In this interview, Grant Osborne, General Manager of FIRST Digital NZ shares valuable insights on growing a business in an increasingly competitive and constantly evolving digital space with fellow Marketer, Ryan Jennings of The Ryan Marketing Show.

Here are some of the valuable insights from this takeaway-packed interview.

 

 

Building A Conversion Driven Business With Data: 15 Key Insights from Grant Osborne

 

Some of the points discussed in the marketing interview were following:

• One of the challenges businesses have around analytics and data is having confidence in the data. Some don’t have data while others are drowning in data. But they don’t have the confidence in their data for whatever reason for them to actually use that to drive things forward. And so, a lot of what FIRST does is around education, training, understanding what actually is the data saying and helping businesses be confident with their data.

• The key is to always start with the data. You can get quantitative data in Google Analytics to understand your drop-offs along your conversion funnel or the checkout process. You can then develop hypotheses around key observations. Your qualitative data can come from onsite surveys, onsite click maps or user testing. At FIRST, we do all of these to get real insight into what people are thinking.

• In doing surveys, we’ve been blown away by people’s responses. You would think people that pop-up onsite surveys are pesky and would just close them. But actually, a lot of people want to give their two cents and if something is not quite right to them to complete what they want to do, they’ll provide the feedback. Often the feedback that has come through from there has actually been more on technical issues than anything. Like, the functionality doesn’t allow them to do something.

• We found that because New Zealand is a smaller country and have lower number of sessions compared to the ones from other countries in the industry, we struggle to achieve significance in the results from tests. That’s why for New Zealand, we need to go for bigger changes to the site sometimes to show statistically that yes that has made a difference.

• One of the mistakes that businesses make is to try to bring anything they change back to revenue. They make the change on the landing page and they evaluate the effectiveness of the change by the revenue. What we try to do here is to see what is the next thing you want them to do from the landing page which maybe to complete a search or complete a newsletter sign up. We’ve got to say what is the next step that we want them to do and then evaluate that. Keeping in mind an overall but sometimes we’re testing and your overall conversion is too far apart to actually be meaningful.

• We found that most businesses often don’t really have a good idea of who their customer audience are and what journeys they take.

• People go through their inspiration phase, and they’ve narrowed it down to a few companies. They then want to find more information and they’re in the mode to purchase and they’re finding themselves in a search engine. So, for most clients that that media mix starts with Search. And starting with the core things that are highly relevant to the business.

• Search should be always on for every client whether that be paid organic or a mixture of both it should always be on. In addition to that, we also believe that remarketing should be always on as well.

• What’s interesting with where Google is going, is that a lot of their real estate has shrunk. It’s now more than 60% of users who search on the phone rather than on desktop. There’s this huge opportunity to take your competitor’s slice because not a lot of businesses in New Zealand even advertise against their brand name. So if someone searches their brand name, there is no paid search result. Especially in mobile, that page search result real estate is so incredibly important. You should own the brand, own the keywords most core to you because again that real estate is all you see first in mobile.

• For 2017-2018 marketing, mobile is and will continue to be the primary device for users. We see that through the data. Data will be an integral part of all marketing campaigns. Online businesses and retailers need to be able to understand and be confident with their own data. But one can get overwhelmed with data and find themselves drowning with data they can’t get insights from.

• So, there is a need for simplification of data. Simple data is in some ways more powerful than big data. That is only going to come if you understand your objectives, your goals and be able to bring it back to exactly what you’re trying to achieve.

• There is a need for data to not exist in silos but to be interconnected to provide the best online experience for customers.

• Over the next few years, we’re going to see an AI (Artificial Intelligence) bot change that changes consumer behaviour that then in turn pushes all the businesses to catch up with that.

• The key for most businesses and agencies is to be agile and adapt quickly to emerging consumer trends and be constantly innovating.

• Data should be used to personalise experiences because those relevant and customised messages and experiences are what customers would respond to the most.

 

Your turn: Ask Grant

Feel free to ask Grant some of your burning marketing and business growth questions. Give us a call at +64 9 9201740 or fill out the fill out the Contact Form below and let’s throw some ideas around.