Data makes your marketing smarter.
That’s it. That’s the blog.
But if you’re someone who loves a few more details, consider the following: How do you know you are or are not meeting your business objectives? How do you track where you’ve been to where you are and set goals for the future?
You need data.
Whether that’s analytics from your advertising efforts, stats on appointment numbers across a period of time, social media engagements, ticket sales, any of it and all of it. It’s all meaningful! And it helps you learn about how your audience responds to what you have to offer, based on how you are presenting it.
And once you know that, you can strategize your marketing to be its most effective.
Data isn’t always crystal clear, though.
So you have to read the story it’s showing you. For example, say you check your Google Analytics and it shows a spike in website traffic on March 17. You’re going to check what type of traffic that was (paid or organic, direct traffic to your website or from social media, from a search engine, or maybe it was referral traffic from another organization), you’ll note what website page or pages these visitors spent time on and how long they were there. Then you’ll think about what communications efforts you had going on around that time. Was there an event happening or a promo running? Did a social media post suddenly get very popular? Had you recently changed your ad campaign creative to something new? Did you just get lucky?
Considering this data, you can make a plan for what comes next. Use the success you found in the data story to either repeat your effort or make changes.
Ta da! You just used data to strategize your next move.
But don’t stop here.
Get in a habit of collecting data → planning. You might do this monthly or quarterly, and certainly annually, because data is dynamic – and so are your audiences. What worked for you once, maybe even twice, isn’t guaranteed to work again, which your data will show you.
Social media, for instance, is always evolving. You may jump on a trend to reach a target audience and see engagement growth for a couple of weeks, just plan to have complementary messaging ready when the trend becomes not so trendy. Or, maybe your email newsletter click-through rate decreased, even though your subscriber numbers are consistent. Consider what content you’re sharing: have you said the same thing one too many times (albeit in a variety of ways)? Or did you diverge too far from the original context of the emails that your audience signed up for? Go back and look at the data, it will show you.
Data makes your marketing smarter by helping you strategize, which makes your goals more achievable.
Alison Quinn
Creativity, strategy and sparkles: our Creative Director's Big 3. Alison is a self-professed word nerd and lover of marketing that makes you go "whoa!"