If I asked you where the majority of your customers or clients find you, would you be able to give a concrete answer? Maybe it’s something you don’t think too much about? If you are lucky enough to have a steady stream of enquiries or sales, it can be easy not to bother asking where your customers are coming from.
However, if you’re spending a lot of time and/or money on your marketing, you might start to wonder if you really need all these different channels. And nothing is more frustrating than not knowing if your hard work creating videos for social media is actually making a difference.
Finding out where your customers are coming from can be a real game-changer for your small business in a lot of ways. So, let’s explore how it can help you and where you can get this information in the first place!
The benefits of knowing the source of your sales
There are multiple benefits to knowing where your customers are coming from. The first, and hopefully most obvious, is that it helps you understand your customer better!
By knowing how and where they are finding you, you can learn more about their interests, lifestyles and preferred platforms. By understanding this, you can better plan for the future.
Having a grasp on this allows you to focus on the marketing efforts that actually work! This way, the time, effort and money spent is going into the things that will deliver the most valuable leads.
(Who knows, you may find that the newsletters you love writing get you a great number of clients while all the content you created for Instagram has nothing to show for – so you finally have a reason to focus on the former and drop the latter. It’s a win-win!)
Also, knowing where your customers are coming from allows you to streamline the types of enquiry you receive! You can analyse where the majority of the enquiries that really fit with your goals come from, and put your effort into them moving forward.
You can also use this knowledge to try out new things and test different messaging. If something is working well on one platform, you can test how that works on another. It can open up whole new possibilities for your marketing. You can even set yourself more specific goals per channel or per campaign, because you have existing data to work from!
And finally, armed with this information, you can react to changes in consumer behaviour or the overall market better. When you know what avenues actually work, you can far more quickly start work on a new campaign to give your business a boost. Or it can give you a much-needed early warning to shift your focus if one of your most popular marketing channels is starting to dry up.
I have a whole post dedicated to how to measure your marketing as a small business owner – check it out next!
Ways to find out where your customers are coming from
1. Platform analytics
In many ways, platform analytics are worth their weight in gold. From Google Analytics to the built-in analytics with social media platforms, you can gain some really useful insight. However, it isn’t quite as straightforward as it used to be!
Due to privacy settings and data security implementations, you might not get the full picture these days. Due to things like ad blockers, secure browsers blocking third-party cookies and GDPR cookie banners, a lot of information is now withheld depending on choices made by the user. While these things are great from a security and privacy point of view, it does limit the information you can access.
Users have to actively give consent to their data being tracked. This means even if they just ignore them, the result is the same. No tracking data for you!
It’s also an unfortunate reality that bot and spam traffic are on the rise, and this data can really skew the picture for you.
And on top of all of that, it’s no secret that social media platforms are rarely showing posts with links these days. This is a huge and complex topic, one that Rand Fishkin did a fantastic deep dive into in this article. I highly recommend checking it out to get a better idea of what we’re up against.
However, all is not lost! There is still data to be gained from analytics, you just need to be smart about it.
For both online and print campaigns, be sure to use a UTM tag to track campaign URLs (which stands for ‘Urchin Tracking Module’ – how’s that for pub quiz knowledge?) A UTM tag is a short code that can be added to the end of a URL to give Google Analytics more information. Part of that information? Where the traffic is coming from!
There are also alternatives to Google Analytics that might be worth looking at. For example, I have found WordPress’ Jetpack stats to be often closer to reality than Google Analytics. And there are GDPR-compliant analysis tools that don’t use cookies and are great at filtering out bot traffic as well.
They are not free, but I have found them worth checking out if you want to know what you’re getting out of your marketing. Here’s a good overview of cookieless analytics tools.
2. A contact form
Adding a question to your contact form or checkout process is such a brilliant way to get answers to where your customers are coming from. The form is going to be a key part of your website anyway! You might as well make it do this extra work for you.
Whether your website or online shop is built on a platform like Squarespace or you have a custom-built site, forms like this are really customisable. You can play with the wording and format to make it as easy for your clients to fill in as possible. The nice thing about asking at this point of enquiry is that the customer is already coming to you – you do not have to reach out and ask. This makes it less invasive than something like a survey (see below).
A couple of tips: I prefer a drop-down menu to radio buttons as it takes up less space on the page and works on both desktop and mobile devices. Also, try and avoid including “other” as a category. It’s such a common addition to the list of options but it’s a real wasted opportunity.
Of course, you could create a mandatory field where they have to list what the “other” thing was. But that just adds to the workload you’re putting on a potential customer before they’ve even bought from you.
3. A survey
Now, I said that a contact form is less invasive than a survey, but that doesn’t mean you should count out this option! There are so many different ways to do a survey these days! It can be a really useful way of finding out where your customers are coming from.
One option is to ask the question in a survey format on your social media channels. You can do this using a question box, asking people to give a brief response, or simply choose from a poll. This is minimally invasive, as they will stumble across it while scrolling on their social media. Being less direct in this way, not everyone will necessarily answer! But any responses can be helpful.
Alternatively, you could create a survey via email and send it out to everyone on your mailing list. You can use platforms like Typeform or SurveyMonkey to build your survey and include as few questions as you like.
This is a more direct approach, landing right in their inboxes, so it might produce more results. However, it is also asking more of the customer; you’re asking them for a favour! So you need to be providing enough value in other areas for them to make the effort!
4. Ask your client directly
And finally, it seems so obvious, doesn’t it? To find out where your customers are coming from, if given the opportunity, ask them directly!
Don’t be afraid to do this! It isn’t an awkward question and most people will be more than happy to oblige. Be sure to ask them where they first remember encountering your business, and about the journey they then took to booking you/buying from you. Did they book right away or did it take a while for them to make the decision?
The best way to make this happen is to make it part of your routine. For example, it could be a question in your onboarding process for new clients or you can talk about it in your feedback session after completing a project. If you’re automatically asking for a review after a purchase, simply ask where they found out about you in the same email.
And, of course, don’t forget to collect the data so you can access it whenever you want and can see changes over time as well.
So, now you have a few ways to find out where your customers have heard about you. Just imagine how much more effective and fun your marketing will be once you know what works and what doesn’t!
FURTHER READING
If you are interested in reading more about this topic, have a look at these:
How to Reach Customers Sooner in their Journey
Customer Focused Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
How to Identify a Target Market for your Small Business
How to Find Out If Your Marketing Is Working – Marketing Analytics for Small Businesses
