One Hour Marketing, Week 1: Get to Know Your Visitors

Note from Andy: Susan Tatum is the latest addition to the Cranking Widgets writing team. She has over 20 years of experience working with technology companies and is currently a marketing consultant, and my partner, at Clicks ‘n Conversions. Susan believes, quite strongly, that any sustainable marketing program must be process-oriented and measurable. She’s been a fantastic mentor to me and I’m confident her insights will be of great value to our dear readers here.

After reading the first few installments of Aaron’s weekly series on preparing for The First Hire, Susan felt inspired to write a weekly series showing freelancers and business owners ways to spend an one hour per week building a basic marketing program. These posts are meant to be short, sweet and actionable. We both agreed The Cranking Widgets Blog was the ideal place to publish the series.

Start with the Basics: Website Analytics.

“Website analytics” show you how many people are coming to your site, how long they stay there, what they do while on your site, where they come from and how they find you. All you need to do is add a chunk of JavaScript to your website

I’m starting week one with analytics because it will generate valuable information in the weeks we’re working on other things. We’ll use this information to optimize marketing performance in future weeks.

While there are many options for tracking this information, I recommend Google Analytics because a) it’s easy, b) it’s free and c) it gives you all the data you need to get going.

Go Install Google Analytics

If you’re not already running some sort of analytics on your site, follow the link below for a step-by-step guide to installing Google Analytics. Fair warning: this step may require the help of your web guy.

http://properprocess.com/public/67/process-for-installing-google-analytics-on-a-website

If you are already running analytics on your website:

Spend your hour this week reviewing your data to understand where you are now. Look at trends in particular. We’ll come back to this in more detail in Week Four.

If you don’t have a website:

It’s hard to imagine any company that can do well without a website these days. If you don’t have one, I encourage you to get one. (Here’s a  list of questions to answer before you talk to a web designer.)

Next week: Your Ideal Prospect…

That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll showing you how to spend an hour reviewing your current client base to identify your ideal prospect.