How does a customer come to be a customer? That is obviously the key question for a marketing person, because marketing is about making the journey to the cash register as smooth and as solid as possible, and supporting it with good content.
But in a world of abundant google analytics it’s easy to think that just because something is easy to measure precisely, there’s no need to measure, or even think about measuring anything else. That I believe is a big mistake. In real life people weave in and out of the digital world in a manner of their choosing, not necessarily according to your official customer funnel diagram. In fact the customer funnel is an illusion. A better model might be a pin ball machine or a tornado spout. (It’s even been described recently as a pretzel).
Someone clicks through the site and then drops off your analytics trail. But how do you know they didn’t then pick up the phone and speak to one of your agents before placing an order? You don’t.
They read your content and go to a competitor site. A day later they tell their client, with a different IP address about both. Their client then invites you to tender. How do you track that journey? It’s tricky.
But you can ask questions. Simple questions from your sales agents taking inbound calls, like “How did you get our number?” or “Have you found anything interesting on our website?” It’s not easy but I think it’s time we tried harder to build a fuller richer picture, one that bridges the digital and the real world. We need to remember that analytics are a great tool, but they’re only half the story.
Until we have this, we’ll have all the precise answers, they just won’t be for the questions that really help us.