CEO's and CMO's are trying to figure out how to integrate their off-line marketing and sales with their digital marketing efforts. Since digital marketing gets too techie/nerdy the creative right brained folks in marketing,sales and advertising seem to avoid getting into the possibilities that digital marketing and web analytics offers. By doing so the more techie folks involved with analytics do get paid but do not feel that they are making a difference to the marketing efforts of the organization. Bad for morale and worse for the great things that are possible from free web analytics like Google Analytics.
Here are three things that CEO's/CMO's should ask their analytics staff:
- Where do our customers come from? This question is very easy to answer and you might be amazed that you have upto 40% web visits from markets and countries that you do not serve i.e. you do not have a distributor and do not ship to. Think of these countries as potential markets. A whole host of opportunities from JV's, distributors and agents are possible. Explore,…
- What happens before sales conversion? The sales conversion may be an e-commerce order or a contact form that you want leads to fill up. Analytics data tells you exactly how many other touchpoints (called multi-channel funnels in Google Analytics) on the web let to the prospect coming in to that form and deciding to fill it up. Shockingly, the digital touchpoints alone can be 15-17 including arrival at your site from different search engines like Google,Bing and Yahoo; Social Media like Facebook and Pinterest or simply being refered from an AdWords PPC campaign. This does not even account for all the good work you do off-line including the massive hoarding you have on the highway or the direct mail campaign that you have got going.
- How many visits from mobile? And you'll be surprised at how this number is growing for your own website. Does your website show up well on a cell phone screen or tablet? Given the projected growth in the mobile web– it might be a good idea to ask your web design folks to make sure that the website is nicely visible on mobile.
Just these things will give you huge pointers to what you can do more effectively in the off-line world. For example, is your merchandising, sales force and distribution responsive to the geography that has a large number of web visitors?…. is just one of the questions that will pop up. Such questions will help you align your off-line marketing and sales to your digital marketing efforts. Contact StratoServe.