Of all the tools that digital marketers have available to them today, analytical tools are among the most important. With data analytics on their side, digital marketers today can gain deep insights into their audiences, as well as markets more broadly. However, in order for data analytics to be useful, it needs to be used in the right way.
Gain Insights into Customers
With data analytics on their side, businesses can dramatically enhance the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns. One of the most important benefits of data analytics is the unprecedented insights that it provides to audiences. With data analytics on your side, it is easy to gain a deep understanding of what makes your customers tick and how you can leverage these trends for your own benefit.
If you want to get the most out of your data analytics and benefit your marketing as much as possible, here’s what you need to keep in mind:
- Treat your network traffic as a data goldmine
- Don’t assume that you know better than the data
- Avoid blind spots by gathering data from multiple channels
- Make sure that you gather high-quality data and reject junk data
- Track your customers’ shifting priorities
Your network traffic is an absolute goldmine of useful data that you can use to improve your digital marketing strategy. For example, every time you launch a new digital marketing campaign, you will begin generating data. Whether this data is the number of people viewing or clicking on your ad, or the increase in traffic that your website receives as a result, this is all data that you can use to improve your approach.
Sometimes the insights that you gain from your data will run counter to what you think that you already know. When this happens, you must be willing to trust your data and listen to what it is telling you. If you end up drawing erroneous conclusions from your data, it means that either your data collection methods or your analytical methods are not fit for purpose.
Gathering data from multiple channels will enable you to use insights that you gain from one channel to inform your decisions about how you utilize a different channel. For example, data that you gather from your social media campaigns can be used to help you craft content that your audience will respond well to deploy it on other digital marketing channels.
Refine Your Strategy
The primary purpose of using data analytics should always be to improve your marketing approach. You never want your business to be regressive, if your marketing campaigns are becoming less effective with time then it means that you are doing something wrong. With the benefit of hard data from previous campaigns to work with, there is never any reason why you shouldn’t be able to keep moving your campaigns forward and developing increasingly sophisticated marketing strategies.
Where To Gather Data
The first step towards using data to enhance your marketing is to put in place a policy for ensuring that you are capturing useful data as it flows through your business. This is easier for some businesses than others, but it is something that every business that uses digital marketing should be implementing.
- Surveys
- Online tracking
- App-based tracking
- Transactional data
- Digital marketing analytics
- Social media channels
- Subscription and registration forms
Once you start looking for opportunities to gather data, you will realize how easy it is. If you can automate this process to ensure that you never miss any data that you might want to capture then you can be certain that you will have the data that you need when you need it. There are endless opportunities to capture data for businesses willing to seize upon them.
Any registration or subscription forms that you present your audience with, such as when they sign up for your email newsletter, for example, is an opportunity to ask them for specific data. If your business has a smartphone app then this can also be a fruitful source of data that you can automatically collect in real-time.
You should also keep monitoring your social media channels to gain whatever insights you can from them. Your social media profile is one of the most important points of contact between you and your audience, make sure that you take advantage of it.
How To Interpret Data
There is no single correct way of interpreting data. Every business has different objectives when it comes to their marketing and this means that every business is also relying on different metrics to tell them whether they are on the right track or not. A business’s objectives will determine the way that they analyze and interpret the data that they gather. Understanding how to interpret data for specific purposes is an acquired skill that requires a professional in data analytics.
There is a school of thought that views data analytics as being as much of an art as a science. As this article from Emerson College notes,
“David Featherstone (1967-2017), former Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at UIC, argued that even science is based on this same need to understand and describe the world, organize data, and share it with others. “Science = Art. They are the same thing.”
This is why data analytics is an area of study that attracts people who think logically and mathematically, as well as those who are better at thinking creatively. A well-rounded data analytics team will include both types of people so that you can benefit from the full range of perspectives available. The best marketing campaigns are rooted in numbers and data while also being creative endeavors.
With the right approach to data analytics, there is no limit on what marketers can achieve. A data-driven approach to digital marketing is always going to be more effective than an uninformed strategy. Every digital marketer working today needs to understand the importance of data analytics and how they can use it to inform and improve their strategies and campaigns.
