As I scroll through Google Analytics I am amazed at what consumers tell me about my business. What amazes me even more are those of you who don’t listen like this. Long ago I was a counterintelligence case officer, which taught me a lot about marketing and sales.
Without taking the analogy too far let me dive deeper into two powerful skills I acquired during that time: looking for patterns of what my targets might “buy” and then creating the perfect “product” they would greedily gobble up.
Looking for Buy Patterns
Consumers are constantly providing us with buy signals and patterns. They browse our retail stores, read certain periodicals and books, they buy other related products and services.
And, in the Internet world they do searches and visit our websites!
Nothing is better intelligence on your prospective customer than the web searches that land them on our website, where they came from, and who they are. If you are not looking at your web analytics search keywords, referral sites, and traffic sources you are ignoring amazing business intelligence.
- Keywords tell you how customers talk about your business and the problems they face
- Referral sites tell you who your natural “partners” are
- Traffic sources tell you who is looking for answers and where to target
Every time you go into your web analytics you should come out with marketing and sales tactics and strategies.
Creating Luring Marketing and Sales
Now that you have the intelligence, what do you do with it?
I like to work this information at three levels: tactical, strategic, research and development. Depending on how you run your marketing and sales each of these levels can have a variety of levers you pull in your organization.
- Tactical marketing and sales moves might be reshaping sales scripts and language, new keyword PPC campaign, or new keyword targeted article on your blog.
- Strategic marketing and sales moves may include developing a new strategic account targeting plan, repositioning product or services marketing, launching a new category of whitepapers, or buying differently targeted sales leads.
- Research and development moves might be the prototyping of a new product or service, trying a new marketing media or methodology, trying a new lead management process, or creating a pre-sales team to test and qualify leads.
Figuring out the best way to exploit business intelligence is the second opportunity. The first, and most important, is to get it into your decision making process.
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