How to Use Google Analytics to Help Shape Your Marketing Strategy

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, it can be a little daunting at first. With so much data available to dig through, it’s hard to know where to look to find the most important metrics.

Marketers that want to better understand their audience, and strengthen their marketing strategy, need to know how to best utilize all of the data available inside Google Analytics.

Without knowing which sections to pay attention to, you could spend hours digging through the platform and walk away with your head spinning.

Similarly, without analyzing your website traffic, it’s hard to assess the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy and know when it’s time to make a shift.

If leveraged correctly, Google Analytics can provide valuable insight into who visits your website, how they got there in the first place and what pages they spend the most time on; this is powerful data for marketers that can be used to enhance their strategy.

An Overview

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for brands, bloggers or businesses alike. Through use of Google Analytics, you can uncover a tremendous amount of data about your website that can be used to enhance your marketing and business development strategies.

The back end of Google Analytics is broken down into eight main sections: Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.

Almost all eight sections contain sub-sections that provide a ton of data, but not all sections are critical for marketers to pay attention to.

Before we dive in to the sections that matter most to marketers, let’s get familiar with some basic Google Analytics terminology:

• Users: These are people who have visited at least once within your selected date range, and includes both new and returning visitors.
• Dimensions: These are descriptive characteristics of an object. For example, browser, exit page and session duration are all considered dimensions.
• Metrics: These are individual statistics of a dimension, such as Average Session Duration or Screenviews.
• Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of single-page visits, meaning that someone left your site from the same page at which they entered; aka, they didn’t interact with your site.
• Sessions: A session is the period of time that a user is actively engaged with your website.

Now that you’re familiar with the Google Analytics sections and terminology, let’s dive in to the areas that you want to pay most attention to in order to save time and strengthen your marketing strategy.

Zeroing in on what matters most

There are three sections that matter most to marketers: Acquisition, Audience and Behavior.

The Audience section provides a tremendous amount of data about your website visitors. It contains multiple subsections that provide information about the gender, age and location of your website visitors. You can also uncover information about their interests, as well as the browsers and mobile devices used to access your site.

The Acquisition section will provide detailed information about how people arrive to your site. Digging in to the “All Traffic” tab will show you exactly how people are arriving at your website – whether it be a search engine, social media site or blog that you’re a contributor for.

The Behavior section helps you understand how people are interacting with your site. You’ll visit this section to better understand which pages on your website are the most popular.

Focusing on these three sections will help you save time when digging through Google Analytics.

When used together, the information uncovered can help you make decisions about which marketing efforts (be it guest blogging or social media posting,) are most useful in driving website traffic.

Analyzing these sections within Google Analytics will provide you with insight that will enable you to make smarketing (smart, marketing) decisions about the type, tone, and placement of content that you use on your website.

Traffic Channels

Before we dive into who exactly is visiting your site, it’s important to understand how they’re getting there.

To see your various traffic sources for a set period of time, go to the Acquisition tab and click the “All Traffic” dropdown. Select the “Channels” button, set the time period at the top of the viewing pane and scroll down to see the results for the give timeframe.

Here’s a simple breakdown of what these different channels mean:

• Direct: Visitors that came directly to your website. They either typed your URL right into their browser, clicked on a bookmark or clicked a link in an email. Direct traffic is a strong indicator of the strength of your brand.
• Organic Search: You can thank search engines like Google and Bing for these website visitors. An organic visitor is someone who got to your website by clicking on a link from a search engine results page. A lot of organic traffic is a strong indicator of the value of your content and SEO strategy.
• Paid Search: You’ll find any paid search (think Google AdWords) campaigns in this viewing pane. A lot of paid search traffic means that you’re Google AdWords are working well.
• Referral: This represents visitors that clicked a link on another site to land on your website. Years ago, before social media was what it is today, all other traffic (that wasn’t direct or organic) fell under the referral tab. Within the past few years, Google created a separate tab for social traffic, which makes it easy for marketers to focus in on just the websites that are driving traffic to their site. If you guest blog, this is the section to visit to see how much traffic is being driven to your site from your guest blogging efforts. A lot of referral traffic means that you’re being talked about (and linked to) from multiple other websites.
• Social: As a social media marketer, this is my favorite section within Google Analytics because it shows me exactly what social media channels drive the majority of traffic to my site. This data can be used to shape your social media strategy.
• Email: The number of visitors that came to your website from an email campaign. If you do a lot of email marketing, you’ll want to dig through here to see how effective your campaigns are.

Looking at the traffic channels will allow you to see which channel is the largest driver of traffic to your site. You’ll notice that the Channels are listed in order of driving power; the Channel at the top is the one that drives the majority of site traffic.

To dig deeper into the data, click each Channel to see more information.

For example, when I click Social, I can see the entire list of social media sites (again, listed in order of most to least powerful) that drove traffic to my website during the selected timeframe.

Analyzing the power of different channels will help you decide which efforts to focus on, and potentially spark ideas to increase traffic from other channel types.

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Here are a few ideas to increase traffic across all channel types:

• Direct: Share the link to your website with friends and family the next time you’re with them. Tell them to type it directly into their browser and voila! You just got a nice direct traffic boost.
• Organic Search: Make sure that you’re utilizing H1 and H2 tags, meta descriptions and keywords in all of your website pages and content updates. The stronger your SEO, the greater likelihood that someone will find you on a search engine.
• Paid Search: Try adjusting your keywords and/or targeting options to make your ads more relevant.
• Referral: Start reaching out to popular blogs and forums in your industry to see if you can guest post or perhaps be featured on their site. Contributing content to other sites is a great way to increase your referral traffic.
• Social: Increasing the frequency of your posting, and the number of links you share on social media will undoubtedly result in a boost of social traffic. I recommend increasing your efforts on one channel at a time to see what drives the largest impact. For example, make February your Twitter month; aim to tweet a lot of links that drive back to your website and at the end of the month, analyze the website traffic. Then, come March, turn that attention over to Facebook and see which social channel drove more traffic. (If you want to learn how to see which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website, refer to this Kissmetrics blog post that I wrote on setting up Advanced Segments.
• Email: Start including more calls to action and links in your email campaigns. Make sure that your calls to action stand out in your email templates and serve to drive people back to your website.

Once you’ve implemented some of these ideas, take the time to review the Channels breakdown again to see the impact of your efforts.

If your efforts to grow traffic from one channel go unnoticed in your analytics, try a different one!

For example, let’s say you have a ton of referral traffic and very little organic traffic. If your attempts to improve SEO and grow organic traffic have little impact, it’s probably not worth the effort. You’re better off continuing to guest blog, as it’s proven to be a critical marketing activity that is worth your time and effort.

Audience Demographics

Understanding who is visiting your site in terms of their age, location and gender is the best way to tailor your site to suit their interests and preferences.

If you want your website content and imagery to appease and resonate with your audience, you need to know who they are.

To find this information, head over to the Audience tab. You’ll want to focus on the sub-sections of Demographics and Geo.

First, let’s look at the Demographics of Age and Gender.

As you can see, the majority of my website visitors are aged 25-34, followed by those aged 35-44.

Knowing this, I aim to create content that is geared towards, and valued by, young professionals. Some examples are tips for professional development and advice for managers leading a team of employees.

Understanding how old your website visitors are, and whether they’re male or female, is helpful if you’re looking to capture their attention when they land on your site.

For example, if 90% of your website visitors are women, you could deliver a more personalized website experience for them by starting your “About” or “Welcome” page with “Hey ladies!”

Through analyzing the Gender section, I can see that the majority of my site visitors are female. It’s not skewed too heavily though, so I don’t want to tailor my site to females only. That’s why I’ve chosen my website colors to be black, white and green; I wanted to create a sleek and clean aesthetic that would be appealing to both men and women.

Digging in to the age and gender of your website visitors is useful if you want to craft creative content for your blog posts and website pages that captures their attention and gains their trust.

For example, telling your fans to “Treat yo self” to a free guide on your website isn’t going to resonate with individuals in their 60’s. However, it WILL get a chuckle from millennials.

Finally, you want to look to see where your website visitors are from. Looking at the Location tab under the “Geo” dropdown will show you the countries, states and cities of your website audience.

When you first click “Location” you’ll be shown the list of countries. Not surprisingly, the majority of my website visitors are from the United States.

Looking at the different states is a great way to gain insight that can be levered for any AdWords or paid Facebook campaigns you’re going to run. You want to target those states and cities that you see are frequenting your site.

I can see that New York dominates the results by a large margin. That’s not surprising since I live there and the majority of my mentors, friends and family live in New York as well.

Clicking on the individual states will bring you to the list of cities, within that state, that your website visitors come from.

Since I currently live in Buffalo, I’m not surprised to see Buffalo and other Western New York cities at the top of the list. I also see New York City, which is expected since that is where the majority of my friends and family reside.

If you don’t see your city as the top city, you might want to consider shifting your marketing strategy, and content, to target those in your geographic area.

Content Drilldown

Last but not least, it’s important to dive in to the content to see which pages people spend the most and least time on.

To do this, click the Behavior tab and go to the Site Content drop-down. You’ll want to look at the Content Drilldown, as well as Landing and Exit Pages to see which pages are most viewed on your website.

Content Drilldown is the overview of which pages on your website are visited the most.

Seeing which pages, and blog posts, are most viewed by your audience is helpful in guiding your web development strategy; you want to create more of what works.

Through analysis, I can see that my homepage and services page are the most popular. I can also see that the page on my site that has all of my marketing blogs is more popular that the blog page itself, which shows me that my audience values marketing content.

Now, you want to head over to the Landing Pages view in order to see what pages people are landing on when they get to your site.

The Landing Pages view is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your social media and promotional strategy, as you hope to see the blogs and website pages promoted most at the top.

For me, that would be my homepage, services page, free social media guide page and Bravery Beats blog post. Those pages are the ones that I promote the most, as they provide the most value and information that I find relevant for my audience.

It’s important to me to see my free social media guide at the top of the landing page list, as this page is a free giveaway that I’m using in part to provide value, and in part to build my email list.

Analyzing the traffic of this page is a good way for me to assess both the value and popularity of the giveaway.

If you don’t see your most important and/or promoted blog posts and website pages in the list of the top ten landing pages, it’s time to either reevaluate their value and/or your promotional strategy to ensure you’re driving traffic to those pages through social media and email marketing campaigns.

Spending time in the behavior section will allow you to develop an awareness of what content your website visitors find the most valuable. You can use this as a guide for what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to blog topics and page types.

For example, if you notice that the top visited pages are all blog posts about social media, yet none of your design blogs are ranking in the top, you want to spend more time blogging about social than you do about design.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool.

By paying attention to the demographics of your audience, you’ll be able to create content and imagery that you know your audience desires. This allows you to craft a customized and relevant site experience for your audience that will keep them coming back for more. (Thereby increasing your direct traffic!)

When you start monitoring your referral traffic, you’ll start to see which guest blogs are helping to increase your online visibility. This will help you save time by focusing only on the guest blogs that provide a return (in the form of website visits) on your content creation efforts. Similarly, by diving in to your social referrals, you’ll be armed with data to decide exactly which social media channels are the best to share your blog posts on.

By utilizing, analyzing, and focusing on these various sections within Google Analytics, you’ll have a deep understanding of who your audience is, what they want and how they find you.

About the Author: Julia Jornsay-Silverberg is a social media marketing consultant and coach with a passion for helping small businesses use social media to build brand awareness and connect with customers. Check out her free guide, “Socially Strategic” to help you get started strategically on social media. You can also find her on Twitter and Periscope.

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Title Tags, New Webmaster Guidelines, and More: Weekly Forum Update

One of the biggest pieces of news this week is that Google updated their Webmaster Guidelines page. Some changes were subtle and others were quite loud.

Our communities have been discussing this as well as John Mueller’s response that title tags “are not the most critical part of a page,” in a recent webmaster hangout.

On Cre8asiteforums, user iamlost has a great summary of what has lead Twitter to its recent financial troubles, and on SEO Chat users had an interesting discussion about direct answers in SERPs.

Let’s get to the breakdown!

John Mueller: Title Tags “Not the Most Critical Part of a Page”

You may not be surprised at all to hear this from Mr. Mueller. As Robert Charlton says on WebmasterWorld,

“…John’s comment about keeping titles ‘short and to the point’ is completely consistent with the trends that some of us have been observing.”

But the issue isn’t whether title tags are “critical,” but whether or not they’ve been deprecated.

Charlton goes on to say that he’s “been seeing enough pages ranking with bad or missing title tags,” that it leads to this question. And besides that, this announcement has opened up old wounds about how much control Google has over your SERPs listings. WebmasterWorld user aristotle writes,

“Re-writing page titles is one of the worst things that Google does. The author of the article chooses the title that best conveys what the article is about, then Google’s algorithm changes it to something that’s less accurate, and sometimes even totally misleading.”

Check this thread out for a familiar debate with new facts and terms.

Google Paid a Hefty Price for Default iOS Search

Specifically, about one billion dollars! Yowza! That figure was recently released in court documents for a case between Oracle and Google. It was almost buried by Google and Apple, but thankfully some journalists were able to get to it first and report it to the public.

Besides the flat fee, Google also pays Apple a revenue share of all ads clicked from Google SERPs. Certainly sheds a little light on how the biggest names in tech do business!

When the Only Inbound Links Come From Social Sites, What Do You Do?

Over on Cre8asiteforums, users are studying analytics data for “two very different local websites,” where the only inbound links come from a social network. User bobbb has some pragmatic advice:

“I know someone will reply do not put all your eggs in the same basket… Oh, and diversify. But if it works (for now) why fix it?”

Lots of great advice on analyzing traffic in relation to conversions and goals in this thread!

Direct Answers, the Knowledge Graph, and Their Impact on SEO

Since the Knowledge Graph was announced, SEOs have been wary of it. The potential exists, they say, for Google to steal traffic away from your site. Why would they click on a link if they can get their answer right in SERPs? B

ut on the other hand, a direct answer provides a link at the top of the SERPs… and Google says that whatever clicks you lose are negligible. Users of SEO Chat are debating what the real impact of direct answers are in this thread.

It’s a well-treaded discussion, but I haven’t seen it in quite a while – the focus lately has been more on Panda, Penguin, RankBrain, et. al. So it’s good to see this presented again with the latest information.

Facebook Opens Up its Audience Network

Facebook’s Audience Network, which allows advertisers to place ads in non-Facebook apps, is now in beta. WebmasterWorld user martinibuster calls the mobile ads,

“Appealing, not trashy. Look great on mobile.”

Facebook has been making some major bank with this network, and now it seems like a promising competitor to existing platforms. Give this thread a read and follow along as WebmasterWorld users test it out!

Google Has Updated Their Webmaster Guidelines

Surprisingly, the quality guidelines have been barely touched. But the Webmaster Guidelines received a slew of changes to make them more current for the state of SEO in 2016.

Of particular interest are the many changes to how Google says it handles images, alt text, and sitemaps. Check out Threadwatch for the details!

Twitter, Déjà Vu Titanic All Over Again

User iamlost shares a great article by Olivier Blanchard about the current state of Twitter. As iamlost summarizes it,

“If you’ve gone through a company ‘near death experience’… you have training aka experience to guide you the next time; if not, you need to step back, take a deep breath, and get back to basics… The thrashing Twitter aka Twitter’s CEO is doing is hastening its death…”

It’s true that Twitter is making many changes – some of them very superficial seeming. Is this the beginning of the end? How can Twitter correct their course?

Problems With Rankings? We’ve All Had ‘Em

Sometimes a commonly asked question results in a thread bursting with expertise. That’s what happened here when a user asked for help on SEO Chat.

User adenphoto undertook a total rebranding of their online presence recently. They used to do quite well, and would like to reach their previous heights. One of SEO Chat’s moderators, ThomasHarvey, has some on-page SEO advice that everyone approaching a rebrand can learn from.

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8 Ways to Use Video for Customer Success, Education, and Advocacy

Video is the modern web browser’s medium of choice. And not just while they’re scrolling through Facebook or spending hours on YouTube; studies have shown that even at work, people prefer to watch video than read text. And that means you! And more importantly (no offence), your customers.

So give the people what they want! If you want to build a customer base that’s learning, growing, getting the most out of your product or service, and loving you while they do it, video is the way to go! If not … well, you might want to see someone for that.

Let’s take a look at eight ways to use video to support your customer relationships:

1. Onboarding Videos

Script it, record it, ship it. And then ship it over and over and over. The beautiful thing about onboarding videos is that you can record them once and use them multiple times. And sure, the same thing goes for text-based onboarding, but since video is so much more captivating and keeps viewers engaged for longer, why not start your customer’s journey off right?

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The better you can make the first few weeks of your customer’s journey and the faster you can get them up and running, the more likely they will be to use your product or service effectively and see positive results. And that means there’s a greater likelihood that you’ll retain them long-term. In other words, the lifetime value of a well onboarded customer skyrockets far beyond the opposite.

The well-renowned Uber created an onboarding video for their drivers to learn how to use the app and how to become a well-reviewed driver. Check it out:

If you want to make the process a little more personal, you can always shoot an additional 10-30 second clip to add to the beginning of each onboarding video that addresses the unique customer.

2. Knowledge Base Videos

Your knowledge base is a hub of documentation around frequently asked questions, instructions for completing common tasks, or options for troubleshooting issues. It’s sole purpose is to help customers self-serve. Video should be a part of this.

But don’t get too trigger happy with video, because it really is best as a supplementary component to your knowledge base. Some people may not be able to listen to audio at the moment when they’re self-serving or they may be looking for one specific step of the process and scanning text is easier for this. An easy way to get around this is to include a video at the start of the article and add the transcript of the video below, like Unbounce does.

These types of videos are often comprised of on-screen text and screenshares. Consider adding a more human element every-so-often and show the face of that lovely voiceover! … like our Ji, our Manager of Customer Experience, did in this recent video!

Ji bought a teleprompter that works with his tablet (the R810.1 Universal Android Teleprompter) for this shoot. This allowed him to script his lines beforehand but avoid spending hours memorizing them the night before the shoot!

3. Meet-the-Team Videos

People like to work with people. That’s why people-skills are so important in Customer Success roles, duh. For many companies, the customer team has long term relationships with their customers — but it’s so often limited to a purely phone-based relationship. Open the doors and allow your customers to get to know a little bit more about who they’re working with. Check out the video that DoubleDutch, a mobile app for events and conferences, put together called “Meet the DoubleDutch Customer Success Team”:

As an alternative, you can showcase your team from different angle and do a higher production film that shows the ‘real’ side of your customer team or your whole company while having a little fun! At Vidyard, we put together a few videos like this every year. Most recently, customers met the Vidyard Family through our version of the Adams Family Theme Song!

4. Support Video Calls

It’s a lot easier to build a relationship when visual cues are involved. Imagine dating someone for a year, but for this year you only ever spoke to them on the phone. You never got to know what they looked like, or evaluate whether they were really into you by their body language. It’d be hard to grow that relationship! And just think, what would you picture when you were day-dreaming about them?

Not that your customers are going to be day-dreaming about you, but the ability to see you on calls can still help to build a strong bridge between your support team and your customers.

5. Live Stream Updates

Sometimes, another email update about what’s going on at your company is not what your customers are looking for. Whoops! Did I actually write that on the web? There are just so. Many. Emails!

So why not think outside the box and host an update for your customers on a live stream? That way they can get a real, unedited view into who your team is, where you work, and what’s new. Jeff Saunders, an Account Manager at Vidyard, recently hosted one of these. He invited his accounts to join him live for a coffee and quick discussion with Ji, Manager of Customer Experience, Jeff, Director of Product Marketing, and myself.

6. Customer Stories

Who said customer stories are only for prospects? No one, that’s who. Sharing the stories of customers having success with your product or service with other customers is beneficial for three reasons:

1. Reinforcing the benefits of your offering
2. Helping them understand how to best utilize your product or service
3. Laying the path for upsell opportunities

So spread the love. Get started by checking out these 7 tips on creating believable video testimonials and keep in mind that if you’re creating stories for customers, you’ll want to dive deeper than the value prop of your product; your customers already know this!

7. Customer Webinars

Generally speaking, your customers will have a different level of knowledge in your area of expertise than higher funnel prospects. So invite them to their own webinar where you can dive deeper into a niche topic and even talk specifically about how to use certain product features. Getting on a webinar and sharing best-practices, demonstrating how to do a task, and opening the floor to questions in real time is the perfect way to help your customers get the most out of your product, feel supported, and build connections with your team.  

After you’re done your webinar, consider chopping it up into shorter segments and posting the webinar recordings in a customer hub or help center!

8. Personalized Campaign Videos

Your name is your identity. And the same goes for your customers and their names. So imagine you could send your customers specialized marketing messages that really connected with them by bringing them right into the story and adding their names within personalized videos.

Since they’re already your customers, you have a detailed profile already built out in your marketing automation and CRM platform. Put these into play for video campaigns promoting your latest learning session, webinar, or knowledge article and take your story to a whole new level with personalization within your videos.

Are you using video for customer education, success, and advocacy? Tell us how in the comments!

The post 8 Ways to Use Video for Customer Success, Education, and Advocacy appeared first on Vidyard.

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The Five-Step Process for Writing Powerful Call-to-Actions By Reverse-Engineering Customer Mindsets

For me, growth hacking is more than just a mindset. It’s about the desire to take tradition and flip it on its head. It’s about leveraging the way we’ve always done things and manipulating those processes to achieve a much better result. It’s about the various interpretations of data and the creative inspiration we draw from them to solve problems and create opportunities.

If you’re growing a product or a startup, you’re probably already aware of the importance of testing which calls-to-action drive the most adoption. Without supplying a nudge for a user to take action, you might get no traction at all, even though your offering may be outstanding.

A call-to-action is the final frontier, separating the discovery of your product’s value proposition and the actual journey a user will take to experience it. It’s like the starter’s gun on track day. After you have attracted users (i.e., runners) who have found the start line, then you need to motivate them to run the journey to the finish line (being a point at which your business objectives are met, such as making a sale, hopefully repeatedly).

Where to begin, though? You could start with the usual “buy now” or “start today” and keep A/B testing to find the most frictionless point of entry. But that approach, even though it may be effective, assumes what you’ve seen elsewhere is “best practice” and therefore should work.

What if you had a starting point so powerful it was almost an unfair advantage? Enter the psych-dive.

How Did This Come About?

I sat down with a psychologist friend of mine the other day, and after all the pleasantries were exchanged, we got to talking about product growth and human behavior. While I’m sure most psychologists are used to putting people on the spot, it was an interesting sight to see how uncomfortable I made him with the question I posed.

I asked something along the lines of: “Michael (name changed to protect his professional integrity), you deal with people and data sets all the time, and you know all about psychological profiling and making educated assumptions in order to help people overcome compulsions, right?”

“Yes,” he nervously replied.

That was my green light. “What would you need to do to turn the tables? To use profiling and data-driven stereotyping to amplify a compulsion?”

He paused, conflicted, partially by the thought of flipping his power for doing good on its head and partially by the surprise of such a request.

What followed was a discussion of the process one could use to profile, generalize, and deconstruct marketers’ tendencies to create more impulsive calls-to-action.

Flipping the Way a Psychologist Cures Compulsion

The main building blocks for the way a psychologist helps someone out of their compulsive need to do something include the following: helping them understand themselves, their habits, and their psychological needs and helping them understand how they use an addiction to fill those needs in an unhealthy way. A psychologist then helps them find new, healthier ways to address those needs (like using exercise to feel better instead of drugs).

Cognitive Modeling of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Source Paul M Salkovskis, Elsevier)

Theoretically, to reverse-engineer that process and increase the likelihood that someone would become compulsive around a product, you would do the opposite. You would try to keep them from being aware of themselves and their habits. You would keep them out of touch with themselves, and encourage them to use an easy, quick-fix solution.

This is already happening in real life. People use Facebook unconsciously. Users have never made an active decision to start spending a lot of their time online looking at other people’s posts and photos. It just happens.

People rarely say they LOVE Facebook, or that Farmville is the BEST. They probably say something like, “I waste waaay too much time on Facebook” or “I spend sooo much money on my farm.” This compulsive relationship, albeit seemingly invasive, is a sign the user has been drawn in to the experience and is there to stay.

Ethically, there also are a lot of questions to answer here. Yes, your business needs to make money. That’s the bottom line. However, at the same time, each person and business has some decisions to make about “how bad” something is. Most of us wouldn’t rob people at gunpoint even if it was rather profitable, because that’s just wrong. But most of us wouldn’t feel too bad about selling chocolate cakes, even though chocolate cakes are technically bad for people.

Somewhere on that scale is a place where it starts to get a little gray. Is it unethical to deal drugs to poor people who can’t afford them? Or, are they the ones who decide to buy the drugs and you’re just providing a service? In other words, how comfortable are you with your business model and the extent to which you encourage/market/manipulate people into wanting your product?

With that said, here’s how to immerse yourself in the deep workings of your target audience for better calls-to-action.

Psych-Dive Analysis for Better CTA Triggers

Different segments of society are compulsive in different ways. You have an aging demographic that was brought up in the era of glorification of cigarettes and alcohol (before cigarette companies started to pay out compensation for smoking-related impairments), just like you have a sector of the technologically-native young adults who take to Snapchat and Candy Crush as if they were the only things keeping them interested in life.

Here are four steps for how to uncover compulsions in your key target audience and craft better calls-to-action from the get-go.

Step 1: Craft a Survey

To craft brilliantly effective calls-to-action laced with compulsion, you need to get a solid idea of how your typical market segment thinks and acts with other things generally considered compulsive behavior. These types of assumptions are easy to guess, especially if you classify yourself as similar to the very users you’re trying to target. But, like most assumptions, it’s easy to get it wrong.

Clarity around how your users become compulsive can only be achieved with research. If someone else has already done the hard work and you find your answers via a research piece on Google, then great. But, chances are, what has worked for someone else might not work for you. If, like 99% of scenarios, existing data just doesn’t cut it, you need to take charge and source these answers yourself.

The most effective (albeit, most annoying to respondents) method is a survey. It’s important to be concise if you intend to get a decent rate of response. I always try to keep my questionnaires to a maximum of 10 questions, and largely base these around behaviors. Behavioral questions are some of the most powerful insights into your target market because they unlock answers about how the user’s mind operates. I also ensure absolute anonymity to increase the likelihood of natural responses.

Questions you ask here should serve the purpose of unlocking insights into the behavior of your target audience. These are questions that, once collated to create an overall persona, tell you exactly what motivates their actions.

With limited bandwidth, each question in your survey needs to count. So how do you decide what to ask? Humans, regardless of demography or psychography, always “want” something. Generally those things include elements of personal, social, and career life. Here are three things to consider when formulating questions for your survey:

Biological Compulsion

It’s easy to understand and relate to biological urges to eat and sleep. Questions that relate to demand-based acquisition of biological needs and desires that truly make us “human” can unlock a lot about what intrinsically motivates a user. Biological compulsions cannot really be switched off, and they drive our very existence.

Primal instinct at its finest. Deliveroo’s “Find Food” call-to-action says it like it is.

Experimental and Social Compulsion

Another great avenue for discovering compulsion is to explore things like relationships, social interactions, and drug and alcohol use. These types of insights can tell you if a user relies on external influences to trigger a decision. A great CTA in this instance would be something like “Join your friends” or “Let’s socialize” because these tap into urges to be “connected.”

When all you want to do is belong, click Meetup’s “Start a Meetup” call-to-action.

Aspirational Compulsion

Finally, studying attitudes about money, career, and material things can help you understand how a user may be motivated to part with their money to make a pain point go away, as well as what their end goals are in life. This assists with understanding what angle you need to take in order to get a user to believe they “need” your product. If you’re aware that your target audience is driven by the desire to excel in life, you’ll be able to create a CTA that reflects this, like “Make money now.”

By tying in the money aspect, Uber’s call-to-action attracts exactly the type of driver they want.

It’s also a good idea to provide an incentive for completing the survey. This method may be frowned upon by market research experts who argue that an incentive will skew results. But I’m of the belief that, with enough responses, those that are skewed positively or negatively will be outweighed by the respondent majority. SurveyMonkey has a great little guide to calculate how many responses you need for statistical confidence.

The incentive could be as simple as offering use of your product for free for the first year, or a substantial discount, or a limited early access. Alternatively, it could pay to supplement your survey with incentives of products or services that target the same market segment you do (for example, a free three-month trial of a non-competing and popular SaaS product).

The way to do this is to include an optional field at the end of the survey that asks for an email address and stipulates that the email will only be used to notify the person about their eligibility for your incentives.

Step 2: Find Your Market

Once you have your survey and incentives ready, it’s time to get your target audience to actually take your survey. Finding people to complete it can be hard. If your target audience is easy to locate physically, try going there and asking as many people as possible to take it. If you have contacts that are highly influential in your target market, try to leverage them.

Alternatively, you can always post your survey to an online medium that your target audience uses prolifically. Or, you can demographically and geographically target your audience through paid advertising.

For example, we compiled a survey at GRONADE for a recruitment startup. Once the survey was ready to go, we sent it out to the founder’s existing database. We supplemented those responses using LinkedIn’s ad targeting system, targeting by job role, seniority, and geography, for better quality survey results.

Targeting the right audience for a survey using LinkedIn

Step 3: Supplement Your Data

When you’ve collected your responses and have an idea of what the general consensus is about the behavioral activity of your target audience, it helps to get extra context. A good idea is to take your target market criteria and search for census and journal research data that provides supplementary information about your target audience.

For example, if you’ve discovered that your dominant target market is entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, it might be beneficial to also search for information about what they earn, how uncomfortable their living arrangements are, or even how well they do at mathematics (see page 45 of the 2015 Silicon Valley Index). This helps you build a complete profile of your audience and helps you make better decisions about what might motivate them to click your call-to-action.

Searching Google for related journals on the survey topic

With census data, you get a very particular insight into household, employment, financial, and cultural information. Some journals and other market research (which has been made public) might help you understand saturation data around device and app usage, and maybe even motivations for what makes a specific user set purchase.

Step 4: Create Hypotheses about Your Market

So now you have your collected your survey responses and supplementary data. This collection of knowledge about your potential user base is pretty powerful. With this information, you’re able to create hypotheses around what makes your audience “compulsive.”

In any particular demographic, you’re not often going to have just one psychological profile, but many. Every person has a pretty unique cocktail of needs, wishes, and desires based on who they are, how they grew up, and what’s on their mind.

Here are some example assumptions from previous research we performed at GRONADE. If we were to address a segment of Australian males aged 18 to 21, some common threads we could leverage are:

• Isolation: They feel lonely and want to be closer or more connected to other people. It’s the same reason people do ecstasy (which promotes feelings of closeness) as a drug and use Facebook – it makes them feel as if they’re bonding, they have friends, and there’s some kind of common ground.
• Boredom: Life doesn’t seem interesting. Their job is boring and nothing new is happening. They need to find something to keep themselves entertained. This is where the thrill of trying something dangerous, like drugs at a wild party or solo skydiving, comes in to play. It’s also the driver of many television successes like House of Cards and Breaking Bad because they can immerse themselves in something far more exciting as an escape. They live vicariously through television characters.
• Distraction: Things aren’t going well. There is a problem at work, at home, with relationships, or they just doesn’t feel good about themselves. They feel anxious, stressed, or worried. Something offers a distraction, often one that numbs or soothes the pain or stress. They’ll use any means to distract and relax, such as scrolling through Instagram, instantly responding to snaps via Snapchat, or they’ll smoke. It’s a way to deal with anxiety at the expense of productivity.
• Lack of purpose/accomplishment: They feel they are not achieving anything and not getting anywhere. Some habits, like playing World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or Angry Birds make people feel as if they’re really getting somewhere or making a difference (like saving lives and becoming a war hero) and that makes up for the fact that their real lives don’t offer much sense of accomplishment.

Most people aren’t very aware of their own psychological needs. If you ask someone why they bought a Ferrari, they will say, “because I have always loved cars” not “because I feel unaccomplished and having an expensive car makes me feel important and powerful” (i.e., it’s signaling my status).

You could guess at someone’s inner needs through lots of clues (such as appearance, behavior, and purchasing habits). Someone who buys expensive brand name clothing might be giving a clue that they care a lot about looking important. Or, it might be a clue that they care a lot about fitting in, so they buy what all their friends are buying.

Step 5: Call-To-Action Logic

Brainstorm a list of words that come to mind when you assess the results you have. When you have a healthy list of around 10 to 20 words, use Thesaurus.com to expand the set of keywords to a list of action words you feel will have the greatest impact.

Use a thesaurus for alternative keywords to impact assumption trigger words

Select five of your favorite, most evocative keywords to kick-start your initial A/B test batch of calls-to-action. This is a good start for your experiment to learn the most effective call-to-action to use.

The best approach to find a CTA that works is to tap in to the fears and attributes you uncovered in your research. If we use the commonalities I mentioned above for middle-class Australian men aged 18 to 21, we could assume the following five calls-to-action would be a good foundation group. Of course, these should be tailored to the actual product you’re offering, though in these examples, I’m representing the most obvious results based on the research:

1. Be Together, Now (playing on the isolation aspect and the longing for connectedness)
2. Your Thrills Await (a counter to the boredom aspect)
3. Escape Today (a ticket away from the mundane)
4. Make a Difference (a way to satisfy the desire for accomplishment)
5. Take Control (a real power move in a world where sometimes all seems out of control)

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you still need a compelling offer. If your product sucks, no psychological trickery is going to vacuum fat stacks out of someone’s wallet.

Apple never says, “If you use Apple products, you’re smart, creative, and stylish.” It’s just implied.

If you have something people will feel good about using or buying and you can create a compelling action-point for your core target audience to begin the journey and use your product, it’s a much stronger position to be in.

To do that, you need to become intimate with who your target audience really is, how they behave, what makes them feel compelled to take action, and then speak their language to engage their trigger finger. If you can do that enough times and can keep them happy, engaged, and converting repeatedly on specific business objectives, that is a sure-fire recipe for growth.

About the Author: Tomer Garzberg is the CEO and Founder at GRONADE Growth Partnerships. They grow seed- and venture-capital-funded startups and enterprise products. GRONADE is a blend of man and machine on a mission to systematize growth. Say Hi on Twitter @TomerGarzberg.

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Why Your Team Can’t Afford to Ignore the Data

A Teradata survey unveiled that 87% of marketers see data as the most underused asset in their cohorts, and 50% desire to extend the use of big data to support their digital marketing efforts.

However, ecommerce marketers are still experiencing difficulty with gaining insights from analytics. They struggle with integrating data into their everyday operations, like competitor analysis, branding strategies, and sales techniques.

Instead of suffering from analysis paralysis, marketing teams should focus on the bigger picture. Major gains are made when marketers concentrate on creating a better customer experience.

So, stop disregarding the data. Move forward by sharpening the following four key areas:

1. Monitor the Competition

Data gives SaaS teams an inside track of how to strategically outdo the competition. With keyword tools, you can measure your methods amongst other market leaders.

SEMrush monitors your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building. Knowing the competition’s unique keywords will help you discover unknown search terms.

Moreover, by improving your content with new keywords, there’s a greater chance to emerge in the SERP next to your competitors.

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Social data also offers an inside track of how competitors interact with customers. Platforms like Rival IQ and Mention can help you size up the competition.

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For example, on Twitter, observe other brands’ mentions, followers, and engagement rates. Know when they outperform you, and vice versa. Then, analyze the content promoted.

What content stands out? How many times was it promoted? How did customers respond?

The purpose is not to mimic your competitors but to learn from their successes and failures. If a particular tweet does well for them, it may have a similar result for your business.

Keep the following points in mind when measuring your brand’s presence:

• Identify insights that can contribute to your plan.
• Learn what and when to post to produce more engagement.
• Pinpoint substantial spikes in impressions.
• Distinguish between what’s working and what’s not.

Mold your strategy with benchmarks, and build marketing campaigns that outwit your competitors.

2. Craft a Personalized Brand Message

Data helps ecommerce marketers create customized buyer personas. Knowing your audience means more personalized messages to segmented groups.

Forrester’s report on Competitive Strategy in the Age of the Consumer emphasizes moving away from consumer historical data. Rather, focus on the here and now.

Try conducting customer surveys, and use open-ended questions. That way, you gain actionable insight beyond the constraints of yes/no questions.

The goal is to understand customer behavior, including the roadblocks that hinder them from making a purchase. So, seek outside the usual interests and needs, and aim for actions and reactions.

Conversion copywriter Jennifer Havice suggests asking these survey questions:

• When did you realize you needed a product/service like ours?
• What problem does our product/service solve in your life?
• What doubts or hesitations did you have before buying?

Your team also may want to gather data from phone interviews. While time-consuming, you will capture specific keywords from your customers. And that may be worth your efforts.

Just be mindful that these customer interviews aren’t sales calls. Instead, listen attentively.

“This is an opportunity to gather symptoms and a prospective customer’s perspective on their needs with respect to a specific problem or capability,” says Sean Murphy, CEO of SKMurphy.

In addition, enlist aid from your online community managers. These folks are pros at finding the most important conversations. Your community forums could uncover new clues about your consumers.

It’s up to brands to offer experiences that cater to their customers. To do so, businesses must look at the real-time data to match customer motivations with personalized products.

Get inside your customer’s heads. Create accurate buyer personas.

3. Acquire Sales Leads

Want to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads? Use data to produce targeted lead generation campaigns.

But in order to do that, sales and marketing teams must be aligned. A common issue amongst these departments is disagreement about lead qualification. Without a set definition, some organizations witness a stunt in their growth.

Research tells us that “highly aligned organizations achieved an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth – while their less aligned competitors saw a 7% decrease in revenue.”

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Marketing and sales centers around lead quality. So, to start a rewarding partnership, use consumer behavior data.

Marketing automation tools were essentially created for this purpose. Work with sales to select which leads deserve a follow up. The data will determine which prospects need to be nurtured and handed to the sales team.

The key is to eliminate missed opportunities. The collaboration should help both teams address the right leads at the right time.

Also, remember to clean your databases. Archive or delete prospects that don’t meet the lead qualification criteria.

Quality trumps quantity. Three super-qualified leads will always surpass 20 disinterested leads.

Set up your parameters. Then, filter for things like:

• Fake email addresses and phone numbers,
• Information-seeking job titles, like “student,” and
• Low annual revenues.

Failure to properly process data is one reason companies don’t generate more leads. Be better. Move data to the forefront to boost sales leads.

4. Retain More Customers

Data identifies holes in the customer experience that may lead to high churn rates. Extend your customer lifetime value by predicting consumer behavior patterns.

By analyzing data, marketers learn their customers’ needs and preferences. Leverage those insights to understand why customers discontinue their services or try other brands.

Is there a disconnect in customer service? Or is your onboarding process complicated? Look for patterns and discover the reasons for your churn issues.

Researchers found that “96% of unhappy customers don’t complain; however, 91% of those will simply leave and never come back.” That’s why it’s so important for your team to be proactive.

Keep an open line of communication between your company and customers. This means promptly addressing concerns and following conversations via social media.

Effective data-gathering doesn’t have to be difficult. Below is an example of how new users sign up for Pusher. The company received a 16% reply rate.

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The real challenge begins when your customers start responding. How will your team correct mistakes? Will you add more value to your services?

Incorporate customer comments into your retention strategy. Find new ways to deliver on your promises, like initiating a rewards program.

Examine the data points that increase your churn rates. Then, develop programs to exceed customer expectations. Build a brand loyal customer base.

Heed the Data

Data is your friend. Shying away from analytics will do more harm than good.

Use keyword tools to monitor your competitors. Develop customer surveys to help with buyer personas, and align marketing and sales to create more qualified leads.

Data is valuable. Think twice before you ignore it.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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