Making Decisions With Data
The sheer amount of data that’s available to the average marketeer today is breathtaking. The savviest of marketers tap into this resource to help form their digital strategy and make more informed decisions on a regular basis. Here’s what data can influence.
Budget Management
Staying within a client’s budget and providing the agreed Return On Investment is one of the biggest challenges a marketer can face. Data is your friend. Used correctly, it will help create a more focused and targeted campaign that keeps you firmly within budget.
We now have access to instant ROI analysis. Is your PPC campaign not working as expected? Change it. Social media advertising not directing traffic as hoped? Cancel it. Having real time data allows us to make instant, reactive decisions without wasting resources or burning through a pile of cash.
User Experience
We spend a lot of time and effort driving traffic (in other words, potential customers) to our desired landing pages. It’s therefore counterproductive to have your visitors suffer through terrible site navigation once they get there.
User experience is a key factor that all marketers must constantly consider. If you’ve done all the hard work of actually getting people to your site, don’t lose them with poor UX design. There are plenty of tools that allow you to track on-page activity through heat maps and user recordings. The data enables you to finetune the user experience and increase the likelihood of a conversion – tools such as Hot Jar are great with this.
Competitive Advantage
The beauty of data-driven marketing is the ability to access vast amounts of data about your competitors and use this to gain an advantage. All this data is freely available – it’s not an underhanded practice.
Tools on the market allow us to use predictive analytics, track rankings, interactions, social following and so much more. Knowing how you rank against your competitors will shape your future marketing strategy. Use this data wisely though – don’t simply become a “me2” entity. Identify niches; products and content that nobody else offers. If all you did is mimic others, then what value are you offering?
Better Content
Every marketer knows that content needs to be relevant and valuable to their readers. If you create content that doesn’t offer value, you’re wasting your time and effort.
Data can help here too – you can actually use it for your next content piece. By analyzing the performance of existing content, you can figure out what turns readers into customers. Google Adwords’ keyword planner finds relevant words or phrases that people search the most for – you can use these to come up with your next blog post idea. You can also use Google Analytics to track and measure whether or not that blog post was a good idea and just how well it performed.
Understanding Audience
Finally, marketing data provides us with the capability of knowing the geographic location of current or potential audiences. Combined with social networks, you can get a much clearer understanding of your end users – this means you can produce content they’ll find useful and are more likely to share with their friends.
For me, the big difference between traditional marketing (tv, radio etc.) and digital marketing is that the ability to track, monitor and report pretty much all aspects of every campaign. With so much data available, make sure you’re tapping into it. If not, hire somebody who knows how.