According to a report by Gartner, 69% marketers expect their every decision to be motivated by data and analytics by the year 2017. But the question is, how do you make sense of the huge amount of data which is coming in?
Although the business world is by no means unfamiliar or new to the data analytics approach, it was not until the last decade or so when data driven decision started making a standard policy and spread its roots to the online marketing arena.
There is an abundance of data all around us today, without businesses consciously making an effort to collecting and gathering it. Several businesses face data overload today because they ask existing and potential customers to fill out forms with their personal information when they click for email subscriptions or when they want to get a membership card. Moreover, because the company social media accounts also bring in a lot of the information about the audience, the overload blows out and of proportion and becomes absolutely unmanageable.
This blog post will address what data driven approach is and why it has become inevitable for businesses to adopt it.
What Is a Data Driven Approach?
By definition, a data driven approach calls for a business system that engages in decision making which can be backed up with verified data. On the surface, it is primarily a way to gain competitive edge. However, there is a lot more to the story because adopting a data driven approach is not that simple. Dealing with data can be quite overwhelming and daunting at first. If you fail to use it correctly, it can easily lead you to the wrong decision spectrum. In order to ensure that your data driven decision making is a success, you need to consider the following:
- Determine a goal
- Focus on getting the right information
- Ensure that the data you gathered is reliable and not compromised
- Leave out any unnecessary elements
- Challenge your own assumptions
Why Do You Need a Data Driven Approach?
Gathering data and analyzing it has become the top corporate agenda today. Decision making based on intuition entirely, with no navigational tool to help you steer to the right path is not enough to survive in today’s chaotic business world. Despite this, there are far too many companies that have tons of data but choose to do nothing with it. It is clear that they are not aware of the wonders that a data driven approach is likely to do for the growth and success of their business.
Now that you know what data overload is all about, you need to focus on the reasons why you should be spending more time collecting and analyzing data and how it will help your company. Here are a couple of pointers you should remember.
Risk Management – Prepares You for the Future
The online marketing world is chaotic. It is volatile, tumultuous and intense. In order to survive (and thrive), in this increasingly complex marketing environment, business owners need to make informed decisions regarding the future. Data driven strategy allows you to predict trends and any upcoming opportunities accurately based on the data. It will alert you to the shift in the industry patterns and in doing so, prepare you for the future. Thus, instead of continuing the guessing game, you get to make routinely informed decisions based on the data.
Helps Testing the Efficiency of Existing Approaches
Another way data driven decision making can help online businesses is by analyzing existing policies (regarding online marketing) and testing its effectiveness to determine whether or not they are working. There are plenty of metrics which can help you test the effectiveness of your ongoing programs by examining the data and deducing the cause of any hidden problems. Doing so will allow you to come up with a preliminary solution without having to lose credibility with your customers, suppliers or executives.
Aligns You with Your Customers
One the most important aspect of online marketing is knowing where your online and offline traffic is coming from. However, locating your audience and potential customers does not come easy. Especially in this chaotic marketing environment where your audience could literally be anywhere. Fortunately for you, the marketing data you collected can come in handy as it provides marketers with the opportunity to track your audience’s geographical location and determine the social networking sites they tend to visit frequently. Being aware of all of this information will do wonders for your overall marketing campaign.
A case in point, when you upload a YouTube video, you can track where most of the viewers are coming from, they reached your video and from which device (smartphones, laptops, tablets) they are viewing your video with the help of YouTube Analytics. This then helps you prioritize your audience and cater to their needs accordingly. For example, if the majority of your viewers are from Brazil, you could effectively target them by creating Portuguese videos or at provide Portuguese subtitles with your videos.
Improves Targeting – Helps in Profiling Prospects
Determining buyer personas is in no way novel to the online marketing world. In fact, it is one of the first things a marketing manager will be asked to do, if it has not been done already.
Data grants you the opportunity and ability to see what buyer personas your companies positively respond to. This, further allows you to segment them accordingly in different groups. For instance, you can identify which of the social media sites are most popular among certain demographics, or how long an average audience is likely to spend time reading your online content. Thus, it allows you to better understand your prospects and then tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
Applications like loginradius are one of the easiest and greatest tools to get user profile data which covers email address, gender, age, geographical location, educational background, interests and much more. Once you have collected these data points, you will be better able to provide your customers with what they need and this in return will empower your online marketing strategy.
Tailored Content
Throughout my blog posts, I have stressed on the fact that content is king, without it, your marketing strategy isn’t going to budge. It is the focal point of any online marketing strategy. Apart from being original, high quality content must be relevant and valuable by your intended audience. If it fails to serve this purpose, your content will be useless, and the time and effort you spent on creating it will be a complete waste.
But, how is all this related to data, one wonders.
Let me tell you, data has a very intimate and functional relationship with the content you create. You will be surprised to know what marketing data is capable of doing for content generation. As mentioned in the previously, marketing data helps you build audience personas based on different demographics and interests. These audience personas then help you create content and write blog posts that your audience is likely to find engaging. For instance, if majority of your personas are active on social media, you need to post more and more content on your social accounts and link your blog posts to your tweets and Facebook posts.
Furthermore, data can also be utilized to analyze the performance of your content by offering insights into the type of content that lead to the most conversions. Applications like Google Analytics are immensely efficient in tracking the blog posts and various other content, and measuring their success.
Opens Doors to More Marketing Opportunities
There are multiple online marketing opportunities that remain untapped. In order to unlatch the doors to these marketing opportunities, you need to make the most of the resources that are at your disposal. One of these valuable resources is the data you collect. With the help of various online marketing tools and applications, you can analyze the marketing data you gathered which will help you explore the possibilities in previously hidden marketing areas and improve your online marketing strategy.
Drives Research & Development
One of the top reasons why companies should adopt data driven decision making is because it paves the way to research and development. From the vast data you have acquired and compiled, you can carry out research into customer behavior, fluctuating marketing & industry trends, as well as your competitors marketing initiatives. Once you are done, you can then use the results to drive better decision making and developmental strategies to increase corporate profits which is the Holy Grail of business growth and success.
Offers a Competitive Edge
In a world where competition is intense, the only way for businesses to stand apart and come out thriving, is to have a competitive edge over their counterparts. Analyzing the marketing data is one such way to gain a competitive advantage. It offers you insights to how your business ranks against your competitors as well as how you can surpass their marketing initiatives.
Two of the most popular marketing data to analyze your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are social data and search engine data. Using the social media analytics tools, you can examine the social data and discover how many followers your competitors have or the number of shares and retweets your competitors posts generate on average. Search engine data, on the other hand, can be used to improve your search engine ranking by challenging your competitors position (on the search engine result page) and matching their strategies with slight improvisations. Thus, you can outrank your competitors by finding out where your competitors stand and use that information to create better data driven marketing strategies.
Personalized Marketing – Helps You Gain Customer Loyalty
In a world of intense competition, where price wars are the norm, customers tend to jump ship every time a competitor lowers their prices. In order to retain customers, you need all the control you can get to establish your company’s superiority over your competitors. Data mining is one such tool that can help retain customers as it can be used to carry out a more personalized lead nurturing process.
You need to make your customers feel loved, cherished and valued if you wish to maintain their loyalty. Here are a few ways you can use data mining techniques to build meaningful relationship with your customers:
- Advancements in technology has made it easier for marketers and analytics to determine who their website visitors are and what demographics they belong to. Thus, allowing you to add a touch of personalized marketing which helps build meaningful customer relationships. For example, instead of sending an automated email with a generic greeting to your customers, you could take a friendlier approach by greeting them with their names.
- Once you know where most of your data is coming from and which platforms your audience appreciates the most, you can start using that channel to send out your message. Instead of wasting time, money and effort on platforms which aren’t used by your customers, you can invest somewhere where your work won’t get wasted.
- Tools like Spigit also help you retain customers by collecting and assessing data from your social media audience. The information then helps you generate ideas on how to improve customer engagement and satisfy them to increase loyalty.
These are just a few reasons why data driven approach is crucial for all businesses today. Not only is it used to better design your online marketing strategy, but it seems to be conquering more and more domains as it is now being used by the human resource department as well as part of their recruitment strategy. However, it still remains an important aspect of your digital marketing campaign, making it more agile and flexible.
Your Takeaway
The shift to data driven decision making is inevitable. Statistical correlations, trend lines, charts, graphs, predictive alerts and big, as well as little data have long replaced the ‘I think’ decision making approach. Thanks to data overload, you can now mitigate majority of the emotional and subjective baggage when it comes to decision making. And focus on a much more neutral and logical decision making process.
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