Every successful and strategic digital marketing campaign is crafted through informed decisions. Unless strategies are based on key information, business can only produce blind strategies at best, hoping they somehow work.
When you’re spending money and time (not to mention blood, sweat, and tears) to make it in today’s cutthroat market, you wouldn’t want to throw resources into anything you’re not sure will produce real results.
That’s where data analytics can help you either make it or break it.
But what is data analytics exactly, and why does it have so much impact on marketing campaigns?
What Is Data Analytics and Why Does It Matter?
Data analytics is a branch of research that focuses on gathering information and using it to form key insights.
In marketing, data analytics uses raw information, such as ROI, click-through-rates, and conversion rate optimization, to spot patterns, trends, and behaviors. This information is crucial in keeping businesses informed on how well they’re performing based on specific metrics.
There are three main reasons why data analytics is indispensable in creating effective strategies:
Informs Decision-Making
Without important insights, it’s impossible to gauge where you’re at and what you need to do to get to where you want to go.
Data analytics provides the data necessary to make informed decisions, leaving no place for guesswork, and ensuring that campaigns are based on actual data. It also helps businesses justify marketing budgets, as well as fine-tune allocations to maximize profit.
Provides Valuable Insights
Data analytics provides valuable insights that give a clear picture of how your campaigns are doing, which elements need to go, and which ones you need to tweak.
Transforming raw data into insights can be tricky, painstaking work. But if you know how to comb through the dense pile of information, you’ll be able to draw insights that are invaluable to the success of your campaigns, such as:
- Which channels give better leads or are most cost-effective
- Which social media campaigns generate the most engagement
- How many visitors are converted into customers
- Customer behavior
Guides Clear Strategies
When you gain key insights on your campaigns, you’ll be able to accurately forecast demands and trends that impact your business.
This is essential in building clear, targeted, and personalized strategies that generate the results that you want to see–especially when competition is tough.
Case in point, campaigns that don’t have a clear direction often fail. It’s the businesses that know how customers are going to behave, what channels are most effective, and what adaptations are needed that make it.
To drive that point even further, a study conducted by Google and MIT concluded that 87% of leading marketers rely on strategic metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.
And it’s data that allows them to do that. Cliche as it may be, knowledge is indeed power.
How To Track and Measure Marketing Metrics
So how can businesses use data to track and gauge the success of their campaigns?
Here’s how.
Understand Metric Areas
There are several types of marketing metrics that you need to look at to better understand the performance of your campaigns. Three of the most important metric areas are the following:
- Paid marketing and revenue. These are all your cost-related metrics, which will most likely be related to paid marketing or advertising. These are metrics such as cost per lead (CPL), click-through rates (CTR), and return on investment (ROI).
These metrics will help you determine whether your marketing expenses and budget allocations are producing proportionate results.
- SEO. These metrics will show you how effective your search engine optimization strategies are, in terms of search engine rankings, time spent on your website, and organic traffic.
Optimizing for search engines improves visibility and drives traffic. When done correctly, it can also boost organic traffic–meaning the website views and engagement that you don’t pay for.
- Social Media Marketing. Today, social media is where the market spends most of their time. Measuring social media marketing metrics, such as subscriber count and post engagement, helps give a clear picture regarding brand awareness and visibility.
Define and Set Your Goals
The data you need to wade through and organize in order to gain insights is massive. But you don’t actually need every little piece of information to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
By defining and setting clear goals, you’ll also be able to know marketing metrics you’ll need to track, and which you don’t need to pay much attention to.
This will help you gain insights that matter to your specific strategies and create campaigns that are targeted toward a specific aim.
To set clear goals, you’ll need to:
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Be specific. State as simply and clearly what you want to accomplish. For example, you can aim to increase web traffic by 20%. That’s a clear, measurable goal that you can drive toward and gauge using specific metrics.
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Set a focus. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when looking at the stats. You may even want to do everything all at once. But a more effective way is to set a focus for specific segments in your campaign.
Use Automated Data Analytics Tools
You don’t have to track metrics manually. Tools like Google Analytics will make your life way easier. Tools like this provide comprehensive reports that give you insights on various aspects of your campaign.
To make interpreting the data much easier, you can also use data visualization tools, like charts and infographics, to turn raw data into easy-to-digest insights.
How To Use Data Insights to Optimize Campaigns
Rich insights are the key to your campaign’s success. You can use them to optimize your campaigns by:
Establishing Personas
Data insights will allow you to know your audience and market better. To create campaigns that will resonate with them, structure your strategies based on who you’re trying to reach.
Make Campaigns Personal
Another interesting insight you can gain through data analytics is customer behavior. You can use this to create a more personalized customer experience, based on which channels they use, where they spend most of their time on, and even what kinds of products they buy.
One way to do this is to streamline the customer experience on your website, so that customers are led to pages that they are interested in and are most likely to engage with.
Restructure Campaign Elements Based on Performance
Make improvements on your campaign as you go along based on how well each campaign element is doing.
Digital marketing is fast-paced, and trends come and go. Because of this, behaviors also change quite rapidly. Make sure that your strategies are able to adapt at the right time.
There's no way around creating successful campaigns but through understanding marketing metrics and gaining data insights.
But that's easier said than done. More often than not, it's a confusing puzzle.
To help you create informed campaigns, the best way is to partner with digital marketing experts that can give you the big picture while walking you through to each piece of the puzzle!