Entering the new year, business owners across all industries can learn some key lessons from last year when it comes to business growth. The first consists of how data is essential — but is also only as valuable as the strategy connected to it. Second is the sound advice to not sleep on the incredible influence and relative power social media gives your business and your PR and sales initiatives. Further, entering the new year also means recognizing how Google’s algorithms for ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs) holds the key to unlocking the door to more traffic to your website, lead generation, and appearing in local searches.
Data Is Great for Insight but Strategy Based on Data Means Growth
Data is essential to business growth. However, it’s only valuable if the right strategy is in place to use the analytics. Having a key metric, otherwise known as the North Star metric, will offer you the direction you should take.
You can align the value you offer your customers with the North Star metric. Even more, with direction driving your sustainable long-term growth, you can gauge your customers’ engagement with your product. Your growth model depends on it.
The value that customers receive from your product is what propels their engagement, which in turn outlines strategic direction and creates value for your company. You want to select a metric that can be the core goal of your growth efforts, as it will drive your productivity when improving or creating the appropriate strategy in order to reach it. To choose the single most significant metric for your growth model, you should understand how your product or service brings value to your customers, which you can do by looking at engagement from users and their activity.
By looking at the variables that define the North Star metric, you can then create a strategy based on how to build upon and grow your business. Some of the variables that make up the pathway of the consumer journey include the steps of a new engagement, new users, and finally, retention. You can grow that key metric by understanding the interactions of consumers with your products and services through mapping and creating a comprehensive model for growth.
Look at the user steps as the input of the relationship and interaction model. The North Star metric would be the output. The growth model is the ecosystem you create in the process. Take the data and analyze the user experience for more profound insight.
However, the real value from data doesn’t end with just gaining insight. Key performance indicators (KPIs) need organization so you can extract useful insights, which is why KPI dashboards are essential for your business. You can check processes that go on from day-to-day and see to it that outputs of your business are running smoothly.
More critical is what you do with the information gathered.
It is a continuous improvement process to manage data measurements. It takes more than insights to optimize, test, improve, analyze and discover proactively for business growth; you must be willing to take action, which is the purpose of collecting data in the first place.
Social Media Strengthens Connection with Customers and Fosters Growth
Lots of businesses use different social media platforms in nearly every industry because it is an incredible tool that is useful for creating and fostering relationships. Relationships with influencers and essential decision-makers are just as meaningful as the relationships your business has with its customers. You should be paying attention to the posts of these “tastemakers.” and even sharing their content that you find valuable.
If a business wants to encourage substantial growth, PR efforts need to give considerable attention to leveraging social media for enhancement and support, especially seeing as both social media and PR have their foundation in communication. Social media, however, adds to the PR message, so that it has more of an impact. Businesses can use social media to spread news releases and other means related to PR in a shorter time — while allowing for the information to live longer and reach further.
Salespeople can also find usefulness from social media. They can use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to respond to comments, answer questions, and share valuable content throughout the buyer process — spanning the stages of awareness to the stage of consideration until the purchase decision. Social selling is something that not every salesperson knows how to do.
KPIs of sales, like renewal rate, quota attainment, and forecast accuracy, are deliverable metrics when sales representatives incorporate social media, according to a study on social selling’s impact. Companies can build relationships with prospects and provide more value to those prospective clients by making social selling an essential aim. Social selling works best when complimenting sales prospecting methods already in place.
To get the most out of social media, it helps to understand the habits of an organization’s target users. For example, knowing whether most of them are online in the morning or the evening can be extremely useful. Knowing the lifestyles of the consumers you want to reach allows for better scheduling of posts to increase brand engagement and generate more traffic.
