I hope you’re having a great day, that here you are in the middle of the week, starting a new month, and that things are moving ahead at an amazing pace for you. One of the things that I do first of the month is I look over the numbers for the previous month. And that’s not just for my business. I do that for my clients’ businesses, as well. And what I’m doing is I’m studying the analytics information to determine how well marketing endeavors that we’ve been pursuing have been working.
So looking at traffic counts, repeat visits, where that traffic’s coming from. Are they mobile device users? Are they on a desktop? Were they on a tablet? Then I want to look at how much time they’re spending on the website, where they’re going when they’re on there, have there have been conversions during that time. I want to look at the traffic sources. Are they up or down? What are my main traffic sources? What are some of the unique qualities that I’m seeing from those who come from different traffic sources?
All of that information allows me to fine tune not only marketing campaigns, but also maybe to fine tune product offerings, service offerings, or even to identify a need and then create a whole new product or service to match that need, as well. In the case of my clients, what we’re evaluating is how well the traffic to their website or from their social media is converting to sales for them, and so those are the types of things that we are analyzing.
Now, the reason I bring all that up is because I find a lot of business owners don’t really know their numbers. They don’t really know their metrics. If I were to ask them where does most of your sales coming from, most of the time they take a guess. “Well, I think it comes from this.” They don’t really know where it comes from. One of my favorite scenarios comes from one of my clients that, in his manufacturing company, when I first met him, he told me, “My clients don’t use Facebook and they don’t use mobile devices.” And what we have found is two-thirds of his sales come from mobile devices and come from Facebook. So he was very wrong and he was missing out on about 65% of his revenue because he did not know his metrics. And so we finally got that resolved and turned around, and their first year with me they saw an increase in sales of over $100,000. We obviously got things dialed in correctly.
Now, here’s the thing that I want to encourage you. At the very least, know your metrics when it comes to your website. Where is your traffic coming from? How is it getting there? Who’s coming? Where are they coming from? How long are they on the page? Those types of things.
Second thing, know your metrics on your advertising. If you are paying for advertising, know how many clicks you’re getting, how many phone calls you’re getting, what conversion rates are, all of those types of things. Make sure you’re getting a good return on your investment. Don’t just guess and go by feeling.
Now, beyond that, probably the more important one is know your cashflow. Know whether or not you’re profitable. You should be taking a look at a profit and loss statement every month, again taking a look at a profit and loss statement every quarter, every six months, and then again every year. You really want to know what’s happening in the finances of your business. You want to make sure you’re on top of those. If there are expenditures that no longer need to be made, cutting those back or changing up some of the things you’re doing to make sure you’re maximizing cashflow.
What this has allowed me to do in my own business is about every six months I’ll go through my expenditures and look, am I spending money on things I don’t even use anymore, which is very common in the world of online marketing. There’s a tool or a piece of software that works really great, and then it ages out. It gets to the point that it’s no longer effective, and I don’t want to keep paying for that once it’s served its purpose.
Those are a few thoughts for you. Know your numbers. Know your analytics. And if you haven’t picked up my book, Internet Marketing for Small Business, be sure and do that, smallbizmarketingbook.com, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
