Competing for Customers
Ultimately, a brand must sell something to a customer in order to be a viable entity. The result of this requirement is that brands and the people who manage them must convince a customer that their product or service is superior to the offerings of competitive brands. An enormous amount of information exists in books and online about competitive strategy which oftentimes is fairly generic and brand managers must interpret how to best apply this knowledge.
Information about customers and prospects is a critical element in closing the loop. Understanding who your customer and how they think enhances the ability of brands to "win" that customers heart, mind and wallet. In the course of my consulting, I have access to the Google Analytics for a number of my clients. By studying this data, you can learn a huge amount about your customers.
I have a client that manufactures the Litter-Robot (www.Litter-Robot.com), a $299 self cleaning cat litter box. The company does a significant amount of its sales direct to the consumer via the Internet and I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out why visitors come to the website, how they use the information and how to turn more of them into customers. The following are some of my admittedly non scientific observations:
1) A huge amount of visitors are looking for self cleaning cat litter boxes on company time. I guess that it is no secret that much online shopping happens during work hours and for selfish reasons, I wouldn't want that to stop.
2) International visits often represent 10-25% of daily traffic. This amazes me how flat the world has become so quickly. How do these people in dozens of countries around the world learn about the Litter-Robot and other products I am involved with. Obviously, an increasing amount of information is coming from sources that are not originated ion the visitors home country.
3) Can customers be segmented by employers? The following compares how many visits for a company it took to generate 1 sale:
4 General Electric
10 Hewlett Packard
2 Hyundai Motor Company
6 NASA
1 Temple University
2 University of Connecticut
I don't know if you can draw any conclusions from the above numbers like university folks being well educated and ready to buy or Hyundai Motor visitor being more aggressive than visitors from GE or NASA. Could Hewlett Packard coming in at 10 visits per sale indicates a culture that moves cautiously or slowly. Heck, even the rocket scientists from NASA can make a decision quicker than the ink jet folks.
4) Can Google Analytics be a source of competitive information? Here's a couple of data points that I'm currently pondering.
Microsoft accounted for 39 visits and no sales. could it be that Microsoft is considering entering the self cleaning cat litter box business? Or is this a function they are considering for the next version of Vista?
Goldman Sachs viewed 20 page views and didn't make a purchase. Perhaps they are planning to make a billion dollar acquisition of Automated Pet Car Products, the company that manufactures the Litter-Robot.
5) Drilling down in page views and time spent on the site can also be revealing.
Someone from the Air Force Material Command viewed 17 pages in a 37 minute visit. You would expect someone who is involved in buying materials for planes to thoroughly evaluated all the information. On the other hand, someone from the Air Force Flight Test Center zoomed through 24 pages in 36 minutes. Must be a Top Gun used to speed compared to his counterpart in the Materials Command.
What does this all mean? The better you know your customers, the best you are likely to do to win their business. Google Analytics provides a rich source of data regarding buyer behavior it the wise competitor will tap into it for insight,
posted by Michael Sick @ 11:01 AM
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