The Strat Blog

DAY 1

How many of us have to use Google Analytics without having any training or courses? I bet we are millions of those. Google Analytics is a great and necessary tool, and on top of that it is free. It provides so much information but who is using that information and who know what is available?

I have faced those issues myself and I still do so I decided to explore the tool with you and try to understand all of the MUST of it.

So the first thing I will do is to try and understand all the different tabs available, before I explore them. For each section I will provide you and overview of the section and a use case so it helps you to see how you can use it for your own business, how it can help you to improve your customer journey or draw your digital marketing strategy.

Dashboard / Tableau de bord:

In this section, you can build dashboards that you use one a day to day basis and that will contain the main KPIs that are necessary to drive your business. You can have multiple dashboards and in different formats. Each business have different priorities and this will become really handy when you will understand the other sections of google analytics I will show you below. Indeed by understanding them you will identify what is the most important for your business and what KPIs you need to reach your own business.

Intelligence Events / Evenements d'alerte:

This section you will help you to be proactive and spot the good and the bad related to your website.

You just need a bit of configuration and you will be able to receive some alerts when your figures drop under a certain level OR receive alerts when you reach some targets.

Use case: your website is still small and you need to see on a regular basis how you progress and need to be proactive when your audience decrease significantly but also when you reach some targets. You can for instance:

- Configure an alert when you reach that day where your number of users per day is above 10 000

- Configure an alert if at a point of time you have less than 10 000 sessions in a given day.

And the tool is so well done that you can even restrict your alert on a country for example or even a city.

Real Time / Temps Réel:

This section is providing the KPIs regarding connections on your website right not.

Use case: You just launched a big marketing campaign and you would like to see if the users reacted to your campaign and if yes get additional details such as: where they are from, where they are coming from (source of the users), what pages they are currently reading.

Audience:

This section is giving you insights about the people that are reading your pages and navigating on your shop. It tells you how many users you reached - not just in a real time basis on a longer period (from the moment you configure your Analytics). It tells you as well how many sessions you have, where are those users from, what navigator they are using, how they arrived on your page etc etc...

Use Case: Your website is not responsive yet or it is but you did not spend a lot of time yet to check the experience they have on other devices than their own laptop. So you would like to understand the devices that are used by your readers so you can optimise their experience on those decides. The same way it is important to understand the country they are from so you can focus on the country that has the biggest audience or decide to make more efforts on a country that is weak.

Acquisition:

This section will give you a deeper analysis of where your users are coming from. It will not just tell you from which country they are. It will also tell you the key words that drove them to your website.

Use case: did you make the right investments in term of marketing? If you spent a lot of money in Facebook ads or Google ads, did the audience coming from those pipelines increased as much as you hoped?

Behaviors / Comportement:
This is providing you additional information related specifically to the pages. it helps you to understand your customer behaviour, i-e in which page they love to go. It can also help to identify the pages they dislike thanks to the exit KPIs. Indeed you may need to understand on which page your users are when they leave your website so you can try and find some ways to retain them.
It also provide you KPIs regarding the main researches that are done on your website. Isn't it vital to understand what they are looking for so you know what you need to source, what you need to market more and make more visible?
Use case: Let's imagine you have a physical shop. In that situation you need to understand which sides of your shop the customers are watching the most and where they never go. At list that will help you to try and find some solutions to attract people in non visited area, and optimise the content in the corners they love to go. It is exactly the same thing with a website.

Conversion:
This is useful only for E-commerce and it can be one of the most powerful you can have without reminding you it is free. this section will help you to monitor your objectives, and mesure how you reach them and most importantly how you convert your traffic to money.
Use Case: Remember that it takes more than 1 visit on your website to convince someone to buy something on your website. And the same person can come from different channels, using different tools. You need to understand it so you can optimise your digital strategy, adjust your customer experience on your website etc...
It needs a bit of configuration that we will do together.

The most confusing with Google analytics when you are not used to it is to understand the terminologies that are used and what information exactly is being a KPI. But the good news is that a lot of the same terminologies and KPIs are coming back a lot of times. they are just calculated in different angles and different dimensions to provide you different insights of a global landscape.
My next article will be a lexique of the KPIs you need to know.

Hope this gave you a view on Google analytics and some of its capabilities. You will see, there are a lot to take from it and every business should spend a bit of time to understand it on a regular basis - if not every day.

Wrote by Unknown

Do you like chess? I do! and you know what? I find a lot of similarities between companies and chess. To win in chess, you can be 1- lucky and play with bad players or 2- Have a real strategy. And when you are playing you need to think about your strengths and weaknesses but also your opportunities and threats.

When you look at a SWOT, the information provided seems so obvious that some people may think it is a piece of cake to draw it. Even though it seems simple, it is actually a very picky and detailed job that needs to be done carefully. We get the complexity of the task when we are in front of the white paper and asked to do this exercise.

Indeed it is complex because if you really think about it, the SWOT is a key element of a strategic analysis of your company or the market. So subsequently, the quality of information provided is fundamental, and finding the right information starts by asking the right questions.

So I decided to cover the SWOT and give you some few advises on how to do it. Those advises are based on my last experiences as I had to do this exercise myself. So they are based on a real case and I picked the tips that really helped me to make this exercise a success.

We are going to answer to 2 questions: What information to get and where to get the information from.
The SWOT provides details about Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat and this article focuses mainly on the Strength and Weakness section. I will cover the other points in my next articles. So let's go!

What information to get?

These are few questions you can try to answer in order to define the strengths and weaknesses of your company. For each answer to those questions you will have to define if the answer is a weakness or a strength.

MARKET ENTRY: What is the market entry? Is it easy to enter in it or not? How long would it take to a competitor to do what you are already doing?

COMPETITIVE MARKET: How many competitors do you already have? How are you positioned?

MONETARY ASSISTANCE: Is it easy to raise some money in your industry? Check your competitors, how much they raised when.

LABOR COST: Is your labor is expensive? For example you can compare it with the labor costs of your competitor. Do they have outsourced teams?

R&D INVESTMENT: Is it a high cost or not?

INFRASTRUCTURE: Do you have a strong infrastructure compared to competitors?

RESSOURCES AVAILABILITY: What are your resources availability compared to competitors? Basically if you and a competitor have to develop a similar product, how fast can you develop it compared to your competitors based on your resources?

NETWORK: With which partners do you work VS your competitor and how big is your network compared to theirs?

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: Do my competitors propose professional services and am I able to propose professional services?

SUPPORT: Do I have a dedicated support team? Am I fast in answering to customers support requests? Where to get the information?

Where to get the answers?

This was the less obvious step because the quality of information needs to be great. I did struggle on this myself, because most of documentations you find about strategy will tell you how to draw a SWOT but they don't really tell you how to get the details to feel it. Talking to different strategists and also based on my experiences so far, those are few advises I can give you

Internet: this will probably the most obvious source. But internet is quite big and you need to be carreful because you can find some great information as well as some WRONG information. And this last one is where the danger sits. Check and redouble check your sources as much as you can. Go on serious websites. Some of my favorites are: Gartner, Xerfi, Financial Times.

Financial Reports: they can look boring but can be a real gold mine as they are supposed to contain information like the company strategy and financial situation. Only very few people from the company are reading them, which is a shame because they are where we can find a LOT of details about the company. Also think about the financial reports of your competitors. They can help you to understand your competitors strategy and what they were up to the last years.

People: this is one that one of my friends that is also strategist suggested to me. And when I was told this, I was like: "actually why not?". Who knows better what is not going right in the company than people that drive it on a day to day basis? Each individual in your company has a piece of information you need. Now: information from human is not always objective. They are there to be challenged and you really need to be open mind to take in consideration ideas / opinions that were not what you thought but don't take either every word that is said to you like granted. Basically: take the information for analysis and try to compare / challenge / validate them with real facts and figures.

Internal documents: if you are in a big company you will probably find a lot of internal documents that can help you to identify the company's weaknesses and strength. But let's be honest it is much much harder in startups where there is no internal documents or at least no official internal documents. You can maybe try to get some details from the company's CRM or the company's reporting system.

And you, do you have some other sources of information for your SWOT? Please leave a comment to share tour experience :)

Next time we will talk about the Opportunities and Threats and I will also try to give you a real example. See you soon.

Wrote by Anonymous

The first best way to mesure your business success is a growing turnover. Yes, but unfortunately there are not a lot of businesses that will earn lots of money from the first day or even the first year and it does not mean you failed either.
That is why it is important to have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and KPIs are not limited to turnover, benefits or Sales figures only.

Being a very young startup and not having big teams is not an excuse to not have KPIs and as per my experience so far it is not a luxury to set them right from the beginning. This is true as well even if you are working alone. I think it is even more important because when you work alone you need to mesure your progress to not loose motivation.

After we launched All Made In France, we set a list of KPIs. I will describe you in this article how we chose them, and how they helped us.

How we selected our KPIs

First of all we chose KPIs that are not complex to calculate. The main reason is that we do not have a lot of time to spend on that for the moment (like every startup we have very limited resources).

Secondly we tried to select one or two for each department: for example one for Sales metrics, one for social media metrics, one for our digital metrics. Those KPIs will obviously change and the more you grow the more indicators you will need to mesure your performances.

The tools we use to support it

KPI is relevant only when the information is accurate. That's why we chose some tools to help us easily calculate some of those KPIs. One of our favourite tools for social media statistics for example is Crowdfire (that I listed in my top 5 apps for entrepreneurs here).

Then you have the obvious list of tools that provide you great KPIs like Google Analytics or Twitter analytics.

Application

These are examples of KPIs you can choose for your startups. Some of them are the one we track for All Made In France (discover the launch of the All Made In France MVP here) and the other startups I am working with

Sales:

Number of leads or prospects. This helps you to quantify the prospection job you do. I think it is important to measure your leads growth capacity.
Number of converted prospects. The point of conversion is totally your choice. It can be a purchase (conversion to a customer), it can be a first exchange with the lead. It has to be the first important milestone you target. So for example if you created a new app and you are trying to get people to test it, the conversion point will be the trial conversion.

Social Media

Followers: When you start what you can track is your capacity to attract people and it will be mainly measured by the number of new followers or like, whatever the social media you chose.

Website

I will write another post to explain all the basic website indicators but the most easily and first important milestone is the number of Unique visitors and the average time spent on your website. Then when you get better to it, you can start checking conversion rate.

Blog

The number of views: obvious KPI.
Your blog is usually used to then attract people to use or see your products. So the second important metric is to measure the number of clicks to your website from the blog.

As soon as you have your KPIs set some goals.
Start with monthly objectives and do not hesitate to check your measures on a regular basis. Those help you to boost yourself and your team. There is no such a better way to progress than trying to reach objectives.
Don't set the objectives too high but not too low either: set them slightly higher than what you think is achievable.

Wrote by Unknown

A lot of companies invest in social media but still struggle to get the added value and the return on investment. In a lot of cases, social media drives adoption or improves the company's image but applying a figure to the ROI is very complex.

Do you know that you can use Twitter as a lead generator?

I have used Twitter since a month now as a prospection tool, and the result in term of conversion rate is really good. I felt like I needed to share it with you. Those little tips will help you to get some good prospects. It may takes time so you will not get thousands of leads in a day but you will generate good quality leads.

1- Engage your prospects before prospecting

Sending a salesperson to talk about their product is what all the companies do. Eventually the prospect will listen to you. In a lot of cases, they are annoyed to listen the salesperson before he even started talking.

With Twitter, it is great because you can start engaging a conversion with a prospect and create a relationship before you start selling anything. It is a real one to one nurturing stage that is even better than sending an email that is nothing personalised.

Find your prospect, talk to them, ask them questions about what they like, what they are looking for. When the relationship is getting better and you start to be familiar with your target then you start talking about yourself, your product and how you can help them.

2- Understand what they like

One to one nurturing is long: you cannot build a relationship in one or two days. So if you want to make a good qualification of your lead, take the time to read their tweets, retweets and favorite. It becomes even more interesting when the twitter account owner retweet his Instagram and Facebook feeds. Pay attention to their emotions, their questions. Have a look! You will see it is really rich in information.

3- Conquer the customers of your competitors

What is great with social media is that there is no gate between you and your competitors. With twitter you can easily access to the followers of your competitors and start building a relationship with people that are maybe a customer of your competitors, maybe a prospect.

The other good thing is that the followers are always sorted with the last person that followed the twitter account at the top. You can then easily identify active followers.

This is a very simple exercise you need to do everyday during 10 to 20 minutes. Go on your competitors twitter, and find the followers in their list that may be interested by your concept or your product.

4- Bring value to them before you even start dealing with them

Anyone on Twitter values a lot a new follower, a mention, a retweet or a favorite.

If you work in a B2B market and if you retweet the content of your prospects, they will somehow like you. Indeed any retweet increase their awareness as the potential view of their account / and or product increase.

I will personally get interested by someone that is interested by what I do.

Twitter is usually managed by the Marketing department. In my experience that is the first big error that companies do because it could actually be really useful even for a salesperson. In addition, it can really be used as a competitive advantage, especially because of the fact that a lof of companies are not using twitter in their best advantages and you can really make the difference by just applying those basic tips.

Wrote by Anonymous

One of the hardest things in entrepreneurship is to maintain your motivation all along your adventure. Even if you deeply love your business idea, there will always be some situations where things go wrong, or at least things do not occur like you wished them to. Obstacles will be all along your way and you will need to stay strong to face them the best you can.

Entrepreneurship is all a question of having a strong mind. Strong enough to not give up. Strong enough to not listening negative people telling you that it is not realistic or too risky. Strong enough to not be sad when you have to work hard while some others go on holiday. Strong enough to understand that your family does not go the same pace as you. Strong enough to face suppliers that are awaiting to be paid, or unhappy customers for factors you cannot do anything about as you don't control them.

This is my coping method. I wanted to share it with you because it works well for me so far. I call it the "Epic win a day". As you probably know I run my business ventures at the same time I work full time. So I don't have time to do everything every day. I need to organise myself to be efficient enough and see progress but I also need to make sure I don't fall in a burn out.

I recently wrote an article about doing 10 actions a day, mixing hard and easy tasks. "A epic win a day" is complementary of this technic and it is about doing one hard task a day.

What is an epic win?

I saw that terminology in a TED video. This is the definition Jane McGonial gives about it:

"An epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive, you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it".

Take a look at the video. She does not apply it to entrepreneurship specifically but it is very inspirational.

How to achieve one epic win a day?

1. Make your list of 10 actions a day. At that level you have only a vague idea of their complexity. At least one of those actions may be more complexe than you thought. It may be so complex that it will take a lot of time to achieve. Allow yourself one and only ONE complex task to manage each day.

2. Go from the top of your list and try to do each of them. And this is the important first rule: If you already spent a lot of time on one of the tasks you planned, don't block on that task for now. Delay it for the day after. You need to achieve it the day after but you don't need to make more than one difficult task a day.

3. You now need to tackle one of those complex tasks. You know you are capable of finding the solutions. Stick with this problem no matter the time takes and get up after failure and try to resolve it again. And remember: once this one is achieved, you need to manage simpler tasks and if the next one gets hard as well postpone it for the day after.

And what if it is so complex that you want to give up? Few tips:

Go on the next task of your list and then come back to this one when you are more relax.
Take a break to make a call, go online and spent a bit (I said a bit) of time on social media
Do something you like for few minutes (except smocking :D)
Basically: give a break to your brain and then try again.

Endurance Race

Why is it so important to limit yourself on one problem a day? Because your brain is not capable of managing too many complex problems in a day. It is much much more efficient to do one thing great than lots of things in an unperfect way.

This is like running. It is not only a question of being first at a single sprint race. it is about doing an endurance race. You need to spare yourself and also get satisfaction in what you are doing.

Don't try to put a lot on your shoulders in a short period of time. Be the best of yourself in a long run.

Wrote by Anonymous

DAY 1

What information to get?