Real Knowledge Comes From Segmentation

Let’s talk sales.

You have a salesperson that is really trying. They’re out there every day making sales calls. They are regularly working the phones prospecting for new customers, and they are calling on existing customers to make sure that they stay customers and looking for opportunities for more sales. On the surface, they are the model salesperson. With one exception…they’re not selling anything! On paper, everything seems right, but they just can’t close the deal. In fact, they’re not even involved in any deals.

So, what do you do?

Fire them and start with someone new? Eliminate the sales position altogether? Just continue to pay them and hope that they somehow trip over a sale?

Or, do you do a full analysis of what isn’t working and then get them the support to fix the shortcomings that they are having so that they can successfully help your company grow?
The deterring factor in the direction that you go to fix this problem is based on the “core” capability of the person that is doing the selling.

Your Site Is A Salesperson

Your online efforts, website, marketing, and advertising, has to be evaluated the same way. How long are you going to leave your website up if it’s not getting you any sales or leads? How much money are you going to continue to spend on digital marketing campaigns that aren’t getting you the results that you expect?

It’s Tough

Nobody likes to fire people and nobody likes to evaluate their digital marketing. Both of these management activities are avoided like the plague but both will slowly drain your company of resources, destroy your brand, and ultimately could end your business as you know it.

The first step is to know, exactly, what you want out of your online efforts and what realistic expectations you should have. Then, start the inspection process to determine why you’re not getting it.

Deep Dive Your Analytics

When you login to your analytics software you’re hit with an overview of data. Metrics like sessions, users, and page views are right there. Don’t stop here, dive down to get real information on what’s happening. Google Analytics (GA) provides the ability to segment traffic based on hundreds of segment types like geography, return visits, pages engaged with, etc. Setup the segments in your GA account to reflect the information that is important to you.

Here are a couple of basic segments that every business should have set up in their reports:

  • Segment By Referrer: If you are heavy into inbound marketing this is going to be really important. Let’s say that you’re doing some pretty heavy content marketing. Writing articles on topics within your industry and distributing this information on a number of different websites. How will you know which website is sending you leads? How will you know if one site is sending you better leads than another site?By setting up this segment in your GA you’ll be able to track where a visitor to your site started their journey through your sales funnel and ultimately identify if it was a good lead or a bad lead.This segment will also be able to track people that have come to your site from emails that you’ve sent out, from your social media posts, or even different search engine ads.
  • Segment By Location: This report could actually end up saving you a lot of money in ad costs. Let’s say that you do business in a certain geographic location. That might mean a certain city or metro area, maybe a specific state, or even country.If you set up your GA to report on geography of where people are coming from you’ll be able to see how much of the traffic coming to your site contains people that will never be your customer.
  • Segment By Actions: Do you every wonder what the heck people are doing on your site? Create a report in GA that will tell you the actions that people have taken on your site. You can start to see visitors that have completed different conversion goals that you have like downloading a white paper or people that have put products into a shopping cart.

Google has a lot of information on how to setup segments. There are a lot of built in segments that you can setup in a couple minutes without a lot of difficulty along with the capability to develop a customized segment solution.