Welcome back to our series on tools for your start-up (you can read our other posts here). Today, we're focusing on analytical tools.
Analytics are a crucial part of small businesses. They can make or break a successful company. These days, there's so much data and so many metrics that it can be overwhelming and hard to understand.
To lessen the burden of small business data analytics, we’ve pulled together some of our favourite analytical tools for your startup.
For most start-ups, your website will be the main point of sale for your customer. So, it is important to create the best customer journey. Tools such as HotJar and SmartLook allow you to track your customers' mouse movements. The purpose of mouse tracking is to gather comprehensive data around what your users are doing, helping you decide how to optimize site usability and design. As well as tracking mouse movements, you can track all traffic from external sites using custom URLs supplied by Rebrandly. These custom URLs are more attractive to customers and can give you insights into what external channels are best for generating traffic, on what days and times, and who is clicking your links.
To test your customer journey, you can use tools like ContentSquare and AB Tasty that allow you to complete A/B Testing on your website. A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal. Once your website is live and your customer journey is created, you can use analytical tools such as Google Analytics or Diib to enhance your website's SEO, boost website traffic and grow revenue.
A great way to drive traffic to your website is through your social media channels. You can read our tips, tricks and tools to create social media content here. However, once your content is posted, it is important to understand how your audience is responding. Tools like HootSuite, Buffer and MeetEdgar allow you to not only schedule content but analyse the best times to post based on different metrics. If your goal is to expand your reach, you may choose to focus on the days and times that your target audience is online. However, if your goal is to increase engagement, you may opt to post content when your current audience is more likely to like or comment on your content.
Another benefit to social media is the use of influencer marketing or product placement. If this is part of your marketing strategy, a great tool for analysing influencer reach and engagement is Upfluence. Upfluence is a full-scale influencer platform, offering a well-rounded set of features. A pivotal part of upfluence is its influencer search and discovery engine. It features a massive database of over 3 million influencer profiles that are updated in real-time; the algorithm analyses each piece of content for reach and engagement.
Another great way to analyse how your audience is responding to your content is by simply asking them! Satisfaction questionnaires have come a long way from pen and paper. Add a bit of spice to your feedback through the use of tools like Servicate. Servicate takes a fun approach to customer questionnaires and offers different techniques for different solutions: for marketing teams, for product teams, for customer success teams.
There are some all-in-one tools that have all (or at least most) of what we've talked about today. Mixpanel and Kissmetrics are both great tools for combining website and social media analytics and customer behaviour tracking.
Mixpanel is more focused on mobile technology and offers A/B testing, push notifications and surveys on a mobile level. Whereas, Kissmetrics is best suited for marketers. The feature that makes it unique is its ability to keep user identity across the entire conversion funnel as well as its people level tracking of all actions.
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