Your business has a presence online. It’s time to use that to not just reach out to prospects and generate leads, but to gather data.

In the ever-competitive landscape of organic and paid search, how does your business stand out? Is it worth investing in ads, redesigning your website, or adding a new service to your company?

Until you’re able to look at the data before and after your efforts, you will be flying blind.

Here are some of my recommendations, which most businesses can start leveraging today.

1. Install Google Analytics on your website today (or ask your web developer). Too many businesses don’t run basic analytics on their website to know who is visiting them, how often, where they’re coming from, and what they do while they’re there. I’m not saying you need to become a data analyst right now; get that data recording right now so that when you’re ready to analyze it, you have something to work with. Bonus tip: ask your web developer to help you connect Google Search Console to your Analytics account to learn more about the search terms people are using to find your website.
2. Double-Check your Google My Business listing. This is a hugely important interface for you to directly input a ton of data into Google to connect with people searching for your company. You may have set this up, or you may need to claim it. Google has an excellent guide on doing this. It is easy and effective, please take the time to ensure that you have your business’s Google listing in order.
3. Start a Google Ads campaign (or two). I try to steer you towards tools and services that don’t cost much to get started, however this is one where an initial investment could not only yield valuable insight (and possibly some leads) but with even a small budget left to run for a little while can test some of your company’s copywriting and reveal what resonates with prospects. I suggest following Neil Patel’s guide on starting with Google Ads to help you get started – even if you’re hiring a professional, take a look at this guide to familiarize yourself with the language. Most important is to get this started with a conservative budget right away, so that you can measure what does not work and get a head start on a more aggressive campaign for growth in the future.
4. Build (and send to) an email list. I will freely admit that even though this has been hard for me to do consistently, I am changing my mindset around it and I encourage you to do this as well. The goal here, as with the Google Ads tip above, is to test your ability to write to your audience and also to allow your contacts to self-qualify out of your contact pool. Afraid of losing people from your email list? Don’t be – if they leave, they probably didn’t belong in the first place. It’s okay, let them hear valuable, purposeful, and shareable information from you and make the choice on their own. They can always resubscribe if you put the opportunity in front of them, on your website or social media. If you’re just starting, I recommend using MailChimp to manage your list since it’s easy to get started with and free up to 2,000 contacts. Do not manually send emails to your list from your standard email client! Use a service like MailChimp to protect your domain’s email reputation and take advantage of their analytics insight reporting to measure engagement.
5. Measure Social Media. Not every business needs to be active on social media, and your business doesn’t need to be active on every social media platform. If you’re going to be, however, make sure that you’re able to see analytics or insights on your business-related accounts. Facebook and LinkedIn make this relatively easy, and on Instagram, you can convert any account to a ‘business account’ to activate analytics there as well.

The goal in doing all of these items as soon as possible is to set your benchmarks before you start making new efforts towards growing the business.

You will be able to…

• Visualize the impacts of your changes
• Learn from your audience’s engagement with your current content
• Empower any specialists or consultants you bring on to dig deep and reveal things you may not currently understand from the data

Want to start taking your Digital Heartbeat, but overwhelmed by the task?

Clarity Business Design specializes not just in establishing the tools we’ve mentioned above, but in using them to fine-tune your messaging and establish a lead generation system to get your best services in front of your ideal audience.

Schedule a consultation with Clarity today to see how we might be able to help: https://claritybusines.wpengine.com/consultation

Thank you for reading, and if this is helpful to you please share with a colleague so that they too can measure their business on the path to success.