Very often we’ll talk to someone about a marketing initiative they’ve embarked on, whether that’s a social media campaign or an advert in a magazine and they’ll say ‘we didn’t see the benefit and won’t be doing it again’. However, interestingly, this reaction is often just ‘a feeling’, without any real figures to back it up.
In any marketing situation, data is king. If you launch a campaign, you need to measure its success, otherwise you’ll never establish what works and what doesn’t. Data should inform all your decisions. It helps you to understand your audience, revealing customer preferences, behaviour and demographics, enabling you to create personalised experiences and targeted campaigns.
Obtaining data in your business doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, simply asking people calling your company for the first time where they heard about you, will give you an idea of where your leads are coming from. All you need is a simple spreadsheet to tick – with columns such as Google search, a recommendation, an advert etc. These figures will help to inform your next marketing campaign. Put simply, you need data to make informed decisions.
As a web agency, helping clients to make the most from their websites, our work is based on data. Through analytics, we can easily show clients which pages are the most visited on their websites. Personalisation – both explicit and implicit – can then help tailor your visitor's experience to their needs, thus driving engagement and conversion.
Used well, website analytics can help you to build stronger customer relationships, as data-driven insights will help you to communicate more effectively with customers. Monitoring what clients are searching for will also enable you to predict future trends and deliver what customers are looking for, thus building competitive advantage, as data helps you identify gaps in the market.
By looking at data, we can see if particular campaigns are working, as it’s simple to see how many potential customers are visiting that specific landing page. Then, if engagement or conversion doesn’t necessarily follow, we can help our clients to see if there’s anything they can do to improve this story.
Using data, marketers can track which campaigns work best and adjust strategies accordingly. This includes A/B or multi-variant testing, for example, which allows businesses to compare different versions of content and choose the most effective one for a given audience.
Of course, it’s not necessarily about the number of clicks but the quality matters as well. As a business, you need to establish how many leads you actually need and whether they are the right sort of leads?
If you are in the luxury car business then you only need a few good leads to make the campaign successful, while you’ll need more leads if you are selling chocolate bars. In either case, you still need to understand what’s happening from a numbers point of view.
In theory, you could easily draw in potential customers through a social media channel to your landing page, offering them 50% off their next supermarket shop but they really need to be on that page because they are interested in your business – not to pick up some free shopping. There has to be logic behind each step in the marketing funnel and data will fuel that logic.
We’ve spoken about chat functions on your website before and it might be that potential customers are more likely to buy from you if there’s somebody – whether that’s a real person in a call centre or a chat bot – to answer some simple questions. A call centre might cost you money but if your sales go up by an amount which makes it worth it to your business - just because of that interaction – then it’s worth it.
Every single facet of your marketing chain – whether that’s direct mail, your website, social media channels or taking a stand at an exhibition – should be working for your business and you’ll only know this is if you measure it. Often attending an exhibition seems like a good thing to do – and you might have a pleasant time catching up with peers in the industry – but if you don’t really know why you are doing it from a business point of view, it’s hard to justify.
Utilising data effectively, will help you to optimise your budget and ROI (return on investment). It will enable you to allocate marketing budgets more effectively by focusing on high-performing channels – rather than the ones you ‘feel’ are doing well when, in fact, they are not.
In conclusion, data is the backbone of your business. Without it, you will struggle to make strategic decisions, personalise customer experiences and measure success effectively.
If you want to talk to us about how your website can provide your business with vital data, then contact Lake Solutions today: 0203 397 3222.