Today, data is an essential component of any good digital marketing campaign. Metrics such as conversions, traffic sources, and cost per click have a massive range of potential variables that can be analyzed, making it more and more essential for marketers and business owners to be able to identify the data that is the most important to the business. Marketing decisions that are driven by data are not only becoming more essential, but will also have a number of benefits, enabling the company to achieve faster and better results and improving the return on investment. So, how are data-driven marketing decisions made?
What Does Data-Driven Marketing Involve?
Marketing analysis or data-driven marketing is a process that businesses and marketers use to measure and learn a wide range of different things about a company and its customers. You can use marketing analytics for anything from the simple website metrics to huge datasets that you can base an entire marketing campaign around. Paid advertising, for example, is a common strategy that businesses will use marketing analytics for today. When a company is investing money into marketing the brand online, it’s important to carefully analyze the data and get a clearer idea of who they should be targeting and which ads are having the biggest impact and bringing the highest ROI.
Marketing analytics can help you make better decisions for marketing strategies and campaigns in the future by providing you with essential information regarding who your target audience is, what they are searching for when they come across your brand, where they are located, how they behave, what they are interested in, and more. This information allows you to carry out much more sophisticated targeting of your target audience and put together marketing campaigns and strategies that are ultimately more likely to be successful.
Using Data to Answer Key Business Questions
Preparing for marketing analytics careers using the programs available from Emerson College will often start with teaching students how to utilize data to get the answers to some important business questions. For example, you can use data to understand the platforms that are providing the best ROI to the business, to figure out which kind of online content gets the most engagement with your audience, and where you are likely to get the most value for ad spending. A business can use the data that it collects to make improvements to their website, for example, by finding out which areas of the website are leading to the most conversions and which are having the opposite effect, making it easier for web developers to figure out where updates need to be made for the best results.
Using the data that a business collects to find answers to these questions, it’s possible for marketing professionals and business owners to gather clearer insights into their audience and the business itself. This provides them with data-driven evidence that they can use to back up any decisions that they make in the future.
Using Data to Find New Opportunities
Collecting and analyzing data from various sources can also make it easier for businesses to look further outside of their current marketing campaigns to find new opportunities. For example, data that is gathered and interpreted could make a business owner or marketer aware of a surprising and new source of traffic that’s yielding high conversions recently. Data from ad campaigns can help you determine which marketing strategies are providing the highest product return rates, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments as quickly as possible and find out more about the situation rather than allowing it to worsen while you are unaware of it.
Combining Marketing and Sales Data
Marketing and sales are often viewed as two separate departments; however, removing the barriers that are often present between the two can help business owners and marketing professionals get a more comprehensive overview of the customer journey from start to finish. As a result, combining the data collected by both the marketing and sales teams can make it easier for you to determine the impact that these departments are having on one another, which can lead to better decisions for both in the future. For example, combining data allows you to determine which marketing campaigns tend to lead to the most sales, or which sales tactics you use can bring in even more revenue or build your customer base further through word-of-mouth marketing.
Learning About Your Target Audience
One of the main uses for data in marketing today is using demographic data to find out more about who your ideal target audience is and what might resonate with them the most, allowing you to make more strategic and data-driven decisions in marketing campaigns, sales campaigns, and customer engagement strategies. When you’re not using data to find out more about your target audience, it can often be difficult to determine what will work and what won’t, leaving marketing professionals and sales professionals with a lot of guesswork and trial and error to do before they find something that works well.
However, using publicly available datasets to find out more about key details of your target audience such as household income or spending habits can help you build a strategy for marketing your product or service in a way that they will be able to relate to it. Using data to find out more about your customers can also make it easier to segment them into different lists based on various demographic factors, making it easier for you to offer personalized and tailored marketing to each group.
Drive Email Marketing Success with Data
Data analysis is often regularly used within businesses of all sizes to get better results from email marketing campaigns. Every year, the research suggests that email is still the top marketing strategy for businesses and the strategy that tends to deliver the highest ROI, but this tends to only be true for those businesses that take the time to analyze data when putting together email marketing campaigns. If your marketing emails are going unopened or thrown straight into the trash, chances are that you are not utilizing the data available to you to ensure that your emails are opened and that interest is taken in them. By analyzing the data, you can find out more about which marketing emails are performing better than others and why, providing you with further information for better decisions in the future.
Data for Measuring Success
In the past, buying cycles on the internet were quite linear and direct. However, the online buying cycle for both products and services have become more and more complex over time. As a result, it is not always the marketing campaign that is the deciding factor as to whether or not a customer will make a purchase. Data analytics allows you to measure your success and determine which parts of the buying cycle are the most important by tracking user behavior at every point along the way. You can use this information to create funnels and monitor the steps that users take, making it easier for you to determine which steps tend to be the biggest contributors to users leaving the cycle before becoming a customer. This makes it easier for businesses and marketers to determine exactly where adjustments need to be made in order to encourage leads to complete the buying process from start to finish and convert to customers.
Data for Better Customer Engagement
Today’s marketing is not all promotional. In fact, when marketing on social media and other online platforms, experts suggest that the content you post should be 20% promotional and 80% engaging. While in the past, marketing might have been more geared towards bombarding potential customers with all the information on why they should buy a product or service, how it could help them and how much it costs, today it’s more important to encourage leads to become customers by engaging with them and forming a strong relationship.
By gathering and analyzing data from sources such as social media, a business can determine how their customer engagement strategies are having an impact on the marketing process overall. Data can help you determine what people are saying about your business online and the type of interactions regarding your business or even with your business that are more likely to encourage users to make a purchase or sign up.
Business Predictions Using Data
Finally, gathering and analyzing data can put marketing professionals and business owners in a better position to make accurate predictions for the future. While it’s impossible for anybody to see into the future, data analysis allows you to get as close as possible by getting a clearer understanding of consumer behavior and looking into past trends to try and determine what might happen in the future. Using historical data and predictive analysis allows you to anticipate how users might respond, which in turn can lead to better decision-making, adjustments and more.
Today, data is one of the most valuable assets that a business can own. Using data analysis, you can learn a great deal about your company and your customers, making it easier for you to make decisions that lead to success.
