As a luxury digital marketing agency, we understand the importance of good data - which we will define later -and increasingly the role of data has become increasingly important at a strategic level. Irrespective of the industry or size of the business, data (with or without being aware of it) impacts strategy and thus operations.
Whilst the term Big Data may be an often overused buzzword - there is real value in understand the importance of data and how this can improve marketing performance. Whether its setting KPIs, building a social media strategy or exploring content - understanding data and gaining actionables is vital. In essence, any informed decision can be fueled by data.
Not only does understanding and using data help to mould any sort of campaign but it is an invaluable way to benchmark and provide ROI to clients. So, without further ado, let our date with Date begin.
How to Define Marketing Data?
How do we define marketing data? it’s easy to think of data as say Google Analytics or social media engagement but data goes much further than this. Marketing data is all of the information that one can take from ANY marketing touchpoint a client has with the business be it across adverts, email marketing, website visits and social media engagement.
Data is the bridge between ideas and execution and connects the two together.
Why is Data so important in Digital Marketing?
With so many marketing channels available in the modern world, it's important to understand how your consumers interact with your brand, what generates sales and leads and what their buying cycle is. Understanding the user experience and journey across multiple campaigns and platforms means a greater understanding of how your consumers interact.
Your marketing data ensures you are following the leads and the people, not individual metrics. Data allows us to build a vivid picture of how customers interact and allows us to tweak and refine the individual elements within the composition of the picture.
Is BIG data for small businesses?
As one of the UK’s leading luxury digital marketing agencies, we work with a range of different sized businesses and one of the questions that often comes up when speaking to clients is whether small businesses can “do” big data. The good news is that you do not need to be a big business to do big data and with so many tools and tracking options available, smaller businesses can benefit from big data in a meaningful way. What’s more, with a push for personalised and customised experiences, any business can benefit from this approach and use the data they have available.
What are the most common channels for data harvesting?
Whether a new or existing client, our luxury digital agency always stress the importance of using data and clients to inform marketing strategy. Data can be constantly pulled from many sources, but the most common are:
Web analytics
Social media data
Email marketing
Blog and content creation
Lead generation
Within each of these channels (or areas of data generation) there is a wide array of specifics but by understanding and identifying where to draw data from is the first step in building out a number of campaigns and maximising the use of your data.
Data and Goal
Digital marketing goals should stem from your overall company goals and through the clever use of data we can connect our outcomes. For example, if we were to launch a monthly event we could think about:
Who are you targeting with these events?
Do you know how people have found them?
Are event attendees coming back for other events?
Are they visiting your website?
Purchasing products after the events?
By understanding the impact that the marketing strategy is having we can tweak the approach to align with our goals. On the contrary, without measuring or tracking campaign progress it makes it harder to see the bigger picture and, ultimately, the impact the marketing is having.
Connecting Your Goals to KPIs
In all industries, KPIs play an important role as a measurement for success and progress and help us to track how we are doing. Within marketing we can set KPIs around
ROI on social media ad spend
ROI on ad spend
Acquisition rate
Cost per acquisition
Being able to dive into the specific analytics and data allows us as an agency to know what is important and we can track the key aspects of our goals. In essence, KPIs are the foundation of what marketing analytics will be tracked to form the benchmark for measuring strategy.
Tracking Data
Now that we have an overview as to the importance of data, setting and measuring goals and KPIs, we can being to look at what tools to use to track and access our data.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the tools you can use to gather data on the main digital marketing efforts.
Website Analytics
Google Analytics is quite possibly the most widely used tracking analytics app in the world. Google Analytics dives into the demographics of your users, what pages they visited the most, how they navigated your site, how long they stayed on each page and so much more.
Essentially, Google Analytics tracks how people arrive at a website and how they interact with it.
Email Marketing
Most email marketing platforms offer you analytics on your open rate, what links were clicked and your bounce rate. As part of a package, they offer exceptional value as to the data that they provide. One important idea to note is looking into industry standards to use a measurement for campaigns and look into how your campaigns average out.
Social Media
To track your social media data, there are native analytics, those analytics on each social media platform itself, and third-party analytics software. We believe that, when beginning, the free native analytics tools allow enough data to be gained to begin and tweak campaigns. If you are looking for paid social analytics platforms, Hootsuite and Sprout Social, that also can be used as scheduling tools, provide in-depth analytics.
A Date with Data
The importance of accessing, analysing and implementing the takeaways from data cannot be overstated as we have seen. Irrespective of industry, every client wants to understand their client and data is the way to gain that insight.
Our luxury digital marketing agency can assist you in your digital journey, whether it is refining an in-house strategy or creating new campaigns across SEO, PPC and social media. To speak to our boutique agency, contact hello@theluxurymarketingagency.com or call +44(0)7835 233607.
