The analysis of the results of a demand – or lead – generation campaign is key to determine its success or failure. This analysis is only possible through the metrics and concrete data that the actions have left behind. Let’s take a look at why data is so important in digital marketing, and how it can be leveraged to make our actions have a greater impact.
Why the data is important in digital digital marketing
Information is power (…and there is a lot of it).
Nowadays, with technology everywhere, the digital trail left by users on the Internet is gigantic. We are talking about a community of more than 4.7 billion Internet users around the worldwho surf the Internet for an average of more than 6 hours a day. The amount of data that can be obtained from these users could reach magnitudes that would not even fit in our heads.
There is a discipline specifically designed to handle such volumes of information: big data. big data. It consists of a series of methods and technologies aimed at obtaining and analyzing huge amounts of data, both structured and unstructured.
And this is precisely what big data can bring to digital marketing, the massive collection and processing of information from potential customers helps companies to better segment their campaigns, and to accurately assess the results of their actions.
Big data and digital marketing: strategies backed by data
Given the relevance of data in marketing, it seems logical to think that the more data we have, the more we will know about our target audience and the better targeted our actions will be.
The problem usually lies in the difficulty of accessing and storing the data and, above all, finding the relationships between them. When the amount of data is significantly large, it is unfeasible to apply traditional non-automated methods.
In this discipline, the use of big data involves collecting, analyzing and representing large amounts of digital data to help companies make better business decisions, particularly for marketers.
Big data in inbound marketing
The inbound marketing is a non-intrusive commercial methodology that, through the creation of quality content, allows the design of a personalized user experience to attract customers.
These user experiences, manifested in suggestions for relevant products or content very close to their areas of interest, can be automated if as much as possible is known about the target audience in advance. Big data plays an essential role here in helping the company to learn as much as possible about its potential customers.
How to leverage data in digital marketing
Definition of KPIs
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that we will use to evaluate the scope of a specific action or strategy. If we do not take the time to define them correctly, we will go forward blindly. It is a matter of really knowing what we want to measure, and not conditioning this decision to a supposed “ceiling” that we do not even know if we are going to find or not.
There are many types of KPIs: pageviews, bounce rate, CTR, CPA, CPL, CPC, ROAS … (indeed, if you don’t know the acronyms you will be a bit lost, but that’s why we have created a glossary of digital marketing terms 😊)
Standardization of data format
The data collected may be in a multitude of different formats, and may be entered in structured or unstructured form. In order to be able to process them later, it is important to dedicate some time and resources to homogenize the format of the information. There are applications that allow you to aggregate data from different sources and make the task easier, but it is still time-consuming.
Choice of relevant data
No one disputes the impact of data on digital marketing, but an excess of information can be more harmful than its absence. This does not mean that we should do without data, but rather that we should filter it and adapt it to each specific purpose. Once the data have been collected, we will have to discriminate them according to what we want to measure.
Google analytics offers so much data that the mistake would be to try to use them all. Our recommendation is to focus only on those that provide us with information about the objective we want to achieve.
Centralization of information
One of the pillars on which big data is based is the integration of data sources into a single repository(data warehouse). The information collected must be housed in a common storage to avoid isolated data silos. It is very important, for example, that the sales and marketing departments exchange information.
Homogeneous display
Ultimately, it is also highly recommended to use adashboard, which allows marketers to make the best business decisions thanks to simple and highly visual queries. The purpose of big data in marketing is to facilitate decision making, not to hinder it with unreadable dashboards.
There are numerous options in this field (software, apps…) that are adapted to different media (tablets, mobile, PC…). Google offers the“Datastudio” tool, which is quite powerful and easily integrates data from the brand’s other tools (Ads, Analytics…).
Conclusion
Any digital marketing strategy needs to be fed with diverse data, both on potential customers and on the reactivity (impact) caused by other similar campaigns in the past. The result of a massive and automated processing of large volumes of data enables marketing managers to make better decisions for future projects. The importance of data in digital marketing strategies is now more than ever a reality.
