Crush your Marketing with Profiles

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In the last two blogs, we recently unpacked several areas that sales and marketing teams need to pay close attention to. Valuable Metrics for Sales and Marketing Teams You May Be Missing and Key Metric Comparisons Exposing Marketing Health.

Now we’re going to shift gears and talk about profiling. We will look at five areas, all of which provide tons of metrics and insights to help you profile your constituents at various touchpoints throughout your marketing ecosystem. Let’s start with Google since it is probably the largest data set and the most common.

Google Analytics Profiling

Google Analytics provides more information than you could ever want, and it may not be a 100% clear profile snapshot of your primary persona. That’s why we need to find out the primary and even the secondary profiles are that are being captured by Google Analytics. As you know, this is the foundational metric view for your website visitors, where they came before visiting your website and how they are behaving while they are on it (to name just a few). Get a crystal-clear picture of this data set. Take a look back 1-2 years and get a glimpse of trends. Now start looking at Google Analytics weekly moving forward. You will soon have a good idea of who’s visiting your website and who isn’t. Make sure to record this data, you will need it later.

Social Media Profiling

Your company’s social channels are laden with insights. Peek under the hood of your LinkedIn, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, or Instagram Audiences to name a few. You can learn a whole lot about age, interests, behaviors, professions, engagement with certain types of content and so much more. The key here is to make sure your social profile closely aligns with your brand’s primary persona – otherwise, you may want to re-think your social media strategy.

Now, take Google profiling data and all your social media profiling data (for each channel); look for trends, common data sets, and even uncommon sets as well. If your Google Analytics data closely mirrors your social, and both of those closely mirror your persona descriptions – you’re in great shape. But not too fast. That rarely happens. You want to measure and record these weekly to look for trends that are seasonal, trends that follow content publishing and trends that follow the market dynamics.

Market Profiling

Your market profile and also your primary persona profile are integral to understanding if your Google and social media profiles match-up or not. Market profiles are broad-stroke definitions of the market you and your competitors are in. It’s a big bucket of information, and your brand’s persona profile is just one of the many in there. Typically, industry analysts and the media that support your industry can be great places to find accurate information representing your market profile.

Persona Profiling

Your persona profile is not aspirational; it’s a clear picture of how your business defines a customer so your sales and marketing team can pick them out in a crowd. Since they are your current customers, you need to know what makes them unique? what makes them tick? What motivates them to purchase? How and where they communicate? Where they hang out online and offline? What their problems and pain points are and how to remedy those. There are many criteria you need to consider. Keep in mind, your sales and marketing teams may identify several (3-5).

Lead Profiling

Every company wants to lead score and profile every inquiry. Not every company does it well and accurately. If you’re not doing it on the front end (pre-sale), then make sure you obtain all the data needed (post-sale). A lot of companies that have valuable info use the post-sale method (in my opinion it’s an easy way out), but at least you are getting the information. Take this information and also align it with Google, social, market and persona profiles. Combined, these will provide you with an insightful look at your customers who are visiting your brand asking for information. It will also provide a snapshot of who’s in the market.

Common traits in lead profiles are key; look for them, document them, train everyone on the sales and marketing teams to know and understand them and most of all spot them when they knock on your door and request information. PRO TIP: Lead Profiles, in theory, should be a cross-section of all of your profiles. Take time to see what the most common characteristics are from all profiles and continue to browse through these to look for commonalities. You may see that social media yields a little different type of customer profile.

You may be asking, how does profiling fit into the current theme of metrics? Great question. Every marketing team needs to establish a profile and not just one. By looking at the data provided from a cross-section of these areas listed above (Google, Social, Market, Persona, and Leads), and using the analytics they provide, you will be able to see common data sets – these are the secret sauce you need so your sales and marketing and be most efficient and effective.

Outside the common data sets, you will also find channel-specific data sets that are organic to that specific channel. Let’s use Social media/Facebook as an example. Your Facebook profile is telling you that your audience is different than Google Analytics. Understanding these differences will help you connect and engage more effectively.

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Scott MacFarland is the Director of Marketing for HMY Yacht Sales in Jupiter, FL. He’s an advocate of exciting new ventures, digital marketing and transformation, transformative learning, and how to continue to be at his best in today’s digital marketplace. Scott has had the opportunity to work with some amazing business leaders, all of which were instrumental in his perspective and desire to continue growing through business change.

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