Digital marketing is one of the most important verticals you can leverage for your business’ revenue channels. However, most companies overlook this opportunity. Digital marketing can be a scary space to face head-on, especially if you don’t have experience with it.
The general premise of digital marketing is to build a digital presence for your brand that is properly projected to the internet at large. You want to position your company better than your competitors, this way when people google your services, your company pops up rather than your competition. You should also hire the right software team.
Digital marketing includes a variety of tasks and activities. To build an effective digital marketing campaign, you need to consider a multitude of strategies, including but not limited to:
- Keyword analysis
- SEO optimization
- Content writing
- Backlink profile
- Social media presence
- Website bounce rate
- Email campaign
- Ad campaigns
- Ad retargeting
Whichever strategy you choose to focus on, what is imperative is that you leverage data analytics to boost your performance.
How to Use Data Analytics for Marketing Performance
If you blindly try to implement a digital marketing strategy, you may have success, but you are shooting yourself in the foot…big time. By leveraging data analytics, you can build a predictive digital marketing presence. Rather than implementing a strategy and hoping for the best, you can implement a strategy with confidence that you will see your desired results.
Before we get into how to use data analytics to improve your marketing performance, it is important to understand that this is a process that requires patience. According to marketing guru Neil Patel, it can take anywhere from 6 to 9 months to see results. Yup, 6 to 9 months of just waiting.
So, that is why it is so important to leverage analytics. If you’re going to be putting that much up-front investment into this, it is important that your strategies are effective. The last thing you want is to spend 6 to 9 months of effort to realize that your strategies weren’t effective!
Let’s dive in.
1. Set your goals
Before you can begin your journey into data analytics, you first need to understand what you are looking to get out of your digital marketing campaign. Are you trying to simply drive more website traffic? Are you looking to increase your inbound leads? Or maybe, you are focused more specifically on increasing your conversion rate of inbound leads.
Whatever your core intentions are, it is important to clearly define them because it will influence not only your strategies in pursuing digital marketing, but it will also help you establish benchmarks for measuring what success means for your digital marketing journey.
2. Collect and analyze your data
This one may seem a bit obvious, but in order to analyze data, you first will need to be sure you are collecting it! This means having systems in place to track things like website traffic, click through rates, bounce rates, etc.
You are going to want to use data analytic tools to gather these insights and track your user’s behaviors. In general, here are three different tools that take unique angles in gathering data for different purposes:
- Google Analytics
- Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that reports website traffic and user insights such as where did website visitors come from, how long do they stay on your site, what device are they using, and more.
- Ahrefs
- Ahrefs is a tool that helps provide analytics into your SEO. Through ahrefs, you can understand where your keyword gaps are compared to competitors, how many backlinks you have, your URL strength, and more.
- Hotjar
- Hotjar is a unique tool that helps you analyze your user’s behavior, creating heat maps so you can track where users are navigating on your site, how long they stay on each page, and more.
3. Leverage A/B testing
A/B testing is the process of testing two different versions of something. In this case, it would be related to your digital marketing efforts, such as two different landing pages or two different cold emails. In doing so, you can test two different strategies to then see which one performs better.
You should leverage A/B testing throughout your digital marketing journey so you can always continue iterating and testing new ideas to ensure that you are using the best approach possible, helping you maximize performance.
4. Use your data to personalize your content
Once you’ve got your data, be sure that you use it to your advantage! Your data tells you your audience’s preferences and behaviors, so you can use this information to personalize your content to your audience.
Maybe you change an email subject line or switch up your copy on your website’s landing page. Another way you can leverage the data is by targeting your ads and ad copy to your specific audience. Whatever it be, make sure you let your data influence your strategy, on a recurring basis.
5. Measure your ROI
Once you’ve got all the pieces in place, it is important that you measure the ROI (return on investment) of your efforts. Track things like the cost of your ad campaigns and the amount of time it is taking you to perform certain tasks. Understand how much revenue you are generating from each channel as well. Not every digital marketing channel will work for you, so the more conclusions you can draw from your efforts, the better you can focus your budget on the channels that maximize performance and ROI.
