Do you have business intelligence?
What does Business Intelligence mean to you? Smart entrepreneurs? Accountants digging into your figures? Expensive market research campaigns? Weighty analysis in the Financial Times?
NO! Business Intelligence is at your fingertips whatever size of enterprise you are running. In this connected age, every business is online (whether they know it or not), and the information you can get back from the internet is astounding. Building your business online is not just about delivering your message – it’s about understanding the reaction, too. If you don’t know how your message is being received, you can’t understand what is effective and what is not. Business intelligence saves time and money.
Free Analytics
The immediate need for anyone with an online window to the world is insight into the visitors to their website or page. Some social media platforms such as Facebook already offer simple analytics information(‘Insights’ and the visibility and reach of your posts). Social media dashboards, whatever their pros and cons for managing your activity, deliver nicely packaged activity reports. If you’re using direct email, then you know straight away how effective each newsletter has been, and how many people have walked through your digital door.
For websites, as a minimum we recommend Google Analytics (some ecommerce and other sites will have their own proprietory analytics programmes which do the same job). This is an indispensable tool for every online business – but it’s astonishing how many websites we see which don’t have it. Developers don’t always add it automatically before launching a site, and if you are using a site builder package it can even be part of a paid upgrade. Does your site have it? If you aren’t already logging on regularly to find out about your audience, then try this simple test. Go to your website and right click anywhere on the page. Select ‘View Page Source’ from the menu that appears. Now, hold down CTRL and F keys together so that a search box appears in the top right hand corner. Type in ‘google-analytics’ : if there’s no result, it’s not installed. Talk to your developer, so that you can find out some of this useful information:
- How many new and returning visitors do you have?
- What pages are they looking at, and how long do they stay?
- Where do they come from?
- What they have typed into search engines to find you?
Specialist Tools – B2B
You may find you have plenty of visitors, but research shows that 98% of B2B website visitors will browse pages but don’t make an enquiry. So how can you take the next step and identify who has been browsing? How can you maximise your investment in the online marketing activity which generated traffic to your website in the first place? Galia Digital works hand in hand with Lead Forensics, whose solution provides the business name, address, telephone number, industry, turnover and employee numbers of your anonymous website visitors, and tells you what pages they viewed. How often does a good retailer get business by approaching the person browsing in their shop? This is the online equivalent for B2B professionals.
Specialist Tools – Event Management
When you are organising an event using online marketing – which is true of everyone from the lowliest seminar to high profile festivals – then having all your business intelligence in one place makes life easier. A new tool that is making waves is Eventsneaker. This ground-breaking system allows event organisers to intelligently send, post and share content and messages from one place, understand how online communications are affecting your sales, and – as with all good analytics – ensures you stop wasting time and money, making your decisions based on facts.
For more information about taking advantage of free or specialist analytics for your business, contact Galia Digital today!