Last year almost 600,000 new businesses were launched in the UK. Increased competition is making it tougher than ever and marketers do not have an easy job on their hands.

Traditionally, marketers have focused on measurements such as clicks, unique visitors, leads and opportunities. Whilst these metrics are important, businesses will need to focus their marketing activity further afield if they are going to survive. Thinking more strategically and asking the right questions is key.

But what are those essential questions marketers should to drive their business forward?

1. What captures your buyers’ interest?

What customers ultimately want to know is how your product or service is going to solve their problem. As simple as it might sound, this is often overlooked by senior business leaders who just want to promote their vision or new and shiny product.

By finding out what your customers’ pain points are, you can capture the attention of your buyers. It’s not important how big or small the problem is, by identifying the pain point and then addressing it repeatedly across a variety of mediums, you will successfully grab the attention of your customers.

But how can you discover what these pain points are? It can be done simply through the use of advertising, landing pages, social media outreach and data collection.

2. How quickly did you give customers the ‘wow moment’?

Customers need to see value in your product and get that ‘wow moment’ quickly. We are living in a world where everything happens at pace and the advances in technology have increased the expectation of customers. Buyers need to see value from choosing your product and results need to appear rapidly.

It is fair to assume that people are not always kind to technology. We want it to work well and we want it to work instantly. The best marketers will be able to identify exactly what value looks like to their customers and deliver this as fast as possible. Is value a smooth set-up process? Or perhaps, the first time they see results from the product? Whichever it is, by tracking how quickly each user gets to their unique valuable moment, it will then be possible to work out how to speed up the process.

3. Are customers engaged with your product?

Collecting data is essential to find out if your customers are actually engaged with your product. The first step is to ensure that tracking and analysis are set up for the features and activities which are most important in defining how engaged a user is. After this is done, the data can be analysed to look for trends which will show how likely a customer is to keep using your product or to leave.

Organisations can then develop a strategy to win over those customers that are on the cusp of leaving.

Using data to find out how your customers are using your products allows you to determine between those who are just users and those who are truly engaged and using the product/service in a way that positively impacts business outcomes.

4. Are customers telling other people about you?

It is all very well having customers that are actively using your products or service, but if they are not telling other people about you, how are you going to win new ones? Once you have customers, it’s key that you take the necessary steps to turn them into advocates for your business.

Encouraging and tracking customer advocacy, like all other aspects of marketing, will be data-driven. For example, you could track a customer’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) over time. This identifies whether or not a customer would champion your company and how much they like your product. Ideally, this will be set up to run ongoing assessments on a bi-annual basis, allowing you to track how NPS is changing over time and to act accordingly if it starts reacting negatively.

There are also other ways to track advocacy which can help focus marketing teams on the right activities. For example, at Looker, we track how many times customers or partners mention us on their own social channels, blogs or at speaking events. With this information, we have been able to come up with a number of ideas around how we can get more people engaging with us.

Overall, marketers need to ensure that they capture their buyer’s interest, wow them quickly, keep them engaged and encourage them to be advocates. All of these steps are dependent on data analysis which is the real way which marketers can create business value for their organisation.

Looker offers a data analytics solution to help organisations make data-driven decisions.