Social Selling, Hashtags, Google Analytics

What is Social Selling?

It is using social media channels to market the potential sale. Your company must use analytical data to create the content that will target the correct audience. Therefore, the marketing and sales departments must plan strategically and communicate the end goals properly. This relationship between the departments will result in a more effective marketing approach, reach the target audience, and have a greatly likelihood of obtaining the sale. I strongly advise you to watch the following video to understand social selling from different perspectives. This should help you start using the data you have and apply it more effectively through social media.

Hashtags

Hashtagging has become an extremely vital part of connecting to customers, gaining social media awareness, and creating trends. Creating a hashtag specific to your company will help you build your brand, promote a campaign, or create a trend. Hootsuite has a great post explaining the history and effectiveness of the “hashtag.” As you may already know, hashtagging has gone beyond Twitter. It is now used with Google+, Facebook, Instagram, blogging websites such as WordPress and Tumblr, and on commercials.

Photo Credit: http://blog.hootsuite.com/hashtag-infographic/

Combine Social Media to Google Analytics

I highly recommend you link your social media websites to your Google Analytics account. This will allow you to track the effectiveness of your current social media marketing strategies. Without actually asking the purchaser of your product, you will not know for certain that your social media marketing tactics resulted in a sale. What you need to focus on is the amount of reach you have attainted. You want to reach a vast amount of people, yes, but more importantly, you want to reach people that are within your target audience. This is because you have tailored your messages to attract their attention and persuade them into the purchase. In addition, you want your social media marketing to keep attracting them. You want to remind them constantly why they purchased from you in the first place and maintain their loyalty as a customer by remaining a positive brand. This can be done through your marketing, public relations, and advertising teams’ creativity, innovation, or sparking a feeling or idea such as a good time or happiness. The following video will help you set up or update your Google Analytics account to sync with your social media accounts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sIBrBga0fw

Happy hashtagging y’all!

Please comment with questions or if the post helped you. 🙂

Understanding Data Analytics

Photo Credit: biomedicalcomputationreview.org

Let’s break this down

Data analytics is complicated. If you are starting out as small business, there are many layers that are part of understanding analytics. You cannot read 5 or 10 blogs about data analytics, watch a few videos on YouTube and be good to go. You’re actually just selling yourself short. The research I have done shows that companies, especially small businesses, do not use all the advantages and resources of their analytical software. It more than cluster analysis and data segmentation. Most data charts organically result in a form of visualization. John Bates works as the Product Manager for Predictive Marketing Solutions at Adobe Systems, Inc. His blog post about data analytics helps you grasp what direction you need to go with your research and use of analytical data. He keeps it simple and to the point.

Find the “Gold Nuggets” in your Data

Get ahead now and understand how to interpret the data you gather, whether that be interviews, focus groups, surveys, or online website analytics. This video explains how important it is to be one of the companies that knows how to use its internal and external data. Even if you’re not good at mathematics, it’s all about knowing who to use as a source and use their “insights to transform the way the business operates.”

Advance Your Knowledge

Now that you know what the major challenges and mistakes are, I challenge you to obtain a more in-depth understanding about how to transcend your data analysis with metadata, data visuals, and advancing your skills in monitoring and cross-analyzing internal and external analytics you have and will research.

Here are some of the key steps of analytics:

Reporting what happened
Analysis
Monitoring
Forecasting
Predictive
Prescriptive

Companies that do not understand all of these steps will not come out on top in their industry. Educate yourself. I cannot stress that enough. These steps will be discussed in the video below. (You can stop viewing at the time length 21:40 if you prefer.)

Too much information?

Interpreting data has excelled and technology compresses and distributes the data as an advanced, complicated, and real time source of information. However, without human intelligence, your company will not succeed to its full potential. If your personal learning plan (PLN) and personal research is not helping you in the way you need, I recommend you outsource or hire someone who can interpret your data properly. However, do not sell your research sort; it will be beneficial in having the ability to communicate to your analytics expert. Also, outsourcing is a great way to ensure you are not developing tunnel vision also. Weigh your options and do what will be best ultimately for the company long term.

Questions? Comments? Please let me know. 🙂

Data Analytics for Small Business

I started doing some research on free analytic softwares because I am working with a smaller company in Austin, TX. Myself and a few others in my social media class at SEU are working together to help the new owner expand the company’s brand, improve scheduling and web traffic, and learn how to analyze his business’ data and customers. With my assignment being the later, I researched some free web analytics software. I came across a Tech Media Network article written by Nicholas Dragon.

Based on the owner’s request, I came across 5 potential analytics software.

Here they are:

1. Google Analytics: A 3-step sign up process that allows you to see data tracking within hours. It’s free. I really like that you can upgrade to a premium option if you have long-term expansion goals for your company.

Go to my previous post to learn more about Google Analytics.

2. Site Trail: Allows you to analyze social media and technology news of your website. The owner can add the website to your RSS feed and track the domain name of the company’s website. The weakness to this option of web analytics is that it limits to online information. If your company’s main function is providing tangible service, such as bus rides, t-shirt printing, or retail…you may want to use a different analytics software. HOWEVER, if you want to analyze or get started with a simple website analytics program, this is a good way to go. The analytics reports are favorable to the visual person as well.

3.Click Tale: A great option to increase website design and customer satisfactory with your business’ website. Thousands of companies use it, such as Domino’s, TMobile, and Walmart. It measures website users’ behaviors by using heat maps and form analytics reports. Both are great for the visual business owner and new/small businesses.

4. StatCounter: A free website user analysis. It’s main benefit is providing real-time data monitoring. Here is a visual demo.

5. Woopra: With the free version, you can track web users in real time, run analytics reports, and build labels for important customer segments. The small business version allows you to build scheduled tasks, notifications, retention reports, and more. Go to the website to learn more.

Those with the ambition of vast company expansion:

Adobe Marketing Cloud is another option with good reviews to increase your marketing communications and strategies. It includes analytics, campaign, experience manager, media optimizer, social, and target tools. Long-term, you may want to switch to this type of analytics or Google Analytics Premium.