Don't Neglect Your Analytics

The first thing you need to improve your marketing and sales effectiveness is to measure and keep track of your analytics. Sounds simple, few consulting firms do it right.

Your analytics include both your inputs/initiatives (implemented by your marketing engine and sales activities) and the overall KPIs and results (how your audience and target market is engaging with you).

Why To Track And Measure Analytics

You need to have the ability to collect and aggregate data if you want insights on what is working and what can be improved, and measure the impact of your initiatives.

Here are some undisputed advantages of tracking your analytics:

• It helps to improve implementation. Many consultants invest time and energy to create a sound marketing strategy but struggle to execute that plan. When the implementation numbers are visible for the whole team to see, you increase accountability and avoid blaming tactics or prematurely changing your marketing approach.
• It helps to measure real progress. Analytics for a single time frame might be useful, but irrelevant if can't be aggregated over longer periods. Looking at data over multiple time periods provides insights around trends. When you look at annual or quarterly numbers, you remove noise and increase reliability to make meaningful changes.
• It helps set expectations and goals. If your site receives 500 monthly viewers, increasing it to 5,000 monthly viewers in two to three months without investing in paid traffic is an unrealistic goal. If you are promoting it in different channels and can measure engagement and clicks by each one of them, you can adjust your execution plan accordingly.

How To Track And Measure Analytics

There are no excuses not to measure your initiatives. These consist of the activities that you, your team, and your contractors are implementing, so are easy to register through internal systems. For solo consultants and most boutique consulting firms under 20-30 employees, something as simple as a spreadsheet and a CRM tool can do the work.

Measuring the results of your marketing actions and how your audience engages with your brand requires collecting data from third-party platforms and tools. It can include everything from website traffic and newsletter open rates, to social media engagement and brand mentions.

Here are some recommendations:

• The simplest way to track web analytics, such as unique visitors or time on page, is through Google Analytics - anyone can create a free account to track a website or app. A heat mapping tool like Hotjar can show where your viewers are spending the most time on the site, and provide insights on what can be improved in terms of layout and navigation.
• Social platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter offer their own analytics, but several tools can break these down more simply. Buffer and Hootsuite both offer social analytics features.
• If you use email marketing tools to send newsletters or deliver email drip campaigns, it should be fairly simple to see the main KPIs - almost all of them include analytics in their features. CRM tools like Pipedrive and HubSpot also have their own analytics dashboards that can be customized.

You can also use a third-party tool like Zapier to automate the collection of numbers and information from different tools into a single dashboard.

It doesn't really matter which tools you use and how you do it. Professionals keep track of their initiatives - it's the only way to improve without relying on luck and intuition.

Start today.