Do you feel like your marketing is working, but your business still isn’t growing at the pace you’d like? You probably don’t need more marketing, you need better marketing and looking at the right numbers and analytics can help.
While plenty of people review readily available metrics social likes, follower count, website traffic, or time on page. Strong marketing numbers in one area don’t always ladder up to inquiries and sales.
In fact, engagement and traffic alone won’t tell you if you’re attracting an audience that will convert to sales. But if you dig just a little further, you can get deeper insights into what’s working and what’s not.
When you connect engagement and traffic with inquiry and sales, you’ll better understand where real clients are coming from so you can attract more of them.
Here’s how:
1 Start with your inquiries (not your engagement)
Too often business owners and marketing staff focus on growing their audience. More eyeballs on your content mean more clients, right?
Not necessarily. While many people focus on social media growth and SEO development to increase their traffic, they seldom consider whether or not that traffic is effectively converting to inquiries. If your website can’t convert traffic to inquiries, more traffic won’t help you grow your business.
So when you understand where your inquiries are coming from,you can adjust your marketing efforts to increase those inquiries, not just increase the traffic. And unlike social media DMs, traffic and inquiries are scalable, even when you’re busy.
While tracking inquiries takes a bit more work than tracking likes and traffic, it’s worth it in the end.
Set up a Conversion Goals in Google Analytics
The easiest way to track where your inquiries are coming from is through Google Analytics. When you set up your goals here, you’ll see which marketing efforts lead to more inquiries and sales. This can also help you see what content is working and what’s not on your site.
The best way to track who is inquiring is to set up a destination goal using a Thank You page. That way you can see who ended up actually submitting an inquiry with you and you can then backtrack and see where they came from. You might be surprised by the results.
Caveat: If you are using a third-party platform, like Dubsado, 17Hats, TripleSeat, or something similar, you’ll want to hire someone to help you with advanced setup.
2. Make sure your website traffic is qualified
You could have the biggest, most engaged social media following and a website overflowing with traffic, but if these people aren’t likely to book you, then what’s the point? Most people who engage with your content should be potential clients who consume your content because they’re considering working with you.
To make sure your traffic is qualified to do business with you, confirm it’s coming from the right place.
If you work locally, then most of your traffic should be local, if your clients typically come from out of town, then most of your traffic should come from your defined feeder cities. If you’re a local vendor, but your traffic is made up of people halfway across the country (or world), you should reevaluate your tactics for attracting website traffic.
Additionally, site visitors should be largely evaluating you. Most of their time should be spent on your services page, gallery, menus, inquiry page, and about me. These people are here for you, not just random information you may have posted on your blog, or in a general download.
If you have a blog, you don’t just want people coming to your website for the general tips and information then leaving. They can spend time there, that’s why you have it, but they should then be clicking over to learn about you and your service.
One way to do this is to make your blog post content hyper-local. Don;t just write about seasonal menus, write about farm to fork menus for Asheville couples, or whatever city you hail from.
3. Know your most important numbers
Do you know your numbers? The most important ones? And no we still aren’t talking about general traffic or engagement rates.
The most important numbers are those closest to the money. Your money. These include, landing page conversion rates, close rates, and traffic to conversion rates. Knowing and understanding these three numbers will help you scale your business more than any follower count will.
When you know and monitor these basic metrics, you can calculate how much money your website should be making. You can also see how much each platform makes you and better evaluate where to spend your time and money.
Landing Page Conversion Rate
This number tells you how much business your website is generating for you. You can then use this number to set a goal to maintain or grow that conversion rate.
Calculate your landing page conversion rate by dividing the traffic to your inquiry page by the number of inquiries you get. For example, if you get 100 visits on your inquiry page and 10 of those people inquire, your landing page conversion rate is 10%.
Close rate
Your sales close rate will help you set your value goal in Google Analytics. Set your goal value using your close rate and average sale amount. If you know you can close 50% of your inquiries and your average sale is 12K, then your goal amount in Google Analytics will be $6,000.
Traffic to conversion rate.
This number is handy for evaluating the overall health of your website. Not everyone who visits your site will be ready to book with you.
People typically use your website to compare you with other similar vendors and they will visit your website multiple times before deciding whether or not to book with you. But, you still want to strategically increase traffic to inquiry rate with better user flow and meaningful calls to action.
4. Find your best-performing platforms
Your best-performing platform isn’t necessarily the one with the most followers, even if they’re engaged. It’s the platform that sends you the most converting traffic. That’s the platform you want to put your time and effort into.
Use your goal value to find your most profitable platforms. Not all traffic will inquire or make you money. Just because most of your traffic is coming from Pinterest, doesn’t mean that’s where your inquiries and sales are coming from. Find the platform that sends you conversions and focus your efforts there. You might be surprised where your conversions are coming from.
Pro Tip: From the goal reports page, look at source/medium to find which platforms drive the most inquiries and optimize them first.
Test to see if you can improve your numbers
Once you understand which platforms drive the most inquiries, optimize them to get more. Knowing where a paying audience is located allows you to focus your time and efforts in places that you know are worth it.
Improving inquiries might be as simple as asking for people to inquire when you’re on social media, or using SEO for sales messaging, or even optimizing top-performing blog posts with more information about your services and a big button at the bottom asking for the inquiry.
Once you really understand what’s working, you will be able to make the most effective actions in growing and scaling your business.
Social media, SEO, traffic, and engagement are all important, but they aren’t where you start. If you want to grow your business, you need to know what’s working and what isn’t so you can stop wasting your time on platforms and metrics that don’t help your business grow.
