What comes to your mind when you hear “digital age?” Pop-ups, email, social media, Justin Bieber, music downloads, ebooks, Apple, Google, YouTube?
If you are in marketing, the thing that should come to your mind is data. The digital age has brought an influx of data to empower all your marketing efforts. Data is the reason you target market rather than mass market. Data is the reason you can establish exact ROI’s for all efforts and track all your campaigns. Data is a marketer’s new best friend.
1. Target Niche Audiences
What are people searching for online? What are they purchasing? And with social media, what is their name, age, and favorite color? You probably have some ideas of what your “ideal customer” looks like and acts like. These characteristics form sets of data. These data sets can be used to not only target your audience but expand it.
Impressions that reach non-prospects are just budget wasters. Data minimizes this waste. Each campaign, effort, or communication provides more insight to what your target audience looks like and acts like.
2. Track and Improve
Think of those annoying ESPN statistics. “John Doe hits .400 in the month of August when there are 2 runners on base and the temperature is above 85 degrees during a Democratic presidential administration.” While statistics such as these are irrelevant, you need to be tracking your digital campaigns this closely. What type of online banners received the highest conversion rates? What time of day is the best to maximize your PPC budget? Which device invoked the highest response? All these questions are data questions and must be answered.
If you track everything surrounding your campaign, each new effort becomes more efficient and streamlined. You can get rid of what is not working. If your remarketing banners aren’t performing well on certain websites, take those sites out of the campaign. If your website is receiving zero traffic from Google+, don’t devote as much time to it.
3. Website Analysis
Your website is the epicenter of your marketing. It is the basecamp for all of your onslaughts driving leads, conversions, and sales. Your company’s website is to marketing as the force is to Luke Skywalker. I am trying to say it is important. Through a tracking platform such as Google Analytics, you can monitor all activity on your website. What data are you looking for? You need to know bounce rates, demographics of your visitors, most visited pages, what time of day gets the highest traffic, what is the highest referrer of traffic, etc.
Why do you need to know this? Well as we said your website is the nucleus of the marketing cell. If your site is performing badly, you need to know why. Perform A/B testing and track the bounce rates of each. Find what is bringing in the most traffic and increase efforts in that area. Never be satisfied with your website. Let data guide you to constant improvements.
You don’t have to be content with educated guesses. Data keeps things exact and targeted. That is the name of the game in modern marketing.
