5 Steps To Planalyzing

If you're a small business owner, it's safe to say you're using analytics of some sort - counting hits to your homepage, monitoring reads of your blog posts, checking email open rates, or tracking in-store sales.But did you know that you can plan your week or month using your analytics so you work smarter and maximize your sales and marketing efforts?Yep, it's called PLANALYZING and yes, I made that word up. Basically, planalyzing is planning using analytics and you can do it in 5 easy steps.STEP 1: Decide what you're going to analyze.If you're a blogger, you could look at traffic and post read stats.  If you have a company website, you might look at how many hits to your landing page convert to sales. If you're sending out marketing emails, you could check out your open rates and click-throughs. If you're a brick & mortar store owner, you might track your new product sales. And you might even want to track several of these.Some of the analytics methods you can use:

• Google Analytics (a personal favorite of mine)
• Clicky
• Alexa
• A homemade sheet for B & M stores (feel free to print a copy out - then, you can make a copy for each employee and one for total store sales)

STEP 2: Gather your analytics: After a month or more of using analytics, it's time to take a look at them.So, print out your online analytics (most analytics programs allow you to download a file - do that and then print them) and gather up your handwritten analytics.STEP 3: Get out your yellow highlighterNow that you have your analytics in front of you, it's time to notice what you notice.

• Do your Wednesday blog posts get the most reads?
• Store traffic down on sunny days?
• No one opening your marketing emails on Mondays?
• Are sales down since you added a slow-loading video to your landing page?
• More subscribers since you created a "Why Subscribe" button?
• Clothes flying off the shelves on Thursdays before date night on Fridays?
• Average unit sale waaaay up since you hired your newest salesperson?

Spread out your analytics and start looking for trends or big fluctuations in your stats. Found 'em? Good, now highlight them in bright yellow.STEP 4: It's PLANALYZING timeAlrighty, you've got your analytics trends highlighted and ready to put into a plan.Using the trends you spotted in STEP 3, create a weekly or monthly schedule for yourself to maximize your sales & marketing efforts and utilize your down-time wisely.Just some of the things you might plan:

• Schedule a month's worth of marketing emails on your best open days & don't deviate from that
• Use your "down" days to catch up on emails or clean your house. ;D
• Push some of your slower moving merchandise up front on your busiest sales day
• Publish your blog posts on your best traffic day and spend the other days that week on Twitter generating buzz about it.
• Stand out in front of your store on sunny days & invite people in for a cool drink conveniently located next to your newest merchandise.
• Switch up your landing page so your call to action grabs visitors better & faster
• Have your best salesperson teach your other employees her sales hook and then hold a contest on a slow day to see who can sell the most items per sale

STEP 5: Lather, rinse and repeatTo get the best results from planalyzing, you should keep tracking your analytics, tweaking your weekly & monthly plan and finding new trends that'll help you maximize your sales and marketing efforts. So...how will you planalyze for your business? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.