Using Data to Improve Marketing Efforts for your Small Business

Women entrepreneurs are often trying to do it all - both in their business and in their family lives. In business, they wear the hats of marketer, sales rep, operations coordinator, CEO, CFO and many more. This leaves very little "free" time to stop and think about how to do things better or more efficiently. And, oftentimes, marketing can feel like the most unwieldy area to try to tackle with a "work smarter not harder" mentality.

If you're one of these mompreneurs or solopreneurs and you'd like to start refining your efforts to get the most "bang for your buck" (in terms of your time), I recommend taking a look at how you can use data to improve your marketing efforts. Here are 3 areas in which you can dive into metrics in order to answer some key questions that will help you improve and refine your marketing efforts going forward:

1. Social Media Data

   • How many followers have you gained in the past year on each platform? Are they performing equally?

   • What days of the week and times of day does your content perform the best?

   • Are certain types of content getting more engagement?

2. Google Analytics

   • How many new and returning users have come to your website in the past year? And how does that compare to the prior year?

   • How many pages are people visiting and how much time are they spending on your website?

   • Where is most of your website traffic coming from? (In other words, how are they finding your site?)

3. SEO Report

   • What are the top search terms that people are finding you for?

   • What keywords do you WANT to be found for that you aren't currently?

   • Who are your top competitors from a keyword and website standpoint?

I'm just scratching the surface on how can you be using data to inform marketing efforts for your small business. The point is to get you thinking about how to work more efficiently and maximize your time and energy. Maybe you can disregard a social channel you've been spending your time on because you realize it hasn't really performed for you and that another channel performs a lot better. This will leave you more time to focus your attention on the social platforms that really impact your business.

Perhaps you realize that a certain referring website has driven a great deal of traffic your way - you can start thinking of ways to leverage that relationship even more, or find other similar sites to partner up with you. Maybe you thought you were being found for a top search term in your industry and come to find out you actually don't show up until page 3 of the search results. Guess it's time to start creating content on that topic so you can rise to the top of those results!

There are so many ways to use data to help inform your marketing efforts! If you're not sure where to start, I encourage you to set up a free 15-minute consultation.