“We must move from numbers keeping score, to numbers that drive better actions.” –David Walmsley, Chief Customer Officer at House of Fraser
What is the hype today around data, digital strategy and informed decision making? Why is everyone, including the big names in every industry, gushing towards leveraging the power of data-driven decisions to bring superior and indisputable value to their client’s tables? How can the exorbitant amount of data and information available to us, help drive business with assured returns and productivity?
One thing is for sure, metrics do matter, but there is a lot of confusion on which ones. Gathering numbers just to “keep score” is a fruitless tactic today. Decoding the numbers and data through analytics into valuable insights and further extracting sense from it, is the fuel, that is going to ignite successful digital marketing decisions and endeavors in future.
Gut feelings, intuitions and hypotheses belong to the past now. What rides the present digital marketing arena and lays foundation for the future, is a more pragmatic approach coupled with thorough analysis, logical validations and valuable deductions.
Here is a brief account of a visually cumbersome, but extremely rewarding “data to decision” journey.
“Without data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.” – Geoffrey Moore, author and consultant.
According to a McKinsey analysis, firms that put data at the core of their marketing and sales decisions achieve 15-20% higher ROI. Likewise, a study on the impact of data-driven decisions on business performance found that data-driven companies increase productivity by 5-6%. As a matter of fact, big data ranks second most significant marketing trend in 2018.
With the use of big data, companies can connect their products and services to the core problems of the audience by creating informative content. For instance, businesses use cookies to collect data about customer’s activities including their browsing history on the internet. This helps them build personalized data. In addition to this, marketing experts can create different client personas using big data and can track customer behavior, favorites and frequent purchases. Let’s consider an eCommerce website for women’s clothing. According to a journal of Contemporary Management Research based on the online buying behavior of women by Banasthali University, Jaipur, the convenience to shop online came out to be the most important factor for the female shoppers to shop online in India. Hence their digital marketing campaign should be designed inclined towards female buying behaviors like more inclination towards discounts and coupons, easy payment options etc.
If you indulge in social listening and observe the dynamics of it, the data will tell you where to go next. Using digital marketing analytics data to drive your decisions is a fool-proof way to increase results. Whether those results are more visits, more leads, or more revenue; effective data analysis is the answer.
- Using ANALYTICS as the new- age digital weapon
“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine”– Peter Sondergaard
Using big data for digital marketing campaigns is a great idea, but you also need to make sure the data available shows valuable insight. Therefore, it’s mandatory to use analytical tools for actionable insights. There are plenty of tools available in the market, but you should get the right tool that accesses all kinds of data including websites, social media, cloud and others. It should also function on real-time analytics, marketing funnels and attribution tracking.
Digital Marketing Analytics draw the line between opinion and fact. They give the creative, fluid side of marketing a data-driven foundation on which businesses can build a profitable, scalable marketing strategy. Renowned advertising guru Pops Sridhar says that: “There is nothing such as data analytics or business analytics and it’s all about human analytics. Therefore, how we draw “Insights about human behavior” from the data is the most critical part of the analytics process”. Sentiment Analysis is also one very important dimension, which can explore the strength, positives and negatives revolving around your digital strategy.
Digital analytics can be used to structure a business goal into outcomes based on three broad categories:
- The relationship between different marketing channels
- People-centric data on the buyer’s journey
- Revenue attributed to specific marketing efforts
Using tools like Hootsuite and BuzzSumo can really help you, derive and analyse useful, reliable and insightful information and further assist you in:
- Designing Digital Marketing campaigns.
- Modifying Digital Marketing campaigns.
- Developing better understanding of customer preferences.
The complete picture of every digital marketing strategy can be blended through the outcomes of the three categories, with application of the diverse tools, which can provide you, an unbeatable edge over others.”. According to Dr. Reema Aswani, AI & Analytics Research Lead at NASSCOM Research, “Digital marketers should leverage the power of AI and analytics to understand consumer behavior for creating tailored marketing campaigns”.
- Extracting the sweet essence of valuable INSIGHTS
“The goal is to transform data into information, and information into insight” – Carly Fiorina
In particular, you don’t choose which direction to go in: it’s the numbers, the statistics, that decide for you. Your ability lies in identifying the right numbers, reading them correctly, understanding what actions they suggest, and putting them into practice in the best possible way. Everything combined – here and now – with the right dose of creativity, leads to some really beneficial and valuable insights.
Regardless of how you fit into your company’s marketing puzzle, learning how to understand and leverage digital marketing analytics is incredibly important. Analytics data not only tells you if your marketing is working (or not), but it also tells you precisely how and where you can improve. This type of insight can benefit everyone.
Amazing success can be achieved via authentic Insights. Quoting an example of NIKE, it wasn’t until the 1980s that Nike unleashed a campaign about the actual role of fitness in day-to-day life. The company and their agency partner realized exercise wasn’t always this glorious thing for the average person. Before this, a lot of Nike’s campaigns spoke to the higher level of elite athlete. But then, Insights came into play. There was finally an understanding that the majority of their customers are everyday people, sometimes procrastinating on exercise and feeling like it’s chore. Using this knowledge, they launched “Just Do It” in 1988 and the rest is history.
Similar to this, is an example of the renowned advertising guru, Prahlad Kakkar, who made a fruitful utilization of the customer insights and reproduced them in the famous Cadbury campaign. He made the use of word “Chaaklate”, typical to the pronunciation of most Indians, instead of chocolate and really made connect with the audience.
Some methods to gain these highly authentic and valuable insights are:
- Data Analytics
- Observation of human behavior
- Secondary research
- Concluding the efforts through Sense-making and Decision
“Mediocre marketers think in terms of campaigns. Great marketers think in terms of growth frameworks and what makes those campaigns stand out.” –Neil Patel, New York Times Bestselling Author and Marketing Expert
Sense-making is the application of insights derived, on various platforms and to the overall Digital marketing campaign. Decision is all about the who, what, where, when, why and how, related to the implementation of the insights. With all information in hand, this stage is very simple and the ultimate destination to your digital goals.
All the analysis, from data till the decision stage, is a truly a journey, wherein a digital marketer invests time and resources in order to derive the maximum benefits and further nurture his future goals.
With so much given in, the fruit of the result can be nothing, but sweet, promising and successful.
Brief profiles:
Dr Amit Nagpal: President at Bloggers Alliance and also teaches Digital and Social Media at BIMTECH & other institutes
Zaisha Chadha: PGDM-Marketing student at Birla Institute of Management Technology, Greater Noida
