These days, analysis and data are key to successful marketing strategies. They play important roles in driving your business forwards. Whether you utilise the data or not, you cannot deny that it serves you well.
Successful marketing requires data. Validating results and assumptions with numbers are essential to digital marketing in technology-driven world. At the same time, data on behaviour, social activities, and other things can help you focus on what works.
What Is Marketing Data?
It is the data beneficial to your business. It comes from deeper understanding of customer’s needs and expectation, which drives your company’s profitable growth. It is unsurprising that marketers want more data usage. The Gartner Marketing Data & Analytics 2020 survey states that 85% of marketing management mention, by 2022, marketing decisions will ‘significantly increase’. They will depend on marketing analytics.
Marketing analysis utilises data on marketing activities and consumer behaviours from platforms and other sources:
- Websites and mobile apps
- Social media
- Advertising services
- CRM systems
- E-Mail tracking services, and call
How Data Is Utilised for Marketing Purposes?
Basically, marketers depend on user behaviours and business data to comprehensively decide and achieve marketing goals. In other words, data helps marketers create campaigns more effectively, choose interaction and advertising channels better, reach targets more accurately, and show ads more relevantly.
In addition, it should be noted that 61% of customers expect personalisation supported by data and accurate product or service placement on devices they are using to satisfy their changing preferences and demands. Marketers needs to make decisions based on data and analytics. Those decisions can be grouped into:
- Performance improvement of websites and landing pages
- Adjustment of advertising campaigns
- Increase in sales and LTV
- Increase in loyalty
- E-Mail marketing
User behavioural data is an unquestionable driver for marketers in active marketing for ever-changing marketing trends. However, data collection and being data-driven are two different things. Gartner Marketing Data and Analytics 2020 survey shows that 54% of CMO are not impressed with results of marketing data and analytics.
Low-quality data, unactionable results, and lacking clear instructions are why marketers cannot utilise data effectively. Moreover, marketers wait a long time for reports. Often, it is already too late when reports from analysts arrive. That is why we believe business users should be able to create their own report so they can untangle data and search for relevant insights.
As you can see, despite some progress, marketing technology still has room for improvement. In an ideal world, marketing does not solely depend on data, but also insights.
Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing
Data-driven marketing enables experts to operate under constantly changing conditions. Companies will grow faster than competitors, understand consumers better, and the most important things is making more revenue in the world where advertising cost and competition are rising.
The most valuable benefit of data-driven marketing is comprehensive knowledge on your customer’s needs – both existing and potential.
Embracing data, marketers can thoroughly decide on strategies to be employed and reasonable marketing attempts without wasting resources on unsuccessful operations.
What Are Advantages for Marketers Using Data
1. Improve Effectiveness of Marketing Channels
You must employ different approaches and strategies for customers from different sources. If you want to increase conversion rates, for example, you can create dynamic content based on collected user data.
2. Segment Your Target Groups
The point is not to distribute your messages to as many audiences as possible. Theoretically, your brand messages should be different for each audience. The messages should match their interests.
3. Customise Customer’s Experiences
This is continuation of segmentation. Users want information on products or services that is useful to them, and obviously, when it is useful to them. In the world of supply and demand, users can choose to be picky. On the other hand, companies must ensure they are the first to respond to customer’s needs.
4. Consolidate Automated Marketing Systems
Enormous amount of data from various sources can overwhelm people. Processing it can consume all your working hours (and more), leading to boring routine. The most important thing is human error is inevitable, which causes lower data quality and trustworthiness. In the modern world, it is unreasonable to work with data without high-quality automation system. Automation can help in many ways – from generating report and scoring leads to sending group e-mails, ratio management, and exchanges of dynamic content on websites and e-mails.
5. Continuously Employ Testing Programme
Everything in digital marketing can be assessed and measured, and you should take full advantage of it. Surely, no one says you should test things 24/7. But… why then? With analytics and receiving fresh raw data, you can test as many assumptions as you come up with.
Utilising capabilities and advantages of data-driven marketing, you will get overview of efficiency. In addition, with comprehensive data display (in convenient and accessible formats), you can share insights you gain with colleagues and other departments (or management). This will ensure they receive accurate data on time.
Challenges in Dealing with Large Amount of Marketing Data
Big data is valuable in providing 360-degree view of things happening to your marketing. However, the more data there is, the harder the collection, storing, processing, and gaining insights from your libraries.
1. Data Collection
Analysts collect data from different systems and services. Naturally, data structures are not the same. To ensure quality of data you receive, you should check for updates regularly. If not, you will receive low-quality data, leading to erroneous results. It is a fact that marketers lose 21% of their budgets to bad data.
Solutions
The best choice is to automate data collection instead of manual collection. At the same time, connectors you choose must have these qualities:
- Security: completely monitor and control device access
- Completion: not randomly gather raw data. No repetition. In high detail
- Verification: control quality and relevance of your data
We recommend choosing connectors that can collect data from your websites as well as other advertising platforms, with value added data from monitoring systems, CRM, e-mail, or calls. In addition, you should prepare storage in advance. Google BigQuery is one of the best choices for modern marketers.
2. Data Standardisation
Structuring data from different sources into a unified format is daunting. For example, you want to collect data on advertising costs from different platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. Each platform may use different currencies (USD, THB, EUR, etc.), and different tags in data fields. Converting all raw data into one standard currency is impossible unless you employ automation.
Solutions
When working with large amount of data, errors and discrepancies are to be expected. It is mostly caused by complicated surveys and SQL scripts. If something fails or changes, such as API update by services, everything can crumble.
Automation is your protection. Connecting tools of choice should be able to standardise data: clean, stabilise, verify, convert, and others so you can be confident in collected data’s quality and security. In addition, the tools should be able to constantly provide you with reports on data relevancy, which you can upload to Google Analytics.
3. Data Mixing
Mixing data is an important step to getting complete overview of essential metrics such as ROI, budget allocation, and ineffective procedure removal. The challenge is you are unable to enter all the data into one table.
Solutions
There would not be any problems with single-source data, even double-source like from websites and Instagram. You can use free services from Google Data Studio.
However, if you are running a big project, using different platforms and launching multiple campaigns concurrently, and you still need to consider customer’s online and offline actions, you cannot get by without services such as Data Studio, Tableau, Power BI, or others along with helps from analysts. Basically, you should choose tools which ensure universal data entry whilst ensuring high quality and detail of data.
4. Report Generation
The core of reports is to provide answers to decision-makers as quickly as possible. Successful indicators shown as infographics will help decision-makers operate based on data, not assumptions. There are 2 main roles of reports.
Assessment report – verify, assess, and analyse workflows
Custom-ad hoc report – probe for insights and answers
Solutions
Projecting pictures and connecting with the right data source are lengthy processes. They are impossible without analyst helps. Business users who cannot generate their own reports will face slow workflows. ROPO can be highly beneficial to business operations if they can generate it.
Apart from analytics resources, you should ensure that
- Appropriate sources are chosen (based on your sales channels)
- Comprehensive and high-quality data are employed (to avoid limitations)
- Data is updated automatically based on reports
You can choose reporting services which are more convenient. It depends on your needs and company’s sizes. Everything from familiar Google Sheets to complicated content filtering services are available for you to choose.