If you are a small business owner, you need to know how to use marketing analytics. Using this data allows you to measure the effectiveness of and to optimize the return on investment for your company's marketing efforts. There is a ton of valuable information held in those numbers. However, if you fail to look at the data from the right perspective, you may miss valuable information.

Here are five common mistakes businesses make when viewing marketing analytics:

Mistake #1 - Looking at traffic volume instead of qualified visitors.
High traffic numbers look great on paper. But, when you look deeper at that number, how many of these visitors are qualified? A qualified visitor is someone who visits your website with a particular interest in your products or services. For example, if you sell car parts, a visitor looking for brake pads is qualified. But, someone looking for a book on dolls is not.

Mistake #2 - Not understanding organic traffic. 
Organic traffic happens when visitors come to your site through unpaid sources, like search engines. The visitor was looking for a particular item or topic and your website came up in the results. Understanding what drives this type of traffic to your website is crucial. It is a great source for low-cost, highly qualified traffic.

Mistake #3 - Believing your company name or industry is a keyword. 
Most people look for products or services on the Internet, not the name of a particular company or industry. For example, if someone was looking for a local plumber in Atlanta, they might search for "plumber in Atlanta" or something similar. They would not search for "FGH Plumbers" unless they knew the owner personally.

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Mistake #4 - Ignoring long-tail keywords in favor of short-tail keywords. 
It is important to look at all the keywords you are using. Many people focus on the hottest search words and fail to look at the traffic coming from the less popular ones. One fact many overlook is that many long-tail keywords offer steady highly qualified traffic, even if the numbers are not so high. On the other side of the coin, the shorter keywords may be highly contested and produce low-quality traffic for the most part.

Mistake #5 - Thinking fast results are a good thing. 
Slow and steady produces better results. Many business owners want results and they want them now. The problem is that marketing analytics is a lot like going on a diet. Slow & steady will produce better results in the long-term than fast & furious. Fast and furious is often low quality traffic that generates few leads and almost no sales. Slow and steady shows a growing amount of organic traffic. That is usually highly qualified visitors who become paying customers.

If you can avoid these common mistakes, you can gain plenty of valuable information from your marketing analytics. This information allows you to adjust your digital marketing strategy to capture more of your target market. It makes a big difference in a successful website redesign strategy and a mediocre one.

When was the last time you told a customer what to do? 

The thought of directing a customer to perform an action may seem the opposite of good sales practices. In traditional marketing, telling your client what to do would be a bad practice.

But, the reality of modern inbound marketing is you need to bring your customers to your website and instruct them on what you want them to do. When you are going through a corporate website redesign, you need to merge this idea into your entire design strategy.

Here is how you tell your visitors what to do, in a way that will not turn them away:

1. Use Calls to Action - A call to action, also known as a CTA, is an icon, graphic, or link that you want a customer to click to take them a bit further down the sales funnel. Some calls to action are very strong and in your face. Others are very subtle and almost hidden. But, they are necessary for telling your customer what you want them to do.
    
2. The Placement of Your Calls to Action is Critical - Every page on your website, every email you send, and every blog post you make needs to have a CTA. Some pages, emails, and blog posts will have more than one CTA in it. The first CTA needs to be near the top of the page. If the person wants to learn more, they will look for that place to click. Adding more CTAs further down in the piece is acceptable also. Keep this in mind during your corporate website redesign.
   
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3. Provide Multiple Forms of Contact - Many business owners think of CTAs as a single form you want the visitor to fill out. In fact, many build their websites with this sole means of communication integrated. But, that is a mistake. Some visitors will be willing to fill out the form. Others may want alternative contact options. A phone number is perfect for those who want to speak with a live person. Downloading a form is another option. Even a simple "ask a Question" form might be a good idea.
    
4. The Color of Your Calls to Action Matters - You want people to take notice of your calls to action. If they blend in with the rest of your website, your visitors will be less likely to click-through. The color should complement your website theme while standing out. Bright colors tend to get more traffic than subdued colors. Yellow and orange tends to draw the most attention. White is great on a dark color scheme. Red is controversial color that gains attention, but has negative connotations. Green is good for building trust CTAs like testimonials and success stories. Blue is probably the worst color to choose.

Calls to action will let you direct your customers to the action you want them to perform. It will not always be successful.

But, it will get a significant number to do what you ask. When you are doing a corporate website redesign, you need to put thought into what you want a customer to do and how to make it happen.

• Who is my target market?
  

You can find plenty of tactics on the Internet on how to attract people to your website. But, tactics are only as good as the strategy behind them. Tactics are actions you take to handle specific issues. Strategy is the guiding force that helps you know what tactics you need to use. Without a good strategy, your website and online presence will never meet your goals. A website redesign offers the perfect opportunity to create a strong, effective strategy. If you are going to focus on either strategy or tactics, you need to invest your efforts on first instead of second.

Here are four ways you can invest in your digital strategy during your website redesign:

• Identify your ideal customer

This is something many companies fail to do. They will go to great lengths to design a website with all the bells and whistles. They will create elaborate graphics and web presentations. But, when it comes to the basic strategy of identifying the ideal customer, it doesn't seem to happen. 

Identifying your ideal customer allows you to focus your efforts on meeting their needs and creating a destination they will want to visit and return to multiple times.

• Clearly identify what your ideal customer needs, not what you want to sell them

After identifying your ideal customer, you need to get to know what they need. In today's inbound marketing world, customers are coming to your website based on what they want to find. You need to know what they are trying to find. 

When you do that, you can attract them to your website and present your products as a solution to their needs. That is the core of a modern digital strategy.

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• Identify how your products and/or services are different from your competition

Every company needs to differentiate itself from its competition. Whether you are facing local competitors or Internet competition, your company needs to know its identity first. 

You may offer the same products or services as your competition, but you can differentiate your company with things like excellent customer service, unique offerings, and custom combinations. Knowing what makes your company different allows you to build a strategy with that knowledge built-in.

• Study your past traffic analytics. You will learn a lot.

If you do not have traffic analytic tools running on your site, you are missing out on the kind of information that is priceless for marketing strategy. If you have these tools, take time to look at past traffic analytics. 

• You will learn if people are coming to your website from search engines, direct links, or their bookmarks.
• You will learn whether users are coming from desktop/laptops, smart phones, or tablets.
• You will see which of your web pages are most popular and which are not.
• You will find out where your customers live, down to the city level.

This information is priceless for building a smart strategy.

Investing in your digital strategy will lay the ground work for a successful digital marketing campaign. Tactics will give you the edge in particular situations. Your website redesign and new digital strategy will help you become the top company in your particular market.

Email marketing has been a part of online marketing efforts for years now. But, Internet users have become extremely leery of it. They do not want to get a email box full of spam from a company that they visited once. Website visitors have become more and more hesitant of providing their email addresses to any website. 

If you are lucky enough to get the email address of a customer or a lead, you need to use it carefully. Sending too many emails or low quality ones will backfire and get people to drop you from their email. If you are doing a website redesign, you should update your email marketing efforts to coincide. 

Here are a few tips on how to get better results with email marketing:

1. Optimize the Subject Line
Your subject line will be the first thing your recipient sees when they open their mail. If they see a generic subject line, they will not open it. Your subject line needs to say who you are and what the email is about. For example: "The Top Weekly Tips and Ideas from Company X" instead of "Your Newsletter."

2. Make Sure Your Sender Name Shows Your Name
A major reason for people deleting emails is not knowing who the sender is. You need to be upfront and put your name on the email. Your sender name should be something like "John Smith, Founder of X Company" instead of "John" or "X Company." You want to give a sense of professionalism and openness to your leads. 

3. Less Content is More
Much like a web page, people open emails and want to get the important details right away. A long drawn out email with tons of pictures and text will make people close the email as fast as they open it. Your email should be to the point and offer a link to the website for more information. 

4. Do Not Send Single Image, Flyer, or Link without Reference
Spam often contains a single image, or a single link, or a single flyer without any text. Many email users will see an email like that and automatically delete it or send it to their spam folder. That is the last thing you want to do. Make sure you provide a formatted email with text to avoid that problem. It might take more time, but the results will speak for themselves.

5. Invite Recipient to Read More on Website
Related to Tip #3, you want to give the recipient a call to action within the email. That CTA should provide an invitation and link to read more about what you are talking about on the website. That link will go to a landing page where the email recipient can get the details your email hinted at. When doing your website redesign, you can add landing pages where people will come to see more information.

6. Time of Day is Critical
Did you know that most email goes out in the morning before noon? But, most people do not open the bulk of their email until afternoon or evening. So, if you want your email to be at the top of the pile and opened quickly, sending it in the afternoon is actually a better idea. There are also more popular days of the week. 

These tips show you how you can make your email marketing campaigns be more effective. With a few changes to your email marketing, you should see more leads coming in and more leads converting to sales. That can interlock beautifully with your website redesign efforts. Give your marketing a new face and a new strategy.