In today’s modern age of technology, knowing how customers behave and making smart business decisions depend a lot on data. There is a lot of data available to marketers, which can feel like too much, but by using the right tools and methods to analyze it, you can use it effectively to improve your digital marketing and grow your business. Those marketers who skillfully use this data to make informed decisions gain an advantage over their competitors. This is where data analytics becomes important as a powerful tool that empowers marketers to discover valuable insights and trends that influence their strategies and approaches.
Understanding Data Analytics
Data Analytics is all about collecting, organizing, and studying large sets of data to find patterns, connections, and useful information. By using data analytics, marketers can make informed decisions about their target audience, the effectiveness of their campaigns, and how well their business is performing. This field includes various methods and tools like data mining, predictive analytics, and machine learning.
The Rationale For Embracing Data Analytics In Marketing
Using data analysis in marketing gives clear and concrete results. Forrester’s research shows that marketers who use five or more tools in their marketing analytics have a 39 percent higher chance of improving their campaigns. Most importantly, data analytics removes guesswork from marketing strategies, allowing informed decisions about where to invest in marketing and which campaigns are likely to be successful.
Additionally, using data analysis in marketing helps set better goals. By looking at past performance, you can figure out if your objectives, like getting a 10 percent increase in web traffic from SEO, are achievable. Data analytics gives marketers the power to create improved and personalized campaigns. Personalization is really important in marketing because 80 percent of shoppers are more likely to buy from brands that use personalized strategies. But to do personalization right, marketers need to understand what customers want, need, and do. In a time when consumers are very picky about how they interact with brands, using data to create amazing customer experiences is crucial for success.
Strategies For Marketing With Data Analytics: 5 Approaches To Consider
Using data analysis in your marketing efforts can greatly improve your strategies. Here are five specific and practical strategies that I highly suggest trying out:
- Enhance The Customer Experience Through Personalization
Don’t hesitate to use personalization because 65 percent of consumers are okay with sharing data to get a more personalized experience. Data analysis is the best way to do this because your customers create a lot of data, which lets you personalize every interaction with them. Emails are a common way to personalize brands. Tools like Klayvio, ActiveCampaign, and Campaign Monitor can automatically send personalized emails using data like what customers bought before, how they browse, and when they leave items in their cart.
Another way to make things personal on your website is by using Google Optimize. It helps you turn the important things you measure in Google Analytics into personalized experiences. For example, you can:
- Show users pages that are tailored to their country or city.
- Display different pages based on the website that sent them to your site.
- Personalize pages based on products they bought before.
Using data to personalize things isn’t just about online information; analyzing data from offline sources can also be really helpful in making marketing better.
- Implement A/B Tests For Site Optimization
If you’ve done an A/B test before, good job! It means you’ve already used data analysis in your marketing plan. A/B testing, or split testing, is a popular way to make marketing messages better. It’s used for things like emails and landing pages. About 77 percent of companies use A/B tests to try out different versions of their campaigns and find the one that works best.
A/B testing is a strong method to figure out what really connects with your brand and target audience. Instead of guessing or relying on luck, you use solid data to definitively know what works and what doesn’t. The results from A/B testing can be very significant and sometimes surprising.
You can try A/B testing different parts of your marketing campaign, like your website (77 percent), landing pages (60 percent), emails (59 percent), and paid search (58 percent), according to Invesp. Starting A/B testing is easy, especially with tools like Google Optimize. Google has a complete guide, but here are the main steps:
- Pick the marketing part you want to improve.
- Create a strong guess about what might work better.
- Choose the key things to measure, like open rates and conversions.
- Make different versions of the thing you want to improve.
- Make sure your guess is specific and can be used in the future. For example, you might guess that changing the heading of a landing page to highlight a benefit will make a 10 percent increase in conversions.
When you do each test, it’s important to check if the results are meaningful. Tools like Optimize will help you know how much traffic you need but try to have at least 5000 different visitors to get trustworthy results.
- Creating Content That Resonates With Customers
Checking how well content is doing is something most content marketers do regularly. About 78 percent of marketers measure how their content is performing, 63 percent set goals to track, and 51 percent see how much they gain from the content they make. But not many marketers use data to plan future content marketing, except for looking at keywords. This is a missed chance because data analysis can be really helpful in finding the best types of content and topics that customers are truly interested in.
The best content that gets the most results is often made when marketers really pay attention to what their users want. A great example of this is the Pain Point SEO process used by Grow and Convert. Instead of just looking at keywords, they talk to customers in-depth to find out specific problems that they use as the basis for their articles. This way, they make content that’s about topics their competitors don’t talk about. While one-on-one interviews are great for getting detailed information, they might not work well when you want input from many people at the same time. That’s where social listening comes in. Social listening is a really effective way to use data analysis on a big scale, so you can make content that matches what customers are interested in. With special tools for social listening, marketers can use this strategy on a larger scale and find topics that nobody else has covered yet.
- Enhancing Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are detailed descriptions of your ideal customers, usually based on made-up characters but backed by real customer data. They are extremely valuable. Research from HubSpot shows that using buyer personas can make websites two to five times more effective and user-friendly for the target audience. Additionally, they can boost email open rates by 14 percent and conversion rates by 10 percent. Although many businesses have buyer personas, it’s important to check if they are based on solid data or just assumptions made by your marketing team.
If your buyer personas don’t have data-based insights, they may not be as accurate or reliable as they should be. Using customer data is crucial to creating detailed and genuinely helpful buyer personas. The great thing is that almost every business can get the data needed to build such buyer personas, and Google Analytics is an extremely useful tool for this purpose. In Google Analytics, pay attention to the Audience Reports section, which provides various data reports to create the basis for your buyer personas.
Pay Special Attention To:
- Age and gender report.
- Interest reports.
- in-Market Segment report.
- Geo reports.
- Device reports.
By using these five reports, you can learn important information about your customers, such as their age, gender, where they live, what they are interested in, whether they plan to make a purchase, and how they prefer to access your website.
- Enhancing Marketing Channels Through Cross-Channel Data Analysis
When you want to start a new marketing channel or improve an existing one, you don’t always have to begin everything anew. Instead, you can use the benefits of data analytics. This is helpful because many brands can afford to try out a marketing channel that might not work perfectly for a short time. However, keeping a completely unsuccessful marketing channel can be expensive and unproductive.
The ability to use data across different marketing channels is huge. For example, the number of people who open your emails can give you ideas for new blog topics. The questions people ask in live chat can help you come up with new landing page ideas. Also, the data you get from Instagram can help you plan your TikTok strategy.
One very effective way for brands to use data across different channels is by using pay-per-click (PPC) data to improve website content. Tools like Ubersuggest can give you accurate information about how often certain keywords are searched for, which helps you find popular phrases. But it’s important to remember that just because these keywords attract users, it doesn’t guarantee they will actually make a purchase or take any action. On the other hand, PPC copy focuses entirely on the text used in ads, with very few other factors to consider. If one ad performs better than another while targeting the same keyword, it’s probably because the ad’s text is more effective.
