Many companies create a marketing strategy, implement the finer points, and wait for big things to happen. While this approach can lead to some positive results, it’ll never allow you to reach your full potential.
It’s the companies that understand the importance of marketing data that are making the biggest waves.
By using analytics to your advantage, you can better answer questions such as:
What marketing techniques have the highest return on investment (ROI)?
What marketing techniques are falling short of your expectations?
How can you adjust your strategy to achieve greater results in the future?
With so much data to collect and analyze, it’s easy to lose your focus as you begin to drown in the numbers. Fortunately, with the right tools and systems in place, you can prevent this from happening.
Let’s start by taking a closer look at some of the types of data your business can collect:
Created data: This includes data obtained from market research, such as online focus groups or phone calls to past customers and current prospects.
Transactional data: This refers to data associated with the buying process, such as: what customers are buying, when they’re buying, the steps they’re taking before checkout, and shopping card abandonment rate among others.
User generated: User generated data is on the rise, thanks to the growth of social media. It includes data such as number of retweets, Facebook likes, and YouTube views.
Collect, Analyze, and Use Data
It’s one thing to understand the types of data you can collect, but another thing entirely to use it to your advantage. The way you collect, analyze, and use data will impact the success you have.
Fortunately, there are a variety of tools you can use to speed up the process and maintain efficiency throughout.
Here are some of your better options:
Google Analytics: It’s the easiest and most affordable (it’s free) way to collect data associated with visitors to your website. From the number of visitors to top pages, from bounce rate to demographic details, there’s no shortage of data.
Kloudio: Many companies struggle to analyze their data, often because it’s not in a centralized location. Kloudio allows you to access and update any database/cloud application within Google Sheets - without any IT involvement. Once you have the data in an easy to understand format, you’re in better position to make use of it.
Dasheroo: This tool is designed to pull together business performance metrics from more than 100 applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Stripe, and Eventbrite to name a few. From your dashboard, you can access and analyze data.
Final Thoughts
In today’s competitive business landscape, it’s more important than ever to make the most of your marketing data. Once you begin to do so, you’ll realize the positive impact it’s having on your business.