Harnessing Data-Driven Insights for Effective Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide to SEO, Customer Behavior, and Business Growth

Digital marketing is a valuable way to grow your business and increase revenue. It can be challenging to measure success and ROI, though.

In this second episode in our Measure to March series, we take a high-level approach to understanding digital marketing and why it is essential to know where you are before deciding on where you are going.

Remember, If you don't have the data, you're just guessing.

Tired of not knowing if you're focusing on the right things? Tune in next week as we dive deeper and share how data can answer the questions you never knew you had.

Thanks for tuning in to Collab with Kiva. Your reviews are appreciated on Apple

Are you ready to take massive action in your business and make data-driven decisions? Click the button below and let’s chat 👇🏽

Podcast Transcript:

0:01

Hello and welcome to collab with Kiva. I'm your host Kiva, Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing themed office chair. I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a legislative director for a member of Congress, policy director for a nonprofit, stay at home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry biz owner, and now the owner of a service based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line, or full of zigs and zags. Join me and my guest as we share insights hope in lessons learned from our email entrepreneurship journeys. May the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lifts your boat? Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to this episode of collab with Kiva. I am excited as we continue our measure to march series. So let's get out your pen and paper, we are going to take a little journey today. I want you to go back in time to when you were much younger. And if you arrived at the mall, or an amusement park, or really anywhere where you didn't know where you were going, you sought out a map. And on that map, there was always a dot that said, you are here. You needed to know where you were in this expansive place in order to know where to go. Like which direction to head in. When talking about measure to march, it's important to know, where are you now in your business. In determining where you are now often requires data or analytics, because the analytics will not only tell you where you are now, it helps inform where you're going. Because it understands where you have come from. Because when you walked into the mall or the amusement park, especially if there was more than one entry point, you had to know exactly where you had come from. Because if you came in from the east side, when you got to that dot that said you are here was a different dot than someone who entered on the west side. So it understands also where you have come from. As a business, you have a website. Most businesses do your website, lets the world know more about you, your company, what you do, what you're selling, how they can buy from you, whether that's a product, whether that's a service, they have to know those kinds of things. And for those, you can still remember Yellow Pages. That's what our websites are. They're the yellow pages of old. So now, when we used to, like I don't even know if they still deliver those, but you would get the yellow pages in the mail. It looks like an exciting time, at least I can recall that in my childhood. And you can go through and flip through. Never ever, ever did I go through all of the Yellow Pages. It was a really thick book. But our search engines are like those yellow pages nowadays. So when we had yellow pages, if I was looking for a plumber, I flip the pages till I get to p to plumbing and I would go through that list. In my case my parents would and make that decision on who to go with. Sometimes they may call someone else and get that kind of a referral to understand Oh, okay, you like them? Good recommendation. Okay, great. When people go to the search engine of their choice online, and they enter in search terms, you want your website to come up if your website matches what they're looking for, if your services match what they are looking for, and your site comes up based on good S E O or search engine optimization

5:02

So if your website has good SEO, and it's really keywords, tags data, we won't go into all of this, we're going to keep it pretty high level that SEO will cause you in your website to rank higher in those search engine results. So if you ever can still recall back to the Yellow Pages, lots of companies began their names with the letter A, you would have double a plumbing, a plus plumbing, triple A plus plumbing, why? Because a would put them at the top of the list. Where if you were Sam's plumbing, you had to be hopeful that people would scroll through or flip the pages past all the A's, B's, C's, DS, E's, f all the way to get to s. That's a lot of pages, probably in many yellow pages. And so our search engine optimization has that same thing, we're all trying to be a plus palming, we're all trying to be double a plumbing, because we want to have that higher search result. Because research shows like most of us aren't going past page three. Some of us, we bail on the search before then, and we're clicking on those top links. So your SEO will have people click on your website as it is one of those top results. And it causes people to visit your website. When they get to your website, they're liking what they see, they sign up for your newsletter or a coupon code. And they're going to receive an email from you now. That email might be just that coupon code, that email email might be, Hey, welcome to my newsletter, or you have a nurture sequence that's going to tell them more about you tell them more about the services, and why you are the best plumber, you're going to share some testimonials as to other great customers who have had an A plus experience with you and your plumbing services. And through that email sequence, they're feeling loved and cared for they to truly understand their plumbing problem. And there are moving along in what we call the customer journey, your email, you send out another email, it includes a link to a blog post on how to avoid losing your wedding ring in the kitchen sink. And you find out they've clicked on that blog post. So you know, now that these emails have gone out, people are reading your blog post. They're also now following you on social media. You have engaging videos and content that keeps them informed and entertained and continues once again, to usher them through. So customer journey. All of the bits and pieces that I've talked about, make up your digital marketing. Yes, there are many more details. But we're staying again, pretty high level for this. So you might be wondering, okay, Kiva, I get all that. I'm an amazing plumber, I have this amazing service, I help people not be in trouble with their spouses, because I've informed them of how not to lose their wedding ring down the drain. And what though, is the connection to data, who still don't get it? And so let's talk about it. Because the data is really all around us. And all woven throughout that example that I shared. So let's start with that SEO. That is letting you know if you're tracking it, how people are finding you on the worldwide web, because let's be realistic plumber, Washington DC there's a Google Apps have references and you know, like options that are going to come up.

9:53

So what is it that lead someone to get to you what words were in that search that allowed that to happen? So So, tracking that SEO, how people are finding you how they're landing on your website helps inform you as to what keywords you want to focus on what people are searching for, because let's be honest, you might think that they're searching for a best plumber in Washington, DC. And they might search for I couldn't come up with something that fast, but they might search for something else. So it helps it give you insights into customer behavior. Just like tracking your website visitors, because they've wound up on your website, and what do they explore when they're on your site? How far down your page? Do they scroll? Where do they exit your website? How long? Are they staying on your site? What pages do they visit when they are on your site? Are they looking you up and viewing your website via their mobile phone? Are they at their desktop? You know, maybe they're at work, or they're working from home and the child has caused something to get stuck in the drain? Are they on their desktop? Are they on a tablet. So that helps you because it will inform what optimizations you need to make for your website to make sure that they have the best experience on those platforms. And, obviously, there's some other things we could dive into as it relates to that. But we also talked about emails, and like how tracking your emails will let you know, obviously, how many people are opening the email. But if you have additional links, say again to that blog post inside, and we utilize what's called a UTM link, we'll know looking at that traffic that, hey, our blog, our email, readers are actually clicking the links inside. And that's taking them back to our blog so that we can continue to educate them. What are they not clicking on? Sometimes emails have way too many links in them. And people just don't click on anything because they're overwhelmed. How long are people on your list before they make a purchase? That's a good one to think about. Because you might have what's called like a longer selling journey process. So if your sales cycle is a bit longer, that's helpful for you to know. When you're planning out, how does your sales process look throughout the year? When do you do certain things in your business? Your blogs, your video other content? Like what resonates with customers? What doesn't resonate with them? What SEO is leading them to that content? Is the SEO telling you that maybe there should be a secondary piece of content that you create? Because there's additional information that people want to know. Maybe you're posting on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. And those people are coming to your website, because hey, everybody wants to know how not to lose their wedding ring down the drain? And from that, though, are they booking your services? And are you actually able to differentiate who's coming from LinkedIn versus who's coming from Instagram versus us coming from Facebook or Twitter? Should you even spend time maybe on one of those platforms or two of those platforms? Because those folks never were coming to your website, and they're not signing up for your email list. So the time you're spending there, because you spend it better somewhere else. So is that platform giving you a return on your investment. We haven't even begun to touch on the fact of ads, and what that can look like for your business. And I get it, he can feel overwhelming. That was a long list of a it was really a short list of a much longer list of things that can be tracked in your business that can help you make decisions.

14:46

And that's why last week in the first part of this series, we really talked about how all of this is interconnected. Your marketing impacts your operations, your mark Getting in operations impact, obviously, they're impacted by in many cases, your sales. And that can really have a ripple effect throughout your business. So the data when actually collected, organize, interpret it and use can lead to a heightened awareness of what's really needed in all areas of your business. And if you're thinking about that, you can definitely see, okay, hey, the marketing's pretty, you know, on fire right now we're getting all of these additional customers who are coming in our phone, wait times have drastically increased, I was going to hire an additional plumber. But right now, I think my first bet is hiring someone else to answer these phones, as I am able to still hold on, keep up with the customers that I have. Because I'm just rescuing a bunch of rings that have gone down the drain. And that's right there. And that elbow of the pipe, I can go do that. So there's so much more that you can delve into. We can even talk further about the call times and tracking those things as well in terms of just some additional metrics for your business. But I want to circle back to the beginning, where we really talked about understanding where you are now. We are approaching the midpoint we really are at well, 15 days left or so by the time you listen to this, when q1 is going to be over. Our minds are looking at already q2. What does that look like? I asked you to ask yourself before you start thinking about where you're going. Where are you right now? Where are you at right now, as we finish up q1? Have you taken stock of the information that you have, in order to ascertain what needs to be done as you do look ahead to q2, as you look beyond that to possibly q3 holding all of it loosely. But still having a plan on how to go from where you are which that big read that to where you had intended to go when you came into the mall, the amusement park or whatever structure that was. Because if your plans for their future, don't take into account where you are now, and where you've come from, then those plans for the future are lacking in quite honestly, they're not fully informed, they're half baked. And we aren't trying to run businesses that are half baked. We are purposeful in how we run our businesses, we are intentional in how we run our businesses. We are data driven in how we run our businesses. So as you plan and look ahead, I want you to take stock of where you are now. And where you've come from. And it's okay if you don't have data in place, you can get the data in place. And I don't just mean the simple. Hey, Kiva, I got Google Analytics installed. It's a little bit more detail than that people. So if you're interested in talking further, definitely hit me up on my website, the 516 collaborative.com. And we can talk about where you are now in order to inform where you are going. So stay tuned. Next week, we are going to dive even deeper. So I hope you were taking notes today, because you're going to need those notes next week. And I look forward to talking to you then. Bye.

19:07

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of collab with Kiva. You know my heart, and it wants you to know that you are uniquely made and that your business path is unique to you. I hope that now you have some clear takeaways from this episode that have left you inspired and motivated to keep pressing forward on your unique path. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. And of course, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciated. If you are a small business owner and you are ready to build out your business playbook, and you're ready to document and delegate what takes place in your business so it can grow beyond you. Make sure you visit me on my website, the 516 collaborative.com and let's schedule a time to talk. I'll see everyone next time. Bye

Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.

Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.