Digital marketing should never be a guessing game: data is the key to your success. We take a look at some of the key benefits of having a data-driven approach to your marketing.
One of the key benefits of data-driven online marketing is that you quickly learn the behaviour patterns of your target audience. How do most people enter your site? At which times? Are there any pages which receive a high bounce rate?
Once you begin to understand the intricacies of how people enter and use your website, you’ll have a better idea of how best to market to them.
The best way to learn these behaviours is to track them in Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You can view which pages get the most visits, which have the longest visits, and which search terms people come to your site through.
Your digital marketing campaign might include search marketing, paid advertising, social media and email marketing. When you begin to look at the data which represents audience behaviour, you can also analyse this to see the differences between channels.
With social media, you might only be getting engagement on certain platforms which can help you refine your approach. Similarly, you might work out that email marketing is not producing the same results as search engine marketing, allowing you to invest more time and money into what’s working.
Once you know your audience better, you can target them with effective advertising. With Google, this research process will involve looking at a selection of queries related to your industry and identifying those that get searches. You can then create Google Ads campaigns which advertise directly to people who are interested in what you’re selling.
With social media advertising, you will develop a better understanding of the type of messaging that works on your audience. On platforms such as Facebook, you can create Lookalike Audiences, which means you can target people who are similar to your existing audience – and are therefore much more likely to view your products or services.
Related article: Our Tips for Successful Facebook Advertising
Another key advantage of data-driven marketing is that you will be constantly checking the results of your strategies. This means that, if anything goes wrong, you will notice almost immediately because there will be significant changes in your data: whether that’s an increase in bounce rate on your website or a decrease in your social media engagement.
We would recommend setting up frequent checks so you can confirm that everything is running smoothly. If you are unsure of the best ways to identify potential problems, it’s worth getting someone to run an audit of your website – you’re always welcome to contact us to see if we can help you with anything.
You might be someone who lives by the motto ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. However, when you start to use data-driven marketing, you will see that there are always improvements to be made! You can constantly evolve your approach and try new experiments based on the data available to you.
It can be hard to justify the budgets being spent on marketing when you aren’t actually sure what’s working and what has been successful. However, when you have clear data sets and a record of changes over time, you can show that the marketing investment is worthwhile.
For example, you can set up software which tracks the position of your website in the search engine results and looks at the number of external websites that are linking to you. You can also use Google Analytics to track page visits and conversion rates.
If you decide to use a digital marketing agency, those with a data-driven approach are best positioned to show you clear, measurable results.
Are you looking to implement a digital marketing strategy? Take a look at what we do to see if we could help you out.
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