Your customers are talking. Are you listening?

For the last 15 years that we have been in the business of marketing – one thing has not changed; you must know and understand your customer before starting any campaign.

Based upon your knowledge of your customer, you create a landing page, send out scheduled emails, press releases, create a PPC campaign, and boost a post or two on social media to get the message out about your product or service and hope that customers will respond.

Then, you wait to see if the phone rings, hope for landing page visits, wait for purchases to be made, wish for your social posts to be shared, and hope people send in questions on Facebook and your other social media sites.

But, what if this doesn’t happen?

Start looking at your website, ad, email and social media analytics.

By using analytics, you will see right away where you lost them.

Such as: no click on the email, no likes on the post, no visits to the website, and so on. Or, did you lose them after they clicked on the landing page, visited lots of pages on your website and then left, or added a product to the cart and never came back to buy.

You learn where you lost them—now what?

Go back and take a deeper look at all of your results. Use them to make changes to the campaign quickly. Do A/B testing if you didn’t before and create a message using different photos and offers.

Now, we know analytics is not the end all, be all, marketing tool. Because sometimes you still need to make marketing decisions outside of analytics, as it is not an EXACT science yet, therefore the results will be pretty close.

Yet, strangely….

Even after we try to help clients use analytics to create better campaigns we still have clients who insist that they want to keep the same message/offer/type of post because they believe they know their customer better than analytics does. They believe if they just keep pushing their message that there will be sales.

Now, maybe these companies will get some sales down the road.

But it is really important to understand that TODAY people do not want a push message marketing strategy from you. They want your business to listen to their needs and create campaigns that touch them.

Time after time, we have seen clients who are really good at listening to their customers through analytics and made changes to the campaign— increase sales much faster compared to those clients that remain stuck on telling customers what they thought they wanted and/or needed.

The ball is your court. What will you do?

Will you listen to your customer or still insist that you know them better than analytics does?