The following article was written by Adinah Brown, content manager at Leverate.
“Hiding within those mounds of data is knowledge that could change… the world.” (Atul Butte, Stanford)
The world as we know it is driven by technology, data, and information. Concepts such as Big Data motivate competition in the global business sector, whereby companies have to adapt to ever-changing consumer demands.
Consequently, business needs to continually adapt their marketing strategies to maintain and improve customer attraction and retention figures. As a result, the natural evolution of the brand’s digital media marketing model has had to include the adoption of Business Intelligence as a primary driver of the model.
In essence, the successful business needs to strive for efficient Return on Investment (ROI) concerning the marketing budget. As a result, marketing can no longer be seen as an ethereal, mystical practice. It has to be a quantifiable, measurable, data-driven strategy.
Big Data and Business Intelligence
Before we look at how business can (and must) use Big Data to justify and validate the adoption of a particular marketing strategy, let’s take a quick look at a brief history of Big Data:
Data has always been around in one form or another since the inception of the Internet in 1991. However, until recently, it has not been utilized as a driver behind strategic marketing decisions.
Consequently, the question that begs is why it has taken so long for data to be used as a primary driver of digital media marketing efforts? The simple answer is that our ability to process and translate the vast amounts of data into meaningful statistics has recently evolved and developed to the point where it can be converted into useful information.
The Key behind Data-Driven Marketing
The next question should be how do you incorporate the use of Business Intelligence and Big Data into your company’s digital marketing strategy?
Here are several tips that are worthy of consideration:
Make a habit of tracking relevant data
It is easy to become swamped and overwhelmed by the masses of available data. Therefore, to avoid confusion, it is vital to make sure that you focus on the data that is relevant to your marketing campaigns.
The good news is that technology has developed to the extent where everything about consumer behavior can be tracked. Actions such as time spent on a website, bounce rate, conversion rate, and social media interaction can all be monitored on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. These results can now be interpreted into meaningful statistics of what your viewers are looking at, what websites they are coming from, what sites they are going to next. Thus, giving you are fuller picture of the purchase objectives of your visitors.
Don’t Ignore Negative Data
There is a good chance that’s where your data-gold is. It’s hard to acknowledge the cold hard facts of when marketing strategies have not performed as well as hoped. The immediate inclination may be to ignore negative statistics, excuse them away or just pretend that they do not exist. However, reviewing negative data is an essential element of design and implementation, because knowing what not to do, can be just as critical as knowing what to do.
Simply stated, how will you understand your target audience’s likes and dislikes if you don’t review all the data, both positive and negative?
Utilize A/B testing
A/B testing is a simple but handy tool, which enables you to easily compare the performance of various marketing material. When you upload your campaigns, the marketer can design two variations, post them both to the Internet and regularly review them to assess which campaign (A or B) achieves a higher level of audience engagement. Think of it as automated market research that keeps the marketer aware of which of his campaigns the audience prefers to engage with.
The ability to access data-driven marketing and extract vital insights is a crucial component of any successful marketing strategy. In a business climate that is competitive and fast paced, marketing technology tools such as Optim8 have become an essential element to a successful business.