after a few weeks, you will be able to see some trends. You will be able to start to see some things that your audiences are engaging with, and then be able to assess what is going to work for your business and what is not going to work for your business. Because sometimes, it may just mean a change of your title, the use of a different type of picture, it a change of your color. But once you’ve made that decision to show up, share information, write these emails and blogs, and do these podcasts and videos, you have to get the data to help you make the right decision. You want to use the data that you’re going to collect.
Here are 5 ways to increase your visibility
You need to collect your data in a real way. We don’t just look at it and say oh, okay! Instead, we create a full spreadsheet that we use every Monday. We fill out the data and based on that information, then we can make informed decisions on the content that we are going to share for the next seven days.
When analyzing our data, we look for a few key things including:
1. what got more engagement,
2. what got more shares,
3. which posts got more people leaving comments
4. which one of our emails are opened the most,
5. which one of the links in our emails has readers clicked on the most
This ensures that you are operating a business based on some really valuable information because that data is what helps you build know, like and trust with your audience. When you analyze that data, you can
get a better sense of who your ideal clients are,
what their challenges are,
the kinds of questions they are accessing, and
what you should be focused on,
what your main message should be, and
how you can position yourself as the go-to person for this particular solution.
It’s good to help you to differentiate yourself from everybody else whom you may feel, is saying the same thing. That data aspect of your business is what drives the difference in your business once you are putting out content for your audience.
Week by week we compare our results to take note of any trends, dips, and flows. We can compare this week to last week and the week before and the month before and six months before. This forms part of our ongoing market research. We want to be able to see, after six months or three-month period, how has our blog grown, how has our email list grown, and which one of our emails has continued to stand out. Which one of our opt-ins or lead magnets has been able to stand out. This data is very, very important for us in making the right decisions for our business moving forward.
Now is as good a time as any to start collecting data for your business.
