You need good marketing data to make good decisions. And you need good decisions to grow your small business.
It’s that simple—and yet getting the data to make those decisions can be incredibly complicated. Big companies can throw large, expensive tracking systems and a whole department of data analysts at solving the problem. But small or medium-sized companies have been left in the cold.
The unfortunate reality is that SMBs are inadequately staffed for today’s advanced attribution and decision-making. Overworked staff can miss important information or reach the wrong conclusions. Small-to- medium-size businesses can’t hire the staff needed for today’s advanced attribution and decision-making. Overworked staff without good marketing data can miss important information or reach the wrong conclusions.
That makes it tough for you to know—quickly and easily—what’s working and what’s not working in your sales cycle.
Marketing at Internet Speed
When the market moves at Internet speed, you have to move with it regardless of your size. Here are five of the most important questions you need to answer when you’re trying to figure out how to grow your small business:
- How much money did I make from my ads in the first 24 hours? After 7 days? After 30 days?
- Which of my emails or retargeting offers produce the most profits?
- Which Facebook audiences spend the most on my products?
- Which keywords produce the biggest ROI for my company?
- Which 20% of my marketing is producing 80% of my income?
Like 99% of online marketers, though, you probably end up frustrated because you can’t get clear, ACCURATE answers. Without them you’ll run straight into several problems:
- How can you scale your ad spend to get a positive ROI?
- How will you know where to find the best customers, the ones with high long-term value (LTV)?
- How can you trust data that you can’t verify?
- And how can you avoid wasting time trying to correlate the data in multiple spreadsheets and complicated reports?
Compensating for Size
You can compensate for your size by doing three things to get good marketing data:
Track people instead of pixels for best attribution. Pixels don’t always work for these big reasons.
1.) Focus on the return on investment instead of clicks or open rates. If you depend on cost-per-click or cost-per-lead data to make decisions, you’re going to lose money. Those numbers tell you nothing unless you know how much money you made from those opens, clicks and leads.
2.) Track people instead of pixels for best attribution. Pixels don’t always work for these big reasons.
- They load multiple times or are not properly installed
- People shop with cookies turned off
- Customers use multiple devices over the contact lifetime
- You have to program the “value” of a conversion on every thank-you page
- There are multiple products in the shopping cart
- It’s hard to push data “cross domain“
- Phone sales follow up breaks the chain of events
- Sales come from leads gathered at a live event
3.) Follow customer behavior over time and across the entire customer journey. After all, you don’t make all your money on the first day. That means you must be able to track value (sales) over TIME or your data is worthless. But a long sales cycle makes for a complicated funnel and that means more complexity. Cross-channel attribution is time-consuming and expensive for small companies.
Fortunately, Wicked Reports can help you. Just check out our video on “Do you know where to find your best customers?”
