6 Step Approach to Reinvigorating Your Competitive Positioning – Part 1

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As tech competition heats up, those that innovate and work faster, better or cheaper, may win, yet while they focus on reinventing or optimizing what they bring to market, businesses that focus on how to position their solutions might be more successful in attracting buyers.

In our latest whitepaper, we highlight seven principles of how disruptors win against competition. The first principle, “have simple offerings, messaging, and pricing,” is first for a reason. Truth be told, while your most well-known products are evolving to be a better version of themselves (such as on-prem to cloud-based solutions) your neighbor is following suit. A huge gap in this race to market lies in meeting buyer’s wants and needs in relevant, simple, yet versioned messaging. While consistent, overarching messaging is important , when a specific buyer, like IT, walks in the door, can you address their individual needs and painpoints more accurately and diligently than the competition?

Here are six steps to reinvigorating your competitive positioning at the persona level. Most importantly, our approach focuses on moving beyond “words on paper” (the typical messaging framework one-and-done approach) to create action steps and playbooks for sales and marketers as they encounter various buyers.

Step 1: Establish a Baseline, Build a Fact Base

How are you positioning yourself in the market today? Is it working? Does it differ from where you want to be positioned? Facilitate an internal workshop to gain alignment on the team’s strategic vision for the solution. Your stakeholders know the value of the product better than anyone. From developers to sales leads, they know what features were built and why, and your selling team knows what benefits seal the deal in customer conversations. Tease out what has worked before and what hasn’t. Build a fact base based on internal expertise. Remember, you will ultimately need their buy-in!

Discuss:

  • Where is there a gap in our messaging?
  • What buyer types/personas might we be missing that need to be better addressed?
  • What do stakeholders believe are the most important benefits to highlight?
  • What are the table stakes value messages we have to include, and where can we differentiate ourselves?
  • What are the dos and don’ts of messaging when buyers are considering other vendors?

Step 2: Conduct Agile Market Research

Market research in any form is critical to inform a top-line understanding of key competitors, target audiences, and industry trends. Consider taking a comprehensive approach to market research to collect intelligence across all of these areas. While a comprehensive approach is ideal, understanding the different market research options and outputs may help you prioritize them based on your timeline and you budget. When it comes to primary research for example, different approaches can surface varying levels of insights. With a survey, you can reach a larger number of buyers (e.g. 150+) and gain shallow, yet statistically significant insights to help inform messaging. With 1-on-1 in-depth interviews, you’ll likely reach a much smaller pool of participants (e.g. 10) but you’ll gain deeper insights and specifics. Here are the three suggested types of market research:

  1. Primary Research
    Primary research will help you understand your users and their dynamics – from use cases, to goals and motivations, to needs and pain points. It will surface distinct personas and their journeys from pre-purchase through post-purchase.

    • Online Surveying (150+ survey respondents): Conduct online survey research with a mix of closed-end and free-form response types to gain a broad understanding of customer personas, customer journeys, usage experiences, and competitor perceptions.
    • In-depth Interviews (10+ interviews): Conduct in-depth interviews to probe deeper into survey results and bring to life the user personas, decision-making journey and usage experiences.

Read more about another form of primary research called ethnography, and how watching customers attempt to buy, use, upgrade, and maintain your product can increase retention rates. Click here. >

  1. Competitive Scan
    Understand your competition’s messaging, product positioning and target audiences without copying them. This will allow you to purposely differentiate while at the same time understanding the messaging tablestakes. Imagine if 5 out of 5 of your competitors are using “speed” as their value prop and all the while, you’re thinking that benefit is your “winning ticket”? Clearly, “speed” must be an important benefit to your buyer, so you too need to highlight it, yet you should not try to differentiate on it. On the other hand, if only 1 in 5 competitors are highlighting integration in their suite of benefits, that may be where you can differentiate your messaging.In initiating a competitive scan, identify your top 5 competitors. Document the landscape including similarities, differences, and ID audiences they might be addressing. Beyond their websites, what marketing campaigns are they driving across social channels and web? And that gets to number three…
  2. Digital Listening
    Digital listening techniques can be used to track thousands of industry, buyer, and competitor conversations to surface newsworthy, real-time insights as well as past historical data. Ask yourself “Do you have the eyes and ears out there to really understand what buyers, partners and influencers are saying (daily, weekly, monthly) to craft messaging?” What’s in plain sight is sometimes overlooked. Many people underestimate the value of social data and it’s actionability, but every second 60,532 GB of internet traffic is taking place. As a strong case for digital monitoring, a leading tech client of ours in the document management space was looking to uncover potential new business opportunities. Through in-depth digital listening on their keywords, competitors, and buyers, it was discovered that law firms and legal offices were seeking to use new technologies as a means of reducing filing and document management requirements of their staff so they could instead focus on client-billable hours. Here, a new target audience was identified (law firms) and a messaging course of action could be built.

Read more about how Digital Listening can ID vertical opportunities. Click here >

Step 3: Develop the Messaging and Personas

In this phase, we aggregate insights to build the messaging framework and define the personas.

  1. Develop Foundational Messaging Framework
    Start by developing a messaging framework structure. A typical messaging framework will consist of an overarching Umbrella Message, 3-5 core messaging themes called Pillar Messages and supporting statements accompanied by proof points/evidence. Consolidate your market research insights to understand the most important features and value props in building your messaging framework. What is the highest ranking product feature or benefit? What differentiators set you apart from competitors that were surfaced in the competitive scan? What details were repeated time and time again across one-on-one interviews?
  2. Refine Messaging Framework by Persona
    Once you have a foundational Messaging Framework, it’s time to refine your messaging based on the unique needs and pain points found for each persona. Document key persona characteristics including how different personas adopt, use, purchase and/or manage the product, and their key needs and pain points. For instance, one of your pillars may be more relevant to an IT buyer and in turn, may need additional supporting messages to address their specific needs. This may also be the priority pillar to lead with when developing IT-focused content or collateral. Technology features and benefit preferences will vary by use case and the benefits that are “must have” will be different for each persona.

Example: Let’s say I’m a provider of a cloudbased web-conferencing solution (to the likes of WebEx or GoToMeeting). In gathering and analyzing the results from my online survey and more, I could dissect the data and rank features by buyer type to understand must-have buying considerations.

Survey Q13. Thinking about all the cloudbased web-conferencing options available, what are the most important features to you? In other words, what are your MUST-HAVES? Rank your top three.


Overarching Messaging Takeaways:
– Mobile device accessibility is a priority for all personas

Persona-Based Messaging Takeaways:

– Emphasize cost effectiveness and simplicity when speaking to executive leadership
– Highlight file storage and sharing in conjunction with security to IT professionals

 Now that you have consolidated insights and understand which messaging resonates at all levels, in Part 2 of this blog will discuss making the messaging actionable. First, validate your results and reviewing with stakeholders to ensure organizational wide buy-in. And secondly, turn your architecture into useful battlecards and cheat sheets – i.e., “If I am speaking to persona A, here are exactly the words and phrases I need to say to show we convey their need.” Oftentimes a messaging framework is built simply as an encyclopedia of findings rather than a playbook for sales and marketing action. The goal should be to put all messaging into activation – in your website, marketing collateral, sales messaging, and speaker notes. Your framework should act as a guide for all go-to-market activities. Stay tuned to Part 2 of this blog as we cover:

  • Phase 4: Validation

    Interview external customers to test messaging and positioning framework, identify key areas of strength and weakness.

  • Phase 5: Activating the Output

    Build a playbook of conversation and market-ready copy.

  • Phase 6: Launch/Measurement

    Measure ongoing trends and reaction to messaging, quantify results (sales talk time, lift, average deals size) and continuously optimize in-market.

2019: Eliminating Go-to-Market Friction in FinServ

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I had the opportunity over the Holidays to reflect a bit on our Financial Services client experience over the past year, and to think ahead to some of the key industry Go-to-Market challenges we see for 2019.

I went through our blogs for 2018 to see which were the most popular and looked for themes across those which resonated most with our readers. I revisited industry and analyst reports on data, AI and analytics, fintech, martech, digital disruption and transformation, etc. to look for consistent themes. I compared these to our work with multiple clients last year across multiple segments of the industry.  I also reviewed my own experiences as a “consumer” of financial services products almost every day.

A lightbulb went on for me while trying to complete my fourth Christmas present return and exchange for one of my kids – there is still a lot of friction in the system today.  My first return was easy (Amazon).  I clicked on the order in my order history, printed the pre-paid return label and dropped the package at the UPS store.  My bank account was refunded as soon as the tracking order was assigned.  Nearly frictionless.

Had a completely different experience on my fourth attempt when I tried to exchange my daughter’s coat (wrong size!) with another vendor.  I actually had to search through the trash to find the receipt from the original shipment as the order was not available online.  No option to print a label, so I had to take the box to the UPS store, fill out the paper form, have them generate a label, and pay the shipping fees.   The vendor said I should expect to wait 7-10 days after the goods were received for a refund to hit my bank account.  Lots of friction. Guess who I will be ordering next year’s jacket from?

This got me thinking about “Go-to-Market Friction” – the amount of resistance that still occurs today between companies and customers as they progress through the buyer’s journey.  The good news is that rapidly advancing technologies in today’s digital world provide significant opportunity to remove friction in FinServ Go-to-Market processes.  The downside is that it also creates great expectations for ever-better customer experiences and provides opportunities for new market entrants to come in and disrupt traditional “high-friction” FI’s with “low-friction” alternatives.

Arguably, the vast majority of investments that FinServ companies are making today in data, analytics, content, and technology are focused on reducing the friction that exists between customers and an organization as they move through their journey.  Firms that reduce or remove friction have to exert less “force” (think reduced marketing and sales investment and resource) to move customers through each journey and encounter less customer resistance (think improved acquisition, cross-sell, retention, customer satisfaction, etc.)

And with nearly $100B in investment in FinTech globally in 2018, there is still a lot of friction in Financial Services business models that FinTech firms and their investors are racing to address with point solutions across the FinServ spectrum.

With Marketing increasingly responsible for leadership in both customer experience and revenue growth in 2019, CMO’s must be able to identify, prioritize and help reduce or eliminate these areas of friction in their Go-to-Market activities.

Technology changes very rapidly.  Customer buying behavior evolves more slowly.  Existing GTM systems are the last to change.  Legacy FinServ firms must become much more agile at identifying and addressing friction in their current Go-to-Market, or risk being disintermediated by more nimble competitors or startups.

So what are your Go-to-Market friction hot spots?

Based on our experience, here are five key leverage points for your consideration to help eliminate Go-to-Market Friction in 2019.

1) Single View of the Customer

Having a single view of the customer that is available to all channels is a key requirement for creating a frictionless Go-to-Market model.  Gathering, managing and maintaining that data from across multiple business units and numerous touchpoints is still a daunting challenge for many financial services organizations today.

According to Dun & Bradstreet’s 6th Annual B2B Marketing Data Report, 56% of the firms surveyed say that aligning sales and marketing data about companies and contacts is very or extremely difficult today.  49% are NOT confident in the current quality of their sales and marketing data.

Integrating this data into a Customer Data Platform, leveraging it and a Marketing Data Platform to support increasing AI and analytics efforts, and making this insight accessible to other GTM applications, processes and channels will be critical for identifying and mitigating GTM friction in today’s multi-channel world.

Small wonder that IBM predicts that Director of Marketing Data becomes the hottest new marketing role in their 2019 Marketing Trends.  Among other responsibilities, this role will “create processes, rules, and procedure to ensure that critical data is collected and integrated into a customer data platform (CDP).”

For more information on the Customer Data Platform, visit the Customer Data Platform Institute here.

For more information on the Promise of the Marketing Data Platform, see here.

2) Marketing Responsibility for the Customer Experience

Removing friction from the customer journey will continue to be a challenge for those organizations that do not have a group responsible for defining, monitoring and improving that experience end-to-end over time.   Increasingly, customer experience is a role for which marketing is assuming leadership –  though interestingly, this area of responsibility for marketing wasn’t even added to the CMO Survey until February 2018.

According to the August 2018 CMO Survey, Financial Services firms already trail all other industries in terms of marketing leadership of the customer experience (33% vs 45% cross-industry average).  The most recent Salesforce State of Marketing report is more optimistic, with 44% of FinServ firms indicating marketing leads CX initiatives.

Identifying areas of friction and providing the personalized and targeted communications that customers expect at each point along the way will require an end-to-end view of that journey. According to Salesforce, 54% of High Performers leverage Marketing as the “Cross-Functional Glue of Customer Experiences.”

Marketing must assume responsibility for the creation of an integrated customer and seller journey framework that aligns each stage of the buying process and the sales process into a unified strategy that identifies and aligns corresponding content and resources – website, customer service, live sales reps, events, etc. – across all channels.  It is also a vital framework for identifying areas of misalignment or friction between the two!

Again, small wonder that IBM predicts customer centricity will drive constant transformation and that companies must develop a cohesive strategic vision for CX “rather than two distinct customer and marketing strategies as independent playbooks.”

For more information on Creating a Consistent Customer Experience, see here.

3) Leverage Digital Listening to Identify Friction Points

Digital listening is a valuable resource for leveraging the “voice of the customer” to identify Go-to-Market friction points in a near real-time way. Many firms still rely on social media primarily for brand tracking and sentiment analysis, and not for the kind of actionable insight that can be garnered about competitors, partner, products and customers.

Today’s digital listening platforms have evolved considerably from the “old days” of social media sentiment tracking.  The depth of insight that digital listening can now deliver is immense. And in the hands of experts, those insights can be translated into near real-time, actionable intelligence that will help identify GTM friction points.

But GTM friction is not just internal or customer-related, so any digital listening exercise must also include visibility into the actions of other industry players, including your distribution partners and your competitors.  Implementing a highly-structured, action-oriented digital listening program will help organizations make continuous improvements in their Go-ot-Market.

For more information on how companies can better leverage digital listening to identify and remove GTM friction, see here.

4) Agile Analytics at Scale

FinServ tends to invest more in analytics than many other industries today.  That said, according to the most recent CMO Survey, the FinServ industry plans to more than double their investments in analytics over the next three years.  To maximize return on these investments, firms will have to become much more agile with their analytics, and more importantly, the incorporation of those insights into their Go-to-Market execution to help reduce friction.

Developing and deploying an agile analytics capability requires developing the right balance between a corporate COE and individual BU teams, and implementing agile methodologies that enable marketers to execute at scale while retaining the ability to shift gears quickly.  Prioritizing activity based on business impact will be crucial. And aligning your analytics teams closely with your marketing teams will be crucial to ensuring a tighter a business alignment and faster time to market.

To learn more about building an agile, results-driven Analytics Organization, see here and here.

To learn more about the Marketing Analytics Family tree, see here.

5) Focus on Enabling the Personal Relationship

Building trusting relationships is one of the highest priorities in Financial Services, and a key differentiator in driving customer acquisition and retention.  For most Financial Services firms, these relationships are personal in nature, and in many instances exist between third-parties and end customers – agents in the insurance industry, or financial advisors in the Asset Management industry for instance.

This can be an area of significant Go-to-Market friction if insufficient investments are made in enabling these relationships.  This “last mile” relationship is where process breakdowns often occur, and customers, channels, and companies are “out-of-sync.”

Eliminating friction in digital channels is much easier given the one-to-many nature of those channels.  In the “emotion” economy, the many-to-many nature of personal relationships is crucial – especially for Financial Services – and ensuring a consistent customer experience across these resources is key to delivering the value proposition.

To learn more about Enabling the Last Mile, see here.

Where will the biggest friction points be in your 2019 Go-to-Market?

 

3 Digital Tactics to Increase your Cross-Sell and Upsell Opportunities

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Most marketers know that acquiring a new customer is only the first step in a long-term relationship. However, cross-sell and upsell activities are often left to sales teams whereas marketing focuses on acquisition. Did you know that having an online presence means you already have an opportunity to upsell using digital marketing? The good news is you won’t need to add anything to your portfolio to take advantage of these advanced sale opportunities, and you can start today.

Emails, social media and your website represent the best opportunities for you to capitalize on online marketing cross-sells and upsells. Keep reading to learn more about how to improve your returns on digital cross-selling.

Digital Cross-Selling: Email

Email is one of the first avenues most brands try for online marketing upsells and cross-sells. With leads and contact lists, as well as customer profiles, email already gives you the right foundation. With email, digital cross-selling and upselling will be a subtle message you either use in existing transaction emails or in standalone emails, such as follow-ups.

In general, upsells perform better within existing transaction emails — standalone emails see better performance from cross-sells. There’s no guarantee about which will work best for you, so consider A/B testing to see if one avenue is more effective.

If you want to start with email, follow these steps:

  1. Define when you will use existing transactional and/or follow-up emails.
  2. Build cross- and upsell emails in your email management system and automate their delivery. Insert transactional emails into existing campaigns, and replace existing follow-up emails with your new cross-sell CTA.
  3. Vary deliveries as you begin. Testing is essential, so make sure you send follow-ups to different groups at different times — such as 5, 10, and 14 days after a purchase.
  4. Link final efforts to events. This varies by industry, but the easiest example would be a vacation reservation service sending a check-in email a week before one of their customer’s trip. This check-in email could also promote auxiliary services such as car rentals, theme park tickets and tourist attraction packages.

Because email is well-understood, it’s a great stepping stone for online marketing upsell and cross-sells.

Digital Cross Selling: Social Media

Marketers often turn to their social media accounts to start cross-sell and upsell pitches because it covers a large area and you’re already working to establish a connection. Studies have also found that people are more likely to make a purchase after brands engage with the customer on Facebook and Twitter.

The main concern with social media is being too pushy. View your interactions on social media as an offer that’s always open, not something you need an immediate answer to move forward. Social media is where you want to share your best deals, but you’ll need to make it clear when and where this applies. It’s also ideal for promoting opportunities for upsells and cross-sells on your platform, especially if you have coupons or specific landing pages that offer your deals.

Use Good Design for Upsells

Digital cross-selling and upselling can take place on your website quickly. The main way this happens is by optimizing each sales page by de-cluttering your site design and using proximity to link products together. If you’re selling shoes, put socks and proper cleaning products directly next to the information about the shoes themselves.

You should also:

  • Clearly list the products you’re trying to cross-sell and use visual cues to tell customers the items are related.
  • Limit your cross-sell and upsell pitches to 2 to 3 items per page.
  • Make digital cross-selling feel like a suggestion, not a demand.
  • Provide upsell opportunities on your cart and checkout pages, or in pop-ups when an option is selected.
  • Don’t make customers click “no” on an offer in order to proceed. This turns offers into annoyances and may lead to abandoned carts.

When you want to achieve upsells using digital marketing, limit your options and provide clear value to your customers. Make sure you de-clutter and provide a distinct advantage, or your attempts will simply seem like noise. Learn more about MarketBridge’s customer retention solution which combines predictive pathways and personalized offer programs that are proven to increase your customer renewals and cross-sell opportunities.

How Marketing Automation Can Help You Better Engage with Customers

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As a seasoned marketer, one of your daily challenges likely involves better understanding your customers.

You know it has never been more crucial to do so, because the only way you can generate demand for your products or services is if you truly offer the value your customers are looking for by solving for THEIR needs.

But putting on the hat of the customer while thinking like a marketer can be puzzling to say the least. Now the influx of marketing technologies available out there make it easier to solve this puzzle. Yet, you still have some homework to do if you want your data collection to be meaningful, because while the goal of a marketing automation platform is to help you generate more qualified leads, it won’t directly solve the problem of understanding a customer’s engagement with your brand. Here’s why…

 

What can Marketing Automation do for you?

A tremendous amount of things, starting with helping you build a wealth of knowledge around your customers. It is both scary and wonderful. Marketing automation does offer a myriad of benefits, and regardless of the tool you are using, a key value of it is having that front-row seat to what is happening behind-the-scenes, such as: Which keywords buyers are using to get to your site, which email they are more responsive to, and most importantly, what kind of behavior, trends and patterns can be pulled across multiple segments of users. You get to know them better at every step of their journey, every interaction they have with your content.

Life just got easier because the data told you what is happening with your specific groups of prospects and customers, definitely putting your marketing efforts in a better place: But is optimizing your next campaign really a “done deal”?

Well… here’s the problem – Marketing Automation stopped there: it told you What, not Why.

It gave you access to better information about what customers are doing, and yes, you were able to track who downloaded that infographic … But you still don’t know why that user never responded to any offers and fell out of your sales and marketing funnel. Why is the business losing a lot of opportunities at a specific stage of the buying cycle?

 

Developing a Customer Persona: A Step Closer To Demand Generation

At this point, you need BIG INSIGHTS. You will need a combination of the quantitative data provided by your automation tool and the qualitative information collected from actual human-to-human interaction.

  • We’ll get to that human-to-human interaction in a minute, but first, you need to capture and understand what happened. Dissect all the data captured, and put it back together to paint “the story” of your different buyers’ journey. You want to look for similarities in level of engagement across your users and group them into segments, netting about 4-5 segments. You may choose to develop groupings of your “new visitors”, or bucket all the users who signed up for your newsletter but only purchased once, or group all the customers who are most responsive to a discount offer you sent via email…The analysis of your data will help you identify segments.
  • Once you’ve identified similar behavior and trends across your groups of buyers, you are ready to develop specific personas. That step involves figuring out- for each of your segments – who they are, spelling out their motivations, trigger points, needs and wants, and taking a closer look at whether or not they are decision-makers or influencers in their market. For the most part, you will be building hypotheses based on secondary research and your expertise.
  • Prioritize your prime segments and reach out to a specific sample to understand why it happened. Marketing automation can help you identify individuals who fell off at a certain point in the funnel, so you can contact them about why their journey ended, capturing their needs and trigger points. Holding interviews to validate and refine your understandings will provide you with greater perspective to your buyer’s interest area, interest level, and stage of the buying process.

That’s the human-to-human interaction, and it is key if you want to develop relevant content that maps back to your specific personas and create better demand generation.

Marketing Automation tools will not replace the qualitative data you need to create interest and change users’ perspectives of your brand – so make sure you spend enough time and effort to collect the BIG INSIGHTS you need to know your customers.

Three things to leverage today:

  • Capture “what happened” – Data from Marketing Automation or Web Analytics will help you sketch what your buyers’ journey looks like, and help you develop customer segments. Look for trends and patterns to build your segments
  • Develop personas, presenting customers’ pain points, gaps, needs and trigger events
  • Select a specific group of individuals to interview them on “why it happened” to validate your insight and use those findings to optimize your next offer for demand generation

5 Website Analyses You Must Conduct Before Your Next Website Redesign

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The time has come for your website redesign. You and your team have been dreaming of this moment for months, even years now. So, let’s roll up our sleeves, toss the old site aside and get the creative juices flowing. But wait! Before you say goodbye to your company or client’s weathered website (probably designed circa 2010), you should take the time to reflect on lessons learned in the form of website analysis.

If you have a web analytics solution on your site, you’re probably already measuring things like visits, bounce rate, average pages per visit and custom events set up to continually optimize site specific solutions. But you may not have thought of leveraging the troves of data your current analytics platform provides to help influence design decisions for the new site. Even if your new website will look drastically different from the former, it can be important to use the data you’re collecting to help guide future design decisions. Here are 5 website analyses that will help in the redesign of your website.

1. Home-Page Analysis:
There are many ways to analyze a home-page, but one great way to visually understand the impact of user navigation is to create a heat-map that shows where visitors are clicking the most. Often you’ll notice that people tend to click on areas “above the fold”, but you may be surprised by what people click on after scrolling down the page. Knowing where your visitors go and don’t go on the homepage will help you decide how to organize that prime real estate in the future. You can also learn where it might be best to feature a callout for a new product or campaign that you are running. If there are any lingering questions after you decide on the homepage layout, set up A/B testing and monitor the results.

2. Page Content Analysis:
Once you have the homepage navigation set, a great next step is a general site content inventory. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many professionals cannot identify their best and worst content by page. By seeing what are the most important sections or pages of your website, a company can prioritize the content that generates the most attention and enhance those that aren’t as frequently visited. A deep dive into your site pages and features can potentially lead to a new navigation screen or a remodeled site hierarchy and structure.

3. Exit Page Analysis:
Just as it is important to know where your visitors arrive, it is equally important to know where they leave. Exit Page Analysis can help with your website redesign by identifying areas where you need to better guide your visitors to the next page. Where do people drop off the most and how can you dissuade them from departing? Perhaps the analysis tells you there are too many steps in an e-commerce site, which leads to abandoned shopping carts. If you have a content site, maybe you can improve it by creating suggested articles. Those pages may need a stronger call-to-actions or potential next steps at the bottom of an article. It isn’t unusual for your most important pages (those right before a user signs up or buys something) to have the highest exit rates, so identifying this is key to an optimized user experience.

4. Traffic Analysis:
It is also extremely valuable to know what type of traffic is coming to your website. A new user who visits from search can have a drastically different objective compared to a user that comes to your site every morning while at work. Understanding how these distinct segments groups navigate the site can give you deep insight into how you can redesign your site to be more first-time friendly, but also how to provide “sticky” features to keep users coming back. By segmenting the Acquisition Type (search, direct, referral, campaigns, etc.), you can identify site content that keeps people engaged with your site longest and make sure to feature this prominently. You could even take it a step farther and dynamically change your site for different user flows to fully capitalize on different visitors’ objectives.

5. Mobile vs. Desktop Analysis:
Finally, one of the most important things to remember when redesigning a site is not only the channel from which a user comes but also the devices they are using when navigating your website. According to a recent study released by comScore, mobile devices (including smartphones and tablet) account for 60% of U.S. digital media time spent. That means at the very least, your site must have a responsive design that renders appropriately for any screen or device size. However, when conducting a device analysis, you may find that it makes sense to adopt the increasingly popular mobile-first design, or even create an app to give users the best overall experience, no matter what device they come from.

 

With the plethora of web metrics available today, it can often be an overwhelming task to begin looking underneath the hood of your website when you want to make significant changes. However, in today’s environment, websites are a critical tool for driving customer engagement, conversion and retention and must not be neglected. By combining useful and pertinent analyses with the latest usability trends, companies can use web analytics solutions to know what their customers are looking for and how to meet and exceed their needs. By evaluating what part of the website your users are looking at, how they are getting there, and why they are coming back, you will have a better, more informed plan when creating the plans for your next website redesign.

Have any other tests or analyses you think are important when evaluating a reconstruction of a website? Let us know in the comments section below!

Learn more analytics tips & tricks from our whitepaper How to Leverage Predictive Analytics in B2B Organizations!