Business Slowing Down? Revamp Your Marketing Materials With Advanced Sales Analytics
With the slow creep of winter approaching, many businesses begin to shift into somewhat of a hibernation mode. Oftentimes this is natural, so there’s no need to fret if it’s your first time experiencing the winter slowdown. But it does provide a golden opportunity to fine-tune your marketing materials and sales analytics strategies so that come spring, your business has adapted and is ready to go.
Winter is the time to build up your analytics department, which is crucial for any business trying to keep up with its market. Constantly refreshing your database allows you to gain the latest insights into your industry. As a result, you can then make decisions that are in line with market realities.
Of course, transforming your business into a data-driven entity requires investing in analytics tools for your sales and marketing teams. Marketing insights are the core of every successful business, and basing your decisions on this data can help you reach the right audiences, get ahead of the competition and determine the most effective marketing methods for your business. Tracking metrics like growing patterns, purchase behavior and social media activity over time helps you pinpoint these trends and build around them.
Basing all the decisions your company makes on data also helps you look clear-eyed at your operational strengths and shortcomings. Human beings have their biases, and may wrongly attribute success or failure to their favored or disfavored methods. Using cold, hard data to drive your decisions can dispel these misconceptions.
Consider These Advanced Sales Analytics
There are a number of ways to conduct these sales trend analyses. Sales trend analysis, predictive analysis and prescriptive analysis all have their uses and should be used in combination with each other to build a holistic overview of company metrics.
Conducting a sales trend analysis entails reviewing historical revenue results to search for specific patterns. The method is useful for financial and budgeting analysis, as it helps indicate early signs of changes that may impact revenue. Filtering by customer, region and even product can provide a more granular view—and the more detailed, the better.
Meanwhile, predictive and prescriptive sales analytics approaches look forward to the future. Predictive sales analysis creates algorithms and patterns based on historical data and can be used to forecast and anticipate prospective clients’ behaviors. The analytics tools that come with advanced presentation software like Ingage are particularly useful for predictive sales analyses. By tracking engagement metrics such as completion, slide views, and time spent on slides in a presentation, you can predict what parts of a presentation—and thus your business—pique potential leads’ interests most, and adjust accordingly.
Prescriptive sales analytics then go a step beyond just generating insights or studying leading sales. At this step, you then have to prescribe specific actions to raise the odds of expanding or closing deals.
All three of these analyses strategies work in tandem with each other. You can’t prescribe without both predictive and historical trends. Likewise, all these predictive and historical sales trends are useless if you don’t implement changes based on them. But all data is useful data if used correctly!
Leveraging Advanced Sales Analytics To Improve Marketing Materials
Once you’ve deduced these trends and decided what they mean for your operations, it’s time to put them into practice. Use the winter downtime to revamp your marketing materials to align with the data you’ve gleaned.
Using the information you obtain from engagement metrics, you can predict what will and won’t be most impactful to include in your digital catalogs. While the beauty of the digital catalog is that you can include an overabundance of information that wouldn’t fit into a short presentation, you need to know how to organize it to maximize engagement. Information needs to be presented coherently, and in a way that stimulates the viewer to keep exploring.
Structuring your digital catalog to maximize engagement means embedding links and monitoring tags to suggestively nudge your viewers in the direction they want to go—even if they don’t know it yet. Embedding links in product pages directs prospective customers to their preferred products. For example, you don’t want to make your clients go back to the homepage every time they need to explore a new category. Anticipating your client’s actions is part of smart design. Whether it’s a new or returning customer, they need to be led through the masses of information on offer.
Monitoring tags can then help you keep track of views going forward. The handy thing about digital content is the ease with which you can track engagement, and strategize forward accordingly. Having a convenient way to see click rates on products can help you re-sort your catalog to maximize sales. Use your first analytics assessments to then build collateral that enables more sales tracking: it’s all about the data!
Launch Data-Driven Marketing with Ingage
Wouldn’t it be nice if there could be a tool to combine all these necessary steps into one easy platform? Good news: there is! While legacy presentation software was often not much more than a collection of slides, next-level software like Ingage is built specifically to help you build the most efficient data-driven presentations possible.
For example, the analytics features allow you to forecast and conduct predictive analyses so as to build personalized presentations for clients. No one likes to be bombarded with irrelevant information, and clients can smell a generic presentation a mile away. By collecting personalized, per-client data, you can cut through the clutter and get them what they want.
On top of the robust analytics features, Ingage also has top-notch interactive tools to help you build the most dynamic digital sales collateral. Features like interactive buttons, compare pages and video and web page embeds allow you to break away from traditional page-by-page linearity and build rich multimedia content that your clients will find interesting, helpful, and convincing.
Once you’ve built these presentations, Ingage’s Teams feature also allows your sales and marketing teams to share and update information in real-time! Everyone on the team has access to digital collateral, so they can collaborate as the analytics data changes. The cloud-based interface means everyone has access to the newest tools and information, all the time.
Take advantage of the slow season to revamp your marketing, so that way when spring comes, your team is ahead of the curve. Versatile, forward-thinking presentation software like Ingage can help improve your sales strategies and marketing materials across the board. Contact Ingage today to set up a free demonstration of their suite of game-changing tools and features!