For any business, and the marketer at the helm of promoting the buying or selling of your product or service, analysing data can be a powerful way to inform, implement and improve an effective marketing strategy. Finding campaign data shouldn’t be too difficult. Most marketing tools have analytics dashboards that display a mind-boggling variety of data regarding your campaign’s performance. Finding the exact data you need and uncovering insights to drive your marketing is the most challenging part.
The role of data in your marketing strategy
One of the nicest aspects of working in the digital era is that you can quantify almost everything. Do you want to know how many people have seen your advertisement or piece of content? Easy; you’ve got it in a few clicks of a finger. Do you want to see how much money your content is making you? It’s difficult, but again, it’s only a few clicks of a finger away.
Although it can be simple to understand the significance of data in your marketing effort (email, search, or social), there is more to the adage “data is king.” If it were that simple to use data to drive all your marketing efforts, you wouldn’t be bombarded with useless content from countless organisations. Unfortunately, even experienced marketers sometimes lose sight of how data might assist them.
To get to grips on how marketers should utilise data in their marketing efforts, we’ve broken down the role of data into three segments.
Behaviour analysis
These questions and subsequent analytics indicate how people interact with your content and/or ads.
Behaviour analysis provides answers to the most fundamental questions regarding your campaigns, such as:
- How many people opened your piece of content or advert?
- How many people clicked on your content or advertisement link?
- Which piece of content or advert achieved the most clicks?
Outcome analysis
The second component is the “outcome analysis”: These measurements reflect the outcomes of your marketing efforts.
Outcome analysis enables you to discover insights like:
- How many people bought your goods or service?
- What is the average revenue per campaign?
- What’s the average revenue per customer/client?
- How many people converted into leads?
- What’s the ROI of your campaign?
Experience analysis
The why behind the what is explained via experience analysis. Experience analysis helps us dive into our customers’ brains and acquire insight or a light bulb moment about why they do the things they do.
Experience analysis can help you comprehend the following issues:
- Why do some segments have greater click rates than others?
- Why do you get lower revenue per campaign during certain months of the year?
The critical data you require for your marketing campaigns
By focusing on only the critical data you need for your strategy and each specific campaign is one effective method in addressing the problem of an abundance of unnecessary data. Some of the KPIs that are most important if you’re an eCommerce marketing manager are:
- Organic:
- Impressions
- Reach
- Clicks
- Interactions (likes, comments, shares)
- Traffic
- Pageviews
- Paid advertisements:
- Impressions
- Reach
- Clicks
- Conversion rate
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Cost per purchase (CPP)
- Adds to cart
- Revenue
- ROI
Examine your findings
A typical approach for marketers to examine data from marketing initiatives can be broken up into three steps:
- Collect all of the data for the metrics that concern your business and its targets (revenue or reputation).
- Examine how these metrics compare to both benchmarks and their intended objectives.
- Consider methods to enhance each measure in order to get better outcomes.
Using benchmarks to guide your data
Marketing benchmarks are important pieces of data that can be utilised to determine the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. There are two sets of marketing benchmarks that you should be aware of while examining them.
- Benchmarks for your brand – personal benchmarks for your brand in relation to the major performance indicators listed above (a.k.a. impressions, reach, clicks etc). These should be the averages for your brand.
- Your industry marketing benchmarks – these are the average standards for the same key performance indicators.
Once you’ve gathered your brand’s personal marketing standards, you’ll be able to compare them to industry averages to evaluate how well you’re doing.
Final thoughts
Marketing data that can inform your marketing strategy is only valuable when it is understood by the person reporting on it. If the right context and examination of information is not applied, the data is essentially just a pile of numbers. Using these steps will ensure your reporting will show what campaigns, topics, content types, paid advertisement audiences and adverts are working, and which are not.
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