The process of analyzing digital data results is an important factor in today’s marketing arena. You have to initiate data-driven responses i.e., perfectly align your digital marketing and real-time analytics in order to keep your potential customers from simply clicking away from your site or choosing another brand. Thanks to digital channels, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or displays like affiliate marketing sites, emails, search ads and more, it is now more important than ever before to properly react to data-driven responses by aligning these two marketing tools. This is a must because anything less than a combination of analytics and digital marketing will likely leave you looking for answers to your marketing problems while your competitors are stealing your customers, who are just a quick click away. Thankfully, by educating yourself on the process of digital analysis, you can improve their alignment within your overall marketing strategy.
Define Your Business Objective For Your Digital Presence
Before syncing analytics, or data, and digital marketing, you should first set a clear direction or objective for your business. In other words, what does digital success look like for your brand? Even the best point of sales tool or customer relationship management systems will only lead to success if these line up with your overall business goal. Setting a clear and concise business goal or growth goal is the first step in leveraging digital analytics as your personal goals for your brand might not be that of any other business.
Create a Metric For Success
The second step of utilizing analytics and digital marketing is creating a measurement strategy, a metric for success, knowing which metrics matter. In years past, many businesses focused only on specific metrics to define a successful digital marketing campaign. Metrics like session duration, bounce rates or page views were given a great deal of value. While these are all performance indicators, they are not the most valuable in terms of turning the digital activity into sales or aligning analytics and digital marketing. For example, the number of leads your website generates has a greater impact on your overall customer retention and profit than merely the number of people who happened to make their way onto your page. Create a way to evaluate marketing success by crafting a measurement strategy.
Use Segmentation to Drive Action
If you really want to get the most out of your digital data, you need to begin segmentation. This means you will compartmentalize customers based on what they have in common. This will help you better understand how your customers behave and what you can do to reach them more effectively. Admittedly, this can be a bit difficult without the right tools and/or expertise, which is why it’s sometimes best to reach out to an expert to help you with this aspect of data analysis.
Optimize your Digital Marketing Strategy
The following acronym is helpful to remember when trying to optimize data into your digital marketing strategy.
- Define: What is the problem you are wanting to solve? How can you go about fixing it with digital data information?
- Measure: Look for anomalies, track relevant data, pay attention to the data you are getting.
- Analyze: Understanding what you are looking at is vital in terms of data is important. Look for patterns, correlations, purchasing habits, etc. Create a target persona.
- Improvement: Now that you have looked at the data, how can you improve your strategy to put it to use?
- Control: Monitor your key performance indicators (which were mentioned above) to determine what you need to do to change your current strategy.
- Optimizing a digital strategy at its root simply means taking the information you gathered through data gathering and putting it into action.
What Are Digital Marketing Analytics?
Now that we have considered how to initiate an alliance between analytics and digital marketing, it’s a good idea to look deeper at the process of digital marketing analytics. In most cases, digital analytics consists of two main factors. They are:
- Marketing Analytics: This information helps you understand your customers’ journey, even perhaps help you create a target customer persona
- Marketing Strategy: This factor comes into play when you use the information you obtained from marketing analytics to formulate a marketing strategy to meet that need.
Types of Digital Marketing Analytics
It was once the thought that a customer would have to interact with your brand multiple times before they would purchase your product or service. Now, thanks to modern digital marketing tools and the internet in general, that is no longer the case. That is why digital analytics are so important. You need to learn what your customers want and meet their needs to build brand awareness and initiate action. There are four basic types of digital analytics. Understanding a bit about each will help you better align your current marketing strategy based on analytics.
- Performance Analytics: This type of digital analytics looks at how your brand is doing in vital locations like Google Instagram and more. It is also tracking key performance indicators (KPI) like average order value, revenues, sales, and more.
- Competitive Landscape Analytics: This helps you track how your competitors retain, convert and attract customers. The adage, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” applies here. It’s wise to learn what is working for others within your industry, so you know what will and will not build brand awareness and success. Don’t look at it as cheating, it is simply working smarter not harder to get the results you want.
- Predictive Analytics: This type of digital analysis actually predicts the customer’s next move. It identifies what they want or need and then meets that need with the right message.
- Customer Behavior Analytics: This value data will tell you everything you need to know about your average customer’s online behavior. It will answer the question of what, where, when and how in terms of how your customers behave online.
Why Bother With Digital Analytics?
To answer the question of why it’s important to make digital analytics a vital aspect of your digital marketing strategy, consider the benefits of digital analytics listed below:
- Increases customers’ lifetime value.
- Retains customers.
- Delivers the right message at the right time.
- Proactive relates to customers.
- Identifies who your customers are, so you can market to them more effectively.
- In other words, it helps you optimize the data and put it to good use.
Tools For Digital Analytics
It’s worth noting that even the best digital analytics tools are pretty much worthless if you don’t put the data to use. Don’t be like some 73% of businesses and simply don’t analyze the data you have. After all, what good is knowing what you need to do or what will work if you don’t intend to put it into action? The following are some free tools you can use to obtain important digital data.
- Basic social media analytics, like those offered by Facebook, will give you somewhat of an idea of who is considering your brand.
- Google Analytics, which will gain data that can be valuable if applied properly to your marketing strategy.
Bottom Line: It’s Vital to Create an Alliance Between Digital Marketing and Analytics
Creating an alliance between analytics and digital marketing is vitally important to having success in today’s ultra-competitive digital market. Too often digital analytics is simply set aside by marketing teams and not utilized properly. Thankfully, you can begin to align your data and your digital marketing strategies today. While you can put some information listed above into use on your own, your brand will have more success overall if you partner with a company that knows this business inside and out.
Digilan helps by aligning your digital marketing and your analytics to get the most out of each aspect. Contact us today to learn more and to begin creating a strategy to form a strong alliance between digital marketing and analytics.