When Private Equity investors take on a new company, they’re looking for growth potential. They want to see where the company can grow and how quickly that growth can happen. Digital growth is one of the most important indicators of future success for a company.
To find out where a company has digital growth opportunities, you need to thoroughly analyse its digital presence and the wide market it operates in. This will give you an understanding of where the company can improve and where it’s performing well. It will also help you to predict future performance.
Conducting a Digital Growth Scan
There are four key areas you need to look at in order to evaluate a company’s digital growth: organic rankings, campaign success, audience analysis and competitor analysis.
Organic Rankings
Does the company rank highly on search engines for relevant keywords? It’s hardly a shock to learn that Google is the most visited website in 2022. In fact, Google is estimated to process around 8.5 million queries per day. It’s the way most people find information about products and services they’re interested in.
If a company doesn’t rank highly on Google, it isn’t meeting anywhere near its full digital growth potential.
Using a tool like SEMRush, you can check where a company ranks for relevant keywords. Once you have this information, you can start to work on improving the company’s SEO. Are the titles and descriptions accurate and up-to-date? Is the site easy to navigate? Do they publish relevant content regularly?
Campaign Success
What kind of online response is the company’s advertising getting? Marketing campaigns are generally designed to do one of these things:
- Increase brand awareness,
- Improve customer relationships,
- Drive sales,
- Generate leads
- Or any combination of the above.
So to measure a campaign’s success you must first identify what the campaign’s goals were.
If the goal is to generate leads and drive sales, you’ll need to measure the number of leads generated and the cost per lead. You can do this by looking at the campaign’s click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate. The CTR is the number of times people who saw the ad clicked on it. The conversion rate is the percentage of people who saw the ad and then went on to buy something from the company. You can get is data from the campaign’s Google Analytics account.
If the goal of the campaign was to increase brand awareness or improve customer relationships, the process is a little more involved.
Measuring reach or the number of likes and comments a campaign generates doesn’t paint the full picture of campaign success. You want campaigns to reach a lot of people, but that’s only useful if those people are potential customers. You want campaigns to drum up conversations, but you also want those conversations to be positive.
That’s why, when it comes to analysing campaign success, it’s important to get deeper insights that take customer sentiment, emotion and loyalty into consideration.
At Symanto we offer tools and services to give you a multi-layered, in-depth view of online conversations. Using advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology, Symanto reads between the lines of social media posts, reviews and news articles to identify the customer sentiment and emotionality, and get accurate insights into things like recommendation, intent and customer loyalty.
With these insights you can decipher whether campaigns have reached the right people, and whether they’ve had the desired affect on them. Which leads us to the next key area for analysing digital growth.
Audience Analysis
Who is the company’s target audience? Are they successfully communicating with them?
One way to analyse your audience is to look at demographic data. Where are they located? What is their age, gender, education level and income? You can find out this information using a tool like Google Analytics.
But demographic data only tells you so much. To get a deeper understanding of your audience you need to know what they care about and what motivates them. What are their interests? What are their values? And more specifically, which services and features of your product do they care about the most?
This is where NLP comes in again. Using our technology, we can help you understand what people are saying about your brand, product or service online. We can identify which topics and features are being talked about most, and how people feel about them. This information is invaluable for 1) tailoring content and marketing campaigns to better connect with your target audience and 2) for product development as you work to align your product features with customer wants and needs.
Symanto can also derive key psychographic data from short text excerpts. For example, a review can reveal whether a customer is emotionally or rationally driven, or whether they process the world more through experience or information. These insights can help you better understand how customers interact with your brand and product, and what kind of messaging will resonate most with them.
Competitor Analysis
A brand’s digital growth potential is dependent on how they compare to its competitors. Are they lagging behind or leading the pack? Are they dominating online conversation? Is there an emerging brand that’s starting to steal market share?
Thankfully, there’s plenty of publicly available data that can give you insights into how your brand is performing relative to your competitors. Using the tools mentioned above, you can measure and analyse organic rankings, share of conversation, customer sentiment/emotion/psychographics, net promoter score, and much more to give you a complete picture of how you’re performing and where there are opportunities for growth.
Armed with this information, you can make data-driven decisions about which areas to focus on to improve digital growth.
Summary
Digital growth potential can be found by analysing a company’s
- Organic rankings,
- Campaign success,
- Audience analysis,
- And competitor analysis.
Tools and services like those we provide at Symanto can help you measure and analyse these areas to get insights that predict future performance. With this information, you can make data-driven decisions about where to focus your efforts for maximum impact.
Get Started With Symanto
Using Symanto’s advanced and innovative NLP technology you can go beyond traditional metrics and get valuable insights into digital growth potential for your current portfolio or new targets. Start making more informed decisions about where to allocate your resources for maximum impact with Symanto. Get in touch to learn more.
