Automated data-driven marketing is making digital marketing possible for every kind of business. Every business these days has an autoresponder email series and promoted social media posts. The problem with this is the more automation there is the quicker the awareness of the prospects change. This makes it dangerous to market subpar information, so make sure you’re making the best content you can.
Analyzing the data of each industry is more than a full-time job. It’s necessary to at least have one person solely dedicated to understanding the micro and macro trends in your field to keep your organization moving in the right direction. Data-driven marketing will help your company with forward-thinking. It’s all too common to think about profit and stock prices in this quarter, but without a long-term agenda it’s difficult to know exactly were your sights should be pointed without understanding the trends that shape your industry.
Keeping up with all the important trends is virtually impossible and will make your head spin without some kind of guidance to adhere to. Use this guide to develop the right benchmarks for your business in the next few years.
Social Media Analytics
The easiest place to get data-driven marketing answers for your business is social media. Social media is the place where people openly share information about themselves. Social media giants like Facebook collects that data to understand who likes what. If you’re new to data-driven marketing, social media is the cheapest and one of the easiest places to learn how to take industry-specific information and apply it to your business.
Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook Audience Insights is the first place I go when I need to understand the market I’m marketing to. There are over 2 billion daily active users on Facebook, and all of their movements on the platform is categorized and by each click.
When you look at the stratifications possible using Facebook Audience insights, it becomes easy to understand why certain groups buy and certain groups don’t. Within minutes of browsing the groups and pages that your customers like, you’ll know where you can learn more about their interests and buying patterns.
Instagram Ads
Instagram ads provide very similar metrics to Facebook. They are more basic, but Instagram is a completely mobile application, and mobile purchases are growing every quarter. The ability to sell your products to your customers with Instagram and Paypal makes impulse buying easier than ever.
Recently, Instagram released the ability to sell products directly on the app. When you see the shopping bag in the corner you can make your purchase right then and there. I don’t know about you, but me being an impulse shopper makes Instagram dangerous for my bank account.
Email Marketing
This is a trend that is known by many data-driven marketing enthusiasts, but it shocks me how many companies do not use email marketing as a way to create repeat business. Plus, the data collected from it will give you many insights, including customer sentiment and insight into the viability of future products for your company.
It’s not enough these days to email your customers when you want them to buy something. If you do that, you’re essentially duplicating your ads and not going to build a relationship of any consequence.
Email marketing works the best when you treat it like a radio show and occasionally selling your products. The majority of your emails should be helpful and entertaining content related to your company and industry. I like to use a 4 to 1 ratio of content to sales pitches.
Most email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Aweber have analytics to help you understand what’s working and what’s not. As long as your emails are getting opened and the reader is clicking on the link to your website you’re pretty much doing things right. That’s the simple way of thinking about it, but it works. If you’re running a complicated system of if they click on this link they get this email or if they click on that link, etc, then you’ll have even better data.
My suggestion is to try a bunch of email marketing platforms at the beginning to make sure it has everything you need. They usually have free trials at the beginning, if you give them your credit card and your email. Most of them are simple, but some of them get very complicated.
Mobile Emphasis
Google and Facebook have gone on record to emphasize their algorithm changes to favor mobile over desktop in the future. This means that every site must have a mobile version and be optimized for use on a smartphone.
Worldwide mobile usage is always on the rise according to data-driven marketers. This may leave many website developers and marketers in a state of confusion. The key is to understand how your customers consume data on each platform and how they prefer to react to it.
Google AMP
The first step is to create a Google AMP style website, which is a fancy way of saying a mobile site. AMP, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source project to help Google’s mobile initiative. Click the link above to make sure you’re in the know and create your mobile version today.
Video Trends
Creating videos for some falls into the same categories as public speaking. Creating a post, writing an article, shooting a video is more important than ever but also difficult to accomplish when the benefit isn’t wildly apparent. In fact, creating video content is the best way to build a great relationship with your client without directly communicating with them.
Considering that most traffic and purchases are being made with a mobile device, it makes sense to consider making content that caters to these kinds of clientele. Mobile users are more likely to purchase when there is a video presented. The customer, especially millennials, reacts better to video, because of the transparency and convenience of it.
Macro Trend Analysis
Data-driven marketing is easier when you consider the macro changes in content consumption and the micro changes in your industry. The connection and the relevance of both sides of the fence are sometimes difficult to comprehend immediately, but with companies like Pew Research, you can learn more about your specific industry with their very comprehensive studies on social trends.
If you know that video and mobile are dominating ad sales in your industry then you should obviously focus your time and money on maximizing platforms that cater to it. Social platforms like Instagram and Snapchat are the best initial options, but if you’re a B2B company then LinkedIn’s ad platform will be a great place for you.
Website Analysis
Trying to understand why your website’s position on Google is where it is can seem like putting a together a Rubik’s cube. There are so many factors and not a ton of guaranteed fixes. However, the biggest problem is the lack of instant success.
When you make a change to your website, the change usually will take effect in a few months at best. In more competitive niches, the effects won’t be seen for 9-12 months. Google has many sites to analyze and it won’t always put your site where you want it by adding a few blogs.
The best strategy is to put your head down and just create the longest and most authoritative content possible on each subject. The quality needs to be very high and your aggressiveness to market it needs to be at an all-time high.
Use tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush to make sure you’re on the right track. Even a small change to your website can make a big difference over time. The main premise of website analytics is to keep on eye out for big changes in your traffic. If it’s trending upwards or downwards, or if you see a huge jump one day you should try and understand why that happened.
Maybe it’s because you wrote a viral article. If you did, great! Write another and another.
Putting It All Together
With all the information in this article, you may feel overwhelmed. Believe me, I was when I started digging deep into this, but let me simplify it for you.
Data-driven marketing is more effective when you get into one of these categories at a time. The first place I would go if you have a website is the Google AMP Project. There you can create a mobile version of your website. This way you want any organic traffic due to not being fast enough for mobile searches.
Next, get on Facebook Audience Insights, and start understanding everything about what your individual customers enjoy about your industry and related subjects. You might find that your perfect customer also likes to travel to exotic locations. With that added industry, you can create content outside your initial niche and enhance the experience of your target market without alienating them with information that lacks their interest.
Lastly, create an email marketing campaign using any one of the above autoresponder platforms. The information you’ll gather from understanding how your email list responds to your content is a valuable indicator of how the masses will respond. You can use this as a testing ground for customer surveys and new product ideas.
For more information on creating a business in 2018 check out this article.
