For small businesses, an online presence is no longer a bonus, it’s a necessity. Today, millions of Australians discover and engage businesses online. For many contemporary consumers, if your small business isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. Having an online presence is one thing, optimising it is another entirely.
Standing out from the competition requires regular analysis and refinement. Is your product or service selling? How is your website performing? Is your marketing strategy effective? How are your customers behaving and engaging with your brand? By regularly asking and analysing these questions, your small business can drive big gains.
Product sales
Ultimately, the aim of every small business is to sell as much of your product or service as possible. Deep diving into performance data around the sales of your product or service allows you to glean key insights like best-selling products which can then support decisions on product marketing, product pricing, products to highlight on your website, and more.
You don’t have to be a big business with a big budget to tap these insights. Sophisticated BI (business intelligence) platforms offer advanced capabilities that help small businesses unearth key insights from their data. When you know what is and isn’t selling, and when it is and isn’t selling, it’s easier to promote the most valuable products or services on your online channels.
Website performance
Monitoring metrics about the performance of your website or e-commerce store is crucial to understanding visitor behaviour. Consider, for example, cart abandonment; a metric that is directly influenced by website performance. A high cart abandonment rate can indicate complexities in the checkout process that should be streamlined.
Then there’s page speed or bounce rate. If pages take too long to load, your visitor might leave before you can convert them. Bounce rate is the volume of visitors who ‘bounce’ away from your site without finding what they were looking for or what you wanted them to find.
These, and many other factors, contribute to your ‘conversion rate’; the number of unique visitors who convert to customers. As you tweak and refine your website, focus on the change in this, which provides an accurate and effective measure of whether your refinements are working.
Marketing performance
Effective marketing shows how motivated visitors are to engage with a business, given the abundance of choices that exist for them online. Therefore, online businesses heavily depend on key marketing metrics – like the monthly ROI and conversion rates – to have success in competitive digital landscapes. For this reason, marketers often track these metrics proactively, as it can highlight future marketing trends, enabling them to align their efforts accordingly.
The advanced forecasting capabilities of today’s BI platforms allow businesses to predict future trends confidently, leading to better-informed data-driven decisions. Consider a retail business ahead of the peak season or a business like a gym which might expect a surge in sign-ups and revenue at the start of a new year.
Customer behaviour
Irrespective of what your business provides, your customers (and your employees) are the heart of it. So understand their behaviour. Monitoring key customer metrics like acquisition cost or lifetime value can provide powerful insights, allowing your small businesses to personalise offerings and facilitate smooth customer interactions that are quick and impactful. Tools like Zoho Analytics allow users with even minimal tech know-how to access, analyse and unearth hidden trends in not only their customer behaviour data but much more.
The proliferation of the internet and evolving consumer behaviour continue to provide lucrative opportunities for small businesses to succeed and scale online. However, an online presence isn’t a set-and-forget; it’s an iterative process that becomes more effective and valuable – for you and for your customers If you analyse then optimise your online presence.
