Data is a big thing in today’s society! All that information is extremely useful to businesses from all industries, and this helps make it enormously valuable. Today, the world produces more data than ever before, and a lot of that is down to the internet. Through our websites and social media pages, we can build up endless amounts of data about our customers. We can log where they access the internet from, learn their gender and age, track the links they click on, collect email addresses, find out their preferences – the list goes on and on.
The trouble is, we have access to so much data, that eventually it becomes difficult managing it, and we have to find the best ways to turn it into actionable insights. This is where data analytics and techniques like SQL join come into their own, helping us make sense of all that data and turning it into something that can help us improve our businesses. Modern entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large enterprises rely on data analytics to make smart decisions that lead to exponential growth. And to streamline the process, data analytics outsourcing is the best way forward.
There are many ways we can use data to expand our businesses, but here are some of the key areas it can help.
It Helps Us Make Better Decisions
If someone comes into a physical shop, they come in, and they leave. If they bought something, you might be able to collect some data on them, but if they don’t, then they’re gone (possibly forever.) In comparison, if that same person visits your website, you will collect some form of useful data on them. At the very least, you will know which pages they visited and how long they were on each page. This data is extremely useful for business owners because when you scale this up over many thousands of people, you build a picture of what content works with your visitors, and what doesn’t.
Just from two metrics (time on page and pages visited), you can make more informed decisions about your business, and digital marketing gives you access to many more metrics than just these two. When you add in all the data you collect across your social media platforms, your websites, and other online tools, this gives you a huge amount of information to help you make informed decisions. Collecting the data isn’t necessarily the hard part; it’s about knowing how to use it.
It Helps Us Solve Problems
When that person walks into your physical store and looks at a product for a few minutes but doesn’t buy it, it’s very difficult to find out why. When you use digital marketing in its many forms, you get all sorts of data to help explain why they might have stopped interacting with you.
Say you’re running an email marketing campaign, and on the third email, the percentage of people that click your link drops from 50% to 5%. The data shows you that something is wrong with the message in the third email. This data on its own help inform you how to solve the problem, but when you combine it with all the other data you collect, then you can start to solve problems much more quickly. Just in that email, you can also track the percentage of people that open the email, which further adds to your ability to solve the problem. When you add up all the data you collect through your digital marketing, it can give you an incredible ability to solve problems swiftly – if you can interpret it correctly.
It Allows Us to See Performance
Our ability to see our performance in real terms has changed exponentially in recent decades. The insights you have available to you as a digital marketer are mind-boggling compared to how business marketing was done in the past. Technology goes as far as allowing us to track exactly what a website visitor is looking at, at any time, giving us extraordinary insight into how customers think. All this information allows us to see how we are performing against our goals at any given time.
In order for goals to be useful, they have to be measurable, and for this to happen, you need to have access to the relevant data. Technology allows us to do this in real-time, with accurate and essential information. Take a video you post to Facebook; at any given moment, you know how many people have viewed it, how many have commented on it, and how many have shared it. If your goals are to improve your brand visibility, you will have concrete evidence of how much progress you are making. The data you create and insights you take from it don’t have to be limited to future digital marketing campaigns; the lessons you learn can be implemented across your whole business.
It Enables Us to Improve Processes
When we can measure performance accurately, we have the ability to make incremental improvements to our processes. If the third email in your email series isn’t getting people to click the links you want, then you need to make changes to it and continue to measure the percentage of people clicking the link until you get the percentage you want. It doesn’t matter what the process is; if you have the data, then you have a way of measuring performance, and you can implement changes until you get things right. Without the data, you’re relying more on a gut feeling, and you don’t have the same ability to measure the impact of the changes.
A big part of digital marketing is being able to tweak your message until you get it right for your target audience. Without the data, or the ability to interpret the data, finding the right message for your audience becomes much harder.
Over to You!
Digital marketing might be a small part of your business, but just like the leads it creates, the data it creates can be used in all areas of your organization. Information is power, but only if you have the ability to use it properly. Digital marketing can help provide you with that data, but how you use it is up to you.
