Leverage Data for Effective Marketing
For any organization, marketing is an investment. Like any investment, you want to ensure it’s working and delivering a return. To achieve confidence in marketing decisions, leveraging data is critical.
“Data-driven decisions reduce guesswork,” said Strategic America (SA) Data Analyst Kaitlin Wren. “When you use data to make your decisions, you can prove what is working and then spend your marketing budget more efficiently to achieve your goals.”
Wren is part of the Data, Research & Insights (DRI) team at SA who work to ensure clients make informed data-driven decisions for their marketing needs. The team utilizes a vast library of resources to gain deep understanding of a brand’s customers, prospects, purchase behaviors, preferred marketing channels and motivations. They look for emerging trends, test concepts to confirm what resonates with consumers, help interpret data and develop strategy to achieve client goals.
“When data is at the foundation of decision making, we are focused on collecting good, actionable data that can be used for continuous improvement,” said Wren.
Test, don’t guess
Testing is essential for making marketing decisions because it provides concrete evidence of how well elements of your marketing campaign are working. Testing can confirm how your audience is responding to your brand, reduce risks and improve targeting.
One essential practice in data-driven decision making is A/B testing. A/B testing compares two versions of something — such as offers, imagery or landing pages. It’s a great way to test new ideas while keeping proven effective campaigns in market, so performance isn’t negatively impacted.
“A/B testing should be done often because the smallest changes can help marketers move the needle,” said Wren. “When reviewing performance, consider the timing of the test and if other seasonal or economic factors are impacting your results.”
Establish & optimize metrics
Trust in marketing data starts at the foundation. At SA, the DRI team builds trust in data through performing quality checks for clients. These quality checks include carefully monitoring campaign data and capturing key performance indicator metrics by channel. Common examples of tracking metrics include:
- Tags, which allow precise data analysis from client tools, extracting meaningful insights from complex data sets.
- Urchin Tracking Model (UTM) data that tracks the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by adding specific codes to client URLs.
- Toll-free numbers (TFN), which are assigned to marketing campaigns to track consumer responses to client products and analyze campaign performance through text message delivery or multimedia content.
All of these tracking mechanisms provide essential data that allow a business to fine-tune marketing campaigns to optimize performance.
Identify marketing trends
Data doesn’t just help you stay on track with your business’s goals; it also helps identify marketing trends.
“A great way to inform future projects and campaigns is by looking at performance over time. We can identify which channels perform well together during peak and off seasons, considering what’s consistently performing well,” said Wren.
Leveraging data allows businesses to spot trends early, adapt quickly and make marketing decisions that are backed by evidence, not just intuition. Research can prove which products are being viewed, purchased or abandoned. To aid in informed decision-making, SA’s data team can uncover repeat customer behaviors and seasonality trends, comparing performance across different marketing platforms and channels to help identify what’s gaining traction or losing momentum.
Tracking channel and campaign effectiveness identifies audience trends with metrics like CTR (click-through rate), time on site or shares. These metrics help pinpoint changing consumer interests or preferences, which can help businesses confidently decide which directions to take for their marketing goals.
Understand trends through data visualization
Data visualization is another valuable way to inform future campaigns — graphically illustrating performance to show trends. These visualizations help simplify strategies, illustrating the “why” behind the numbers to help leaders make the right decisions for their organizations. Suitable for any marketing channel, they help visualize and strategize data.
Wren gave an example of a data strategy created for a client.
“We created lookalike audiences based on high-value customers that we want to replicate and have used those audiences in our paid social and paid search campaigns. This strategy allowed us to target individuals who resemble our best-performing customers and are most likely to engage or convert,” said Wren.
Data isn’t just a performance measure. Strong data helps structure smarter campaigns from the start. SA’s data team is dedicated to testing tactics and market factors, identifying trends and confirming accuracy that can help organizations decide which marketing direction to take for their business’s success. Even gathering data toward the end of a marketing campaign can highlight performance and help structure future campaigns.
Wren recommends always planning ahead when making data-driven decisions for your company’s marketing. “Make sure you think about your data when you are planning and testing your campaigns so you will have access to everything you need to analyze, instead of reaching the end of a campaign and wishing you had tracked something specific,” says Wren.
Want to make more data-driven decisions for your company’s marketing? Contact SA to start the conversation today!
Kaitlin Wren is a data analyst at Strategic America (SA), an integrated marketing and communications agency in West Des Moines, Iowa. Learn more about our data and analytics services.
