Integrating Analytics into Your Marketing Strategy

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.
• Improve: 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.

Aligning Data and Marketing

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.

To learn more about how to effectively use digital marketing analytics, check out our previous article: Understanding Digital Marketing Analytics.