If you plan on running a marketing campaign now or in the near future, these five simple tips will help you most effectively tap into the wealth of data available online.
Are you using innovative data insights for your company’s data?
If you are not using data to inform your marketing decisions and campaigns then, according to McKinsey, you could be up to 10pc worse off than those companies that use big data insights to plan their marketing strategies.
For those in marketing, there remains the issue of sifting through this data to try and find the hidden insights that could make your campaign potentially flourish, or fall to the wayside.
For instance, it is worth bearing in mind that previous estimates suggest as much as 1.7m bytes of information is generated online every second. How do you make the most of that traffic that appears in your company’s online presence?
Heatmaps
Use heatmaps to find where eyeballs are going on your site.
There are powerful and extremely useful tools to track and monitor how people are (and are not) using your website.
These tools are widely available and offer you the ability to make decisions based on data-driven insights rather than just hunches.
Learning how people are actually using your website will help to identify where users are experiencing problems or not using the site as intended.
This data can help identify problem points, confusing messages, and even turn up unexpected insights derived from customer experiences rather than internal hunches.
Heatmap provided by Crazyegg.com. Image via Tomas Friberg/Flickr
Google Analytics
You may not use Google for all of your company activities, but chances are your website will have access to Google Analytics or a similar alternative.
This is a great opportunity to dive deeper into the data behind the customers and potential customers who visit your website and online offerings.
Analytics will tell you the gender, age, region, device, time of day and much more about the demographics of those people using your website.
Google Analytics image via Google
It is vitally important to know who your market is, and your website’s analytics is an incredibly powerful way to learn more about this.
There are also a number of useful courses that don’t require a large time commitment and can help you to master the basics.
This will help you to understand what insights you could, and should, be extracting from your website’s data analytics.
It is far more useful to have some awareness of this rather than merely paying an expensive third party to manage your SEO (search-engine optimisation) strategies.
Social media analytics
You should use analytics from all your social media accounts, rather than just your site
As with your website’s analytics, there are valuable data insights that should be used from the company’s other social media accounts including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
With each of these platforms, there are varying levels of data available. They can clearly demonstrate where your message is effectively reaching – and where it may not be – as well as the age, location and gender of your audience.
Social media logos image via Bloomicon/Shutterstock
Google Trends
Google Trends is a great tool to use to see what people are searching for both historically and currently in real-time.
This provides you with invaluable data that you can use to ensure you are targeting your audience’s interests.
Searching for ‘data science’ on Google Trends
Follow the good and the bad
You can use data monitoring to manage the bad news, too
Sentiment analysis enables you to ensure any damage limitation is handled quicker. Good PR campaign managers are able to deal with negative news as well as positive stories.
If you are monitoring social media accounts you will be aware much quicker if there are problems or negative stories emerging about your company brand or product.
Image via Shutterstock
By Emma Quinn
Emma Quinn is senior marketing manager of Next Generation Recruitment who, in association with CeADAR, will host the inaugural DatSci Awards on 22 September 2016. Tickets for the event are available here.
A version of this article originally appeared on DatSciAwards.ie
Digital marketing image via Shutterstock
