Data-driven marketing is the need of the hour. If you believe that digital marketing and advertising is immune to data, you are in for a pleasant surprise. Data impacts every business process, every marketing strategy and operation.
How you leverage the data and its power decides how you march ahead in business. With each day, as we type, data is becoming more and more crucial to a company, almost to the extent of making or breaking it.
Gone are the days of using digital marketing data to analyse bounce rates and CTR. Today, businesses are harnessing big data for market forecasting and staying ahead of the curve by understanding the needs of the customers. Customers, too, are demanding and don’t want to be a part of the mass emailing. They are driving the need for the personalised experience even though they use multiple digital platforms.
No wonder, if your digital marketing strategy is data-driven, you can enjoy five times the ROI on marketing budget. Besides, you could also be one among the very few marketers who used the personalised experience to gain traction and increase revenue.
But what is data?
Data isn’t a fancy word thrown in a considerable measure to impress the stakeholders. It implies having access to crucial information on your customers, such as their buying habits, demographics, purchase triggers, and so on.
It also means making the most of this knowledge and let it drive your digital marketing and advertising strategy for maximum benefit.
Data these days, decide everything. Your social media marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy. Your existence and relevance in the market!
Data gives you power and control to make an informed decision. If you don’t know what your customers want, or expecting from your product or services, you can’t expect to stay on track with your business objective. You need to get in the mind of your customers to stay ahead of your competitors and data, gives you just that.
Though what many businesses fail to understand is that data isn’t just limited to your website data. It means all of the data, from the nooks and corners of your business, its process and presence.
It consists of your email marketing data, data generated through digital advertising on various third-party sites, social media, download of your app, reviews, criticism, and so on.
This data, when analysed, gives you a sneak peek into what matters and what direction should you be heading towards to make a difference to your customers’ lives and generate more ROI.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that more than forty per cent of companies want to tie their marketing tactics and ROI together and track the spent. However, for this, a business needs quality data and not just the data it is sitting on.
The Data Vicissitudes
The only problem with data is it can go pretty bad quickly. The significance of purity and reliability of information is much more than we lend on. A business thrives on three critical factors if it needs to succeed with its data-driven marketing strategy.
- Data Quality: Data is terrific when it is accurate, reliable, consistent and complete. If it is not, it is just downhill from there and can cause significant consequences for your business. According to this IBM study, poor data amounted to $3.1 trillion losses for the U.S. businesses in the year 2016. Businesses spend up to twenty-five per cent of their annual revenue on ‘rectifying’ their data, which is often a day late and a dollar short response. A study by Experian on Data Quality shows that poor data quality impacts the bottom line of eighty-eight per cent of companies. In comparison, more than ten per cent of companies lose revenues in terms of ad spends, wasted productive hours and resources.
And no business is immune to it.
…but wasn’t your data supposed to be clean?
No data stays clean. Precisely, because
- Forty per cent of leads are nothing but bad data.
- Thirty per cent of people change job every year.
- More than forty per cent of people change their phone number annually.
- More than eighty per cent of companies struggle with “risky” phone records in their database. About twenty-five per cent of the B2B database is inaccurate.
- Data Diagnosis: This is how data mining services come into being. A data mining company find the irregularities, create several checkpoints to keep the quality in control and look for loopholes in the system that are causing the inaccurate data to leak into the system. The data verification is also a part of the overall process where the data is reviewed and updated with current information specific to your business and the challenges it faces.
- Data Insights: The data solutions provider brings meaning to the data by letting a marketing and sales team understand it. It is the blueprint of the business that is delivered to you to make the most of it. A data mining company helps you understand, analyse and use the data to use to drive product information and utilise the full potential of the information you have.
Why is Data Important in Digital Marketing?
Because what goes around comes around, just like the blades on a chainsaw!
A customer journey includes information about customers, their demographics, buying triggers, lead generation platforms and things that are working or not for customers.
All is connected. It is all cyclical.
Bad data leads to bad results and even worse business decision. Great data, on the other hand, can have your business rolling in better traction and more money.
The new journeys are more user-centric and a lot more complicated. They involve different digital platforms and several campaigns. Having command on data keeps you well informed about your customers. With data, you know why are your customers liking your social media posts but aren’t interested in buying your products? You know what factors are driving repeat transactions, and what makes them pass you by? Powerful stuff, eh?
An online customer journey involves multiple platforms, and it is okay for digital marketing professionals to lose track.
However, the business data comes to rescue as it creates a blueprint of the customer journey to follow through while giving you overall imagery of how your campaigns are doing. It helps you see the minute details while focusing on the larger picture.
Once you start understanding data and how it helps you to know your customers, it leads you to the second most crucial step.
Your marketing funnel, sales cycle and the bottlenecks.
The marketing data is the reflection of a customer’s mind.
It takes you to each curve of their journey- the time they log in to their account, the time they spend on a web page or social media platform, interaction with your posts and when they just leave without even as much as a simple interaction.
And then it hits you.
It is not your customers. It is you. It has always been YOU.
You need to fix what’s wrong with ‘your’ marketing strategy on various stages of the marketing funnel. Find what makes them tick and what they don’t like about you. You can assess every touchpoint they go through and see it through a critical viewpoint to understand what exactly is going on the other side.
For instance, as a decision-maker, you could pull the plug on particular strategies and initiate a few more. Using this data, you can figure out if Facebook ads are working out, or it is the email marketing campaigns that are capable of boosting your base.
Does Your Small Business Need Data?
Irrespective of the size, reach and nature of your digital marketing and advertising strategy and business, *wait for it*
***drum rolls***
Data is for you!
It is for every business!
Also, at the heart of every small business is the aspiration of making it big someday!
C’mon. Why would you think otherwise? Don’t let data overwhelm you. Okay, let us be honest. It can be a bit dizzying at first, but you can hire a data solutions company to help you make sense of it and gain insights into it.
There are also third-party software (some free, some paid), tools and techniques available to let you dive deeper into the data and drive actionable insights out of it. With data, you can command a more substantial online presence at a fraction of a cost and expect to understand your customers better. Based on these insights, you can modify your content and digital marketing strategy to extend a more personal experience for your existing and targeted customer base.
Understanding the customers’ data also lets you know what metrics are essential and which ones you should part ways with. The data enables you to connect the dots between KPIs and business goals. With data, you can understand track:
- ROI on ads budget
- ROI on social media
- Cost per acquisition
Grasp on data enables you to better hold on an overall view of your progress. You know the aspects of digital marketing where you should spend a little bit more and where you should hold back. Based on this, you can identify customer behaviour as well as improve the relevancy of your digital strategy.
You can identify the lags and loopholes within the systems. For instance, do you feel that despite doing everything right, you can’t reach out to your customers? Do the email marketing campaigns have zero traction and no success? If it is, it is time to set the ‘refresh’ button on your data. A business should approach data mining and data scrubbing proactively to ensure that it is complete and consistent.
Data is a gateway to gain insights; however, if it is not accurate, the ideas won’t be as well. If you want digital marketing strategy and advertising of your business to pivot on data, you can’t do away with data mining services.
Data is everywhere, and businesses deal with lots of data every day. And often, bad data tends to slip through the cracks and become an Achilles heel for your business, resulting in whole business crumbling down like a house of cards. The data-driven digital marketing strategy can help you drive actionable insights into customers’ buying journey and deliver relevant content to them that does justice to their thought process as well as expectations.
