Identify Goals by Asking Questions
Let’s say you own a restaurant and you want to increase your sales. Asking the question, “How do I make more money,” won’t help you reach the answer you’re looking for.
You need to be more specific.
What kinds of products does your restaurant offer? Are there certain products that have higher profit margins than others? Are there certain products that you’d like to increase sales for? Are customers able to order from your restaurant in different ways (app delivery, online, curbside pickup, etc.)
These are what we call exploratory questions. You can use them to narrow your focus and measure your goals.
Stay Objective
So, let’s say you decide you want to improve your coffee sales. You know that you have good coffee, but your customers aren’t buying your coffee as often as you believe they should.
Do you think it’s because they have poor taste?
Maybe they can’t appreciate your thousand-dollar, Italian-imported espresso machine?
It all comes down to the fact that you can never blame the customer. You need to look at your menus, your process, your presentation, and your marketing.
If you can’t be objective about your business and identify problems from the customer’s perspective, then you’ll never be able to grow.
Come Up With Your Business’s Story
Once you understand your questions, your goals, and the perspective of your customers, you can take all of that information and use it to create data points.
Of course, you’re not going to paint the entire picture of your business with a single data point or metric, which is why you need to focus on many metrics to tell the story of your goals and the current position you are in.
In the case of this particular restaurant owner,
they may decide to work with a marketing expert who can share information regarding their coffee with the customers on the restaurant’s email list.
Tracking these particular actions from your website to social media, and keeping an eye on click-through-rate, is a great place to start, as it can give you insight into how many customers are responding to the content about your coffee. You can also monitor landing page metrics to see how many customers visit your website to learn more about your coffee and ultimately visit your establishment to try it for themselves.
The idea here is to bring in more target sales by increasing traffic.
While these metrics might be baseline metrics, they can give a better idea of what the business is looking to achieve. In this case, the story would be attracting potential customers through social media and email to convert them into customers.
We hope that this helped give you an idea as to how to approach marketing data.
