by Game Marketing Genie, on 29-Apr-2021 10:18:23
Data is one of the most important marketing tools you need to grow your business. It will help you understand your customers better, and you’ll use this information to improve your marketing efforts.
If your marketing channels aren’t bringing the desired results, it could be because you are not gathering enough data about your customers to understand their needs. Thriving businesses have a clear picture of their customer journey maps and use data analytics to serve them better. This article explains how to use big data customer analytics to make smart business decisions.
What is a customer journey?
The customer journey is the total of the experiences users go through when interacting with your brand. Think of it as a roadmap that details how users become aware of your company and their interactions with your brand from that point and beyond. The customer journey doesn't end after a customer makes a purchase. It extends to their post-purchase experience, where customers become loyal advocates of your brand.
Creating a customer journey map is important since it helps organizations understand how customers travel through the sales process and how they feel during that time. It helps brands stay focused on their customers and make each stage of the buying experience as smooth as possible for potential leads.
Read more about how to acquire customers in our article, The Ultimate Customer Acquisition Strategies You Should Try In 2021, on our sister site Growth Marketing Genie.
What is web analytics?
Web analytics is the process of tracking and analyzing how customers interact with an organization through its digital marketing channels. Web analytics solutions are an essential component of any customer journey program. It enables marketers and customer experience professionals to measure cross-channel customer journeys and improve user experience.
By analyzing large sets of data in real-time, web analytics will help you pinpoint the underlying sources of friction in your marketing. You will understand the issues responsible for a positive or negative user experience and initiate actions to optimize the UX. This will help you achieve positive business outcomes such as growing revenue or reducing the churn rate.
Customer experience has risen to become one of the main competitive battlegrounds for businesses across industries. Exceptional customer experience can significantly impact your business outcomes by improving your revenue, customer retention rate, and customer lifetime value (CLTV).
It will be difficult to enhance the customer experience if you're not collecting and analyzing data from your customer touchpoints. Data analytics will let you know if customers are having a good time interacting with your website. You'll use this information to improve your offerings and serve your customers better.
This information can help you solve problems, identify new opportunities and bring in new leads. We'll talk more about this in the next section, but if you don't know what metrics to track, you won't be able to do any of this.
Know what you need to keep an eye on by reading our article on Growth Marketing Genie here: 10 Common Marketing KPIs You Need to Watch.
What do customer journey web analytics help your business do?
Leading organizations use customer journey web analytics to achieve real business impact. The best web analytics services will improve your business in the following ways.
Increase user acquisition
Customer analytics provide a lot of detailed data on the customer journey that aids in user acquisition, as stated in our article here. The early revelation about the nature of customer interactions as they get to know your business will empower you to improve the acquisition process, resulting in more people choosing your business over the competition. You will quickly identify users with purchase intent and eliminate all sales challenges to make the onboarding process seamless.
Identify your highest impact customer journeys
Customer analytics solutions will help you identify journeys that deliver the best customer experience and drive revenue growth. Effective teams work with a web analytics agency to find customer journeys that should be replicated to reduce the cost to serve. This enhances operational efficiency by making it easy for marketing teams to understand what drives clients to perform specific positive actions.
Identify areas for optimization
Customer web analytics removes the guesswork from your customer journey planning by using data and statistics to identify areas of optimization. It will help you identify the channels that work best for user engagement and lead to more sales. As an organization, you're always looking for the most impactful marketing channels for your video game marketing strategies, and customer journey analytics will help identify them.
Your reports will show how different channels performed regarding customer acquisition. You will know the channels that brought the most customers and those that had a lot of churn. These insights will inform your decision-making and planning, guiding you on the best moments to engage your audience and the best channels for connecting with them.
Improve customer experience
Customer journey analytics will help you identify the bottlenecks and challenges users experience in their customer journeys. This allows you to respond in real-time to those challenges with relevant offers, communication, and content. By solving the problems your customers experience when interacting with your brand, you improve the user experience and make your customers feel valued. Those who had thought of leaving your brand for the competition will remain, thus helping you retain a healthy customer base.
Improve cross channel efforts
You’re probably using more than one channel for connecting with your audience. Customer web analytics will show you how the channels perform when it comes to customer engagement and acquisition. The insights derived from the data will guide you on how to improve your cross-channel efforts to help you gain more value from your marketing stack. Better results will improve your sales and marketing ROI and generate more revenue for the organization.
Predict customer behavior
Web analytics will also help you predict how a customer will behave at particular stages of the sales journey. From the analysis of previous customer journey maps, you will know how a customer will behave at a certain stage and provide them with everything they need to ensure they proceed to the next step of the sales process. You will anticipate their needs even before they get the chance to reveal them. This builds your credibility and establishes you as a trustworthy partner for the customer.
Where to use web analytics to encourage customers to move along the customer journey
The following are some of the avenues where you should implement web analytics to understand the customer journey and encourage users to move down the sales funnel.
Content marketing
Content is a great marketing tool for promoting your business. Through it, you will explain your offering to your consumers and establish yourself as a trusted authority in your niche.
As you implement your content marketing plan, you should be tracking your efforts to see how users interact with your content. How many visitors accessed your content at a given time? How many left their emails after consuming your content?
This information will tell you how effective your content marketing efforts are. Use the insight to improve your content format to attract more users to your site and other online pages.
Our blog, Is Content Marketing Worth Your Time? explains how to develop an effective content marketing plan.
Social media marketing
Your customers are active on social media, and marketing on the platforms where they're most active is a great way to connect with them. Create amazing social content, share user-generated content, and respond to their queries for effective management. Don’t forget to track your engagement to know how many people you’ve reached with your social content.
We’ve explained how to use social media to connect with your audience in our blog, How to Get the Best Social Media Reach for Your Video Game.
Paid ads
Organic efforts take time to get you on top of SERPs, and you may have to pay for the coveted top spots. Paid ads are great for bringing traffic to your website and helping you connect with people who are actively looking for your products or services. When running paid ads, you should constantly be tracking your campaigns to see how users interact with your ads.
Find out how many people clicked on your ads and how many converted? Change ad elements such as the headline, description, and CTA, and run the ad for a given period. Compare the marketing data with the previous ad design to figure out the best performing variant.
We’ve explained the whole process in detail in our blog, Google Ads is Changing, and Your Wallet Needs to Know.
Email marketing
Email is one of the most effective channels for connecting with your users. With data from Statista showing that more than 4 billion people use email globally, email is the perfect marketing medium for nurturing prospects down the sales funnel.
It's important to measure and analyze your email campaign, and this is where web analytics comes in. It will help you identify the areas that need improvement, and with simple adjustments, you’ll earn more clicks, downloads, and signups.
Our blog, Why Email Marketing Is Key for Your Game’s Content Marketing Strategy, explains this topic in detail.
Start tracking like a pro
If game marketing wasn’t hard enough, add analytics into the fray! This is a crucial part of your campaign, and something you’ll need to master if you want to get results. But it’s dangerous to go alone! Take this: The Game Dev's Complete Guide to Game Marketing Analytics.
Data is one of the important marketing assets you can have right now. Customer analytics will help you make sense of all the data you collect and use the insights to grow your business.
Understanding player analytics can be difficult, and that’s why you should engage a game marketing agency that knows how to handle it. The team at Game Marketing Genie can help. We have the tools and expertise to help you visualize the customer journey from the data you collect from various customer touch points.
Are you struggling to connect with your customers at an individual level? Here are the best tips to run a customer-centric marketing campaign.
