Turning Symptoms into Sales for Your Small Biz

So many small business owners make the mistake of misdiagnosing business issues due to focusing on the wrong symptoms. Today I'm sharing how I pinpoint the symptoms of problems in my business with tools and data. We talk about the use of analytical tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Hotjar to collect meaningful data on website traffic, user behavior, and email marketing effectiveness. We also discuss how our email marketing stats and post-sale feedback can help. Next, we examine common hurdles at various sales funnel stages—from awareness to action—highlighting problems like insufficient traffic, poor traffic quality, weak brand messaging, and technical issues. Using our data at different points through the stages of the customer journey makes it easier for us to make effective decisions in our business and close more sales. 


00:00 Introduction: The Common Mistakes of Small Business Owners
00:27 Identifying the Real Problems Behind Business Symptoms
01:23 Harnessing Data to Diagnose Business Issues
01:44 Essential Tools for Gathering Business Insights
02:07 Deep Dive into Analytics and User Behavior
03:36 Leveraging Email Metrics for Business Growth
04:49 Utilizing Customer Feedback for Strategic Adjustments
05:56 Navigating the Sales Funnel: Common Problems and Solutions
10:35 Conclusion: Making Informed Decisions with Accurate Data

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Transcript

Kate (2): 0:14

One of the biggest mistakes that I see small business owners make is diagnosing problems in their business by looking at the wrong symptoms. Hi, I'm Kate with dear Kate brand strategy. I've been a small business owner now for about 13 years, and I love helping other small business owners grow through their business journey. By sharing the mistakes that I've made And helping you bypass some of that messy middle. Today, we're going to be talking about finding the right data and the symptoms of problems in your business and how we can more accurately diagnose what's going on so we can fix it better. The most common example I see of this problem is in like Facebook groups or whatever. When someone's raised their prices. And then all of a sudden they feel like they're not getting inquiries. They're not getting sales and to them, the thing that's changed is their pricing. So they automatically assume that, oh, my prices are now too high. I can't book clients at this price. I have to do something. I have to bring my pricing back down, but they're really not seeing the full big picture of what might be happening. It really could be a whole host of issues that are happening though, as you've increased your pricing that are causing this lack of inquiries. For example, It could be that you're still targeting the lower budget clients and you need to speak more to the people that have the money to spend with you. It could be that you have increased the value of what you offer. You've increased the price of it, but you haven't increased your explanation of what it is that you offer. It could be that people are not even seeing that pricing page, that you're not having enough traffic or eyeballs on your site to even get to that pricing page. So it's not the price, that's the problem. It's more of a traffic and visibility problem. So today we're going to talk about a few ways that we can conquer this. It's really important to have the tools and metrics in place so we can get an accurate picture of what's going on in our business and our marketing day to day And what the overall big picture is. We need to know how people are actually interacting with our business as well. let's talk about a few of the ways that I gather data, what I look at on the backend of my business. And how that helps me gauge what's working and what needs to be tweaked. First step, I would recommend installing Google analytics and Google search console. These are tools from Google that will make it easier for you to see which pages are being visited on your site. how many visitors you're getting to your website? What search terms are driving people to your website? These help you to know how many eyeballs are actually seeing your work and what you can do to increase that traffic number. What SEO things are working and what you need to maybe double down on. The second tool that I recommend is Hotjar. This is a really cool piece of software that you can install. there is a free version. If you're a show at user, you'll grab a piece of code and you'll pop it into your advanced settings Under custom head HTML on every page of your website. With this piece of code Hotjar will be able to track how people are interacting with your website. It will give you screen recordings of exactly what people are clicking, where they're scrolling, how they're coming in. What sources referring traffic to your site? All of that juicy detail, plus you'll get like a real, listic live version of how that's happening. I love to see how people are scrolling, what they're reading and you can watch like people's mouse move. You can see what they're clicking. You can see how people get from one page to the next, and then ultimately where you're losing them to. You can also get heatmaps with this tool. Those are more of a snapshot. It gives you basically a full page screenshot of your page, and it shows you how far down a page. Most people are clicking. It's giving you averages. So, um, like say 10 people have visited your site in the last 30 days, it'll show you on average how far those people have made it down the page, and it'll show you where the most people are clicking on, on that page as well. It's a really great tool to just get like a visual reference of how people are interacting with your website. I do recommend that in addition to the Google tools, um, because like search console really shows you. What search terms are driving traffic to your site. How many people are seeing your site as an impression in search results, and then how many people are clicking to your site from those search terms? The next piece of data that I'm going to look at is going to be email statistics. I'm going to look at how many people are coming into my list every week, every day. Which of my opt-ins are maybe driving people. I have a few different lead magnet options for people. And I want to see which ones are performing the best. And then From that I can look at the email sequences that I have for each opt-in and kind of get a feel for how people are interacting. I also like to look at my statistics on my weekly broadcast newsletter type emails and see. How many people are clicking. Which people are clicking. I like to look kind of further back at the data on that. Like if they signed up for my website checklist opt in, and then they clicked on the link for this thing or. If they signed up for the report card and then they seem to be more interested in my templates, whatever it may be. It helps me kind of judge. Which lead magnets to go to which people, and get a feel for how people are consuming my content and interacting with it. It also gives me a good idea of like maybe my lead magnet is not targeting the right person. Or maybe the content that I'm putting out leading to that lead magnet is not connecting with the lead magnet if perhaps like people are landing on that landing page. And then not opting in for that lead magnet. Those are good ways to kind of look at the different pieces of things. The last thing that I'm going to look at is my real customer feedback. Once I've gotten an inquiry. I want to look at what is that they're reaching out to me for. I want to read through that inquiry and be clear on what it was that attracted them to me. And that helps me know how to like, put more of that out into the world to get those people. Um, I also ask on my inquiry form, how did you find me? So I know which marketing channels are really working. And where people are looking for services like mine. This also follows through with our post-purchase, like after the sale, after the service has been completed. I like to send out a survey either. Individually to clients, or once a year, as a whole to all of my clients to get feedback on what I'm doing, right. What they would like to see different, what drew them to me in the first place. All of those little pieces of information helped me know where to go going forward. If it was a client that I really loved working with, I want more feedback from them because I want more people like them. I want to know what attracted them, how to get more people just like them into my doors so that I can continue to work with those great people. When we have all of this data, we can get a more accurate picture of what's going on. We also want to look at this data through the different lenses of where people are in their customer journey. Let's talk about some common problems that happen throughout a sales funnel. First, we're going to talk about the awareness stage. Next is the interest stage, the desire stage, and then the action stage. In that awareness stage it's going to come down to three problems. First is going to be not enough traffic. You're not getting enough eyeballs on your site to make any kind of movement. There's not enough people seeing your offer to start converting. You have to have a certain number of eyeballs before it even hits the right people. So Making sure that you're getting enough traffic to your offers. The second one is going to be the quality of your traffic. So if you have eyeballs coming, but they're not the right people, you are not going to get the sales there either. For example, if you are driving a lot of traffic to your newborn photography page and you do post newborn photography, but all of the people that are coming to it are really specifically wanting that lifestyle. Documentary look, you're going to have a disconnect between who's coming to the page and who the offer is for. So making sure that you're really clear on in your marketing efforts and getting the right people to that page, Which goes to the third one, which is weak brand messaging. So we're getting people to the page. We want to make sure that the message is clear. We want to make sure that our offer and the people coming to it align, And that we're conveying our value. If we're not conveying the value of our offers, people are going to drop off a lot quicker. Next up is the interest stage. So in this stage, some of the problems could be a lack of engaging content. We've got people here, we can get them to kind of see our value. We've got the right people on our page, But there's no content to keep them flowing through. There's not enough there to back up our credibility and build. That kind of relationship between the viewer and our business. In this stage, another problem can be a lack of follow-up or poor follow-up. at this stage, they've expressed some interest in your business. They're inquiring and maybe the response that you're giving them, the inquiry response, isn't answering all their questions. Isn't timely enough. Um, or. They need a little nudge post that first inquiry email. So if they are inquiring, you're sending them an inquiry response and you're not following up again to say, Hey, did you get my email? Um, that could be another place where you're losing people. Another thing that can be happening in this stage is tech issues. So it could be something like their emails are landing in your spam. Your emails are landing in their spam. Or you don't have systems in place to make sure that they're getting through the right funnel and getting the information that they need. When we come to the decision phase, it can be a couple of different things here as well. Perhaps there's just not enough information on the product or service. Maybe you've responded to an inquiry email, and they're not getting all of the data that they need to make that decision, or perhaps your sales page has just not enough detail for them to get to that final. Yes. It could also be that there's a lack of social proof. If you don't have testimonials or reviews, it can be harder to build that trust with people. The third thing here under the decision stage is going to be your competitive advantage or disadvantages your competitors disadvantages. Here we want to make sure that we're explaining how our offer differs from our competitors. And maybe things that they've tried in the past before, a lot of times people are coming to you because what they've tried previously, hasn't worked and we need to acknowledge that that is a real circumstance. And the final stage, the action stage, a few things that are stopping people from buying are hidden costs. So maybe there's a shipping fee or taxes that they didn't realize were going to happen. There could be, a lack of payment options. So maybe they need a payment plan or they need to use PayPal or, um, a credit card or a check. And those are not things that you've thought to offer. Uh, those are ways that we are stopping people from buying as well. Another thing that I've come across in my own buying journey as a customer. Is not being able to use a credit card that's already like stored on my phone or whatever, and I have to get up and get my wallet. And then I ended up not buying because it wasn't an easy process for me. So anything that can make that checkout process less complex, easier. Is a huge benefit to you as a business owner And something that we often maybe overlook. It's a great idea to run through your own checkout process multiple times and see how it works. I would also recommend. Um, again, if you're using Hotjar you can look and see like people are getting to that checkout page, but then they're not buying. You can kind of see what's stopping them from buying their two. No across all of the stages, there are some things that can happen. It can be inconsistent communication, or like a lack of clear message that follows from that interest to buying stage. We want to make sure that our voice and our message are clear across all of those channels. it makes it easier for people to buy and it builds that trust. The other thing that can happen throughout is that, uh, responsiveness making sure that you're responding to inquiries quickly responding to DMS and all of those things as well. Those things will help you get people through that sales funnel more effectively. So with all of those data points that we've installed and that we're looking at regularly, We should be able to kind of diagnose these problems. Throughout our sales funnel more clearly. And when we have all of that data to back up our decisions. It makes it easier to make decisions. It also makes our decisions more effective. I hope this has been helpful in letting you see how you can diagnose some of those problems in your small business, by looking at the actual symptoms and not just kind of what we think might be happening, what we've changed. Um, and getting that real raw data and really diagnosing what those problems are. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of how you pictured it. If you found this episode to be helpful, I would love for you to share it with a friend, take a screenshot of the podcast and share it to your Instagram stories. Tag me at dear Kate brand strategy. I'd love to hear your thoughts as always. You can support the podcast for free by subscribing and leaving a review in whatever podcast player you're listening in. Thanks so much for being here. I can't wait to talk to you again next week. Have a great day.