Team of business people discussing digital marketing metrics report and return on investment. In today’s marketing world, decisions are no longer guided just by hypothesis and past experience. Influential marketing ideas are now determined by analytics and big data. By utilizing past data and predictive analytics, businesses can now generate better return on investment (ROI) and provide insights that can lead to effective business strategies and decisions within an organization, not just in the marketing department but across teams.
Having The Right Data
Having accurate data is essential for making effective marketing decisions, but having too much data can actually harm your marketing strategy if not utilized correctly. You should start with your key performance indicators (KPIs) and work backwards.
Key performance indicators represent measurable values which give an indication of campaigns’ performance. All decisions for marketing initiatives should have a goal whether it be more visitors to the site, registrations, email collections, click-to-calls, etc. Whatever the goal is, your KPIs should be helping to support the objective.
Knowing Your Audience and Channels
The best part of having data is being able to know exactly who you are talking to and who you should be targeting in your marketing campaigns. You can track the type of visitors that come to your site and build personas around those who engage to then target other people similar to your current customer base.
You can use data to determine what things your audience interacts with on your site and in your campaigns such as emails and ads. When deciding on audiences to target, you need to determine their intent. This also relates back to having set KPIs to make content decisions that are fitting for your audience.
The most effective example of this is Starbucks and its rewards mobile app. They utilize their data collected from their app to determine busiest hours, most ordered drinks during certain times of day, seasonal trends, customer habits and preferences and much more. They use this information to build marketing campaigns and promotions that they know from the data are relevant to their customers based on demographics and locations.
Another important data set to take in account is your traffic sources from devices. Having the correct channels to reach your audience can make a huge difference in your digital marketing strategy. Different demographics use different methods of accessing online information. In 2018, 58% of site visits were from mobile devices. Knowing what devices are most fitting for your audience can help you optimize your content to reach them efficiently.
Targeting the Right Keywords
Data can help determine what your audience is searching when looking for your service or product and help you to target those keywords and drive traffic to your channels.
By using the data provided by Google AdWords Keyword Tool you can determine your potential keywords. You can also use this tool to see what keywords your competitors are targeting and determine which ones are worth bidding against and which ones they may be missing.
Utilizing these keywords in more than just ad targeting can drive your business forward by inserting them into social posts, content on the website and other digital entities to fully tackle your SEO initiatives. Monitor and analyze the results continuously while bidding on keywords so you can optimize your strategy.
Optimizing Your Campaigns and Website
You can use your past data to predict future outcomes of your campaigns. By looking at the performance of your past campaigns and ad-targeting efforts you can identify what has worked and what has not been your best methods. If you see that your Facebook ads are outperforming your Google ads, you may want to allocate your budget more towards Facebook.
You can also optimize towards different demographics within your audience. If you a variety of products or services offered, you can target to different personas. Capital One uses their data of spending habits per demographic to determine optimal times to present various offers such as a mortgage, auto loans and credit cards with 0% APR offer to different clients and different points in their customer journey. This increases their conversion rate and lowers their spending on those who don’t fall into these personas.
Showing ROI
Stakeholders want to know that their marketing spend is working and with digital marketing you can show in the data exactly how the spend is being utilized and what effect it is having on profit.
Every actionable item, such as a form or a click-to-call, that you are driving traffic towards needs to be accounted for in some data set. You can add tracking parameters to URLs with and know which channel is driving the most traffic and relocate digital spend. When you have phone numbers listed on the site, ensure you have some way to track those interactions through a system or customer service. The equation for determining digital marketing ROI is: (Your Total Revenue Attributed to Digital – Your Total Cost of Digital Marketing)/(Your Total Cost of Digital Marketing).
Without doing these essential things with your data, you can be collecting information for no reason at all. Data can drive your marketing efforts forward fast if it is used correctly and efficiently.