Marketing Data

 

The Internet and social media have permanently changed the way business is conducted. Companies, both large and small, are now moving away from the old interruptive advertising model to a content marketing model.

 

When businesses focus on creating valuable content, they have a better chance of engaging with their prospective customers, to build long-term loyalty.

 

However, while creating quality blog posts, podcasts, and videos is important, it is not the only thing to consider. There is a seemingly infinite amount of consumer information out there today. New information is being created every second. With big data, you can view your customer’s behavior at a truly granular level.

 

Enriching your content with data is the latest trend in digital marketing and it can help your digital marketing become more effective.

 

 

What Is Big Data?

 

First, let’s define some terms. Big data refers to the massive amount of information that is being created every second of every minute of every day. We are creating nearly 2.5 Exabytes of information each and every day. That’s an incredible amount. And this information is being created by your customers and prospects.

 

Once you can distill all the raw information you can start creating blog posts that will resonate with your customers and that they will be more likely to share.

 

 

How Can You Turn Big Data Into Marketing Data?

 

Before embracing this trend it is important for you to focus on those things that are actually helpful. With so much information out there it is tempting to try to use all of it, to think that it is all important. You do not need to analyze every bit of information to provide value to your customer.

That being said, here are five ways to incorporate this trend into your digital marketing strategy.

 

 

1 – Raise Awareness With Your Target Audience

 

If you want to raise brand awareness with your target audience, there are a number of areas you can measure and analyze.

They are:

  • Website traffic
  • Brand mentions on social media
  • Social media followers
  • Traffic sources
  • Backlinks generated by your posts
  • Brand name searches

 

By using a program like Google Analytics you can see the behavior of your target audience. How often are they mentioning you?

 

What are they saying about your brand? Once you have identified patterns of behavior you can then create information that your audience will be more receptive to.

 

 

2 – Customer Conversion

 

The whole point of digital marketing is to convert customers as they travel down the buying path. Using marketing data, you can see your prospect’s behavior along that path. How long do they stay at a certain point? What kind of information are they consuming the most? Are they abandoning the process at a certain point?

 

“Of critical importance, always remember that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why you need to track your conversion rates on both a daily and monthly basis. Doing so allows you to immediately correct problems (e.g., why is our conversion rate so low today? …oh my, it’s because our website isn’t loading properly) and make sure you are improving your conversion rates over time.”

 

All this information will help you refine your marketing efforts and create information that will help move the prospect on to the next step. By conducting this type of analysis, you will be able to identify ideas that convert and deliver value to your audience.

 

 

3 – Retaining Customers

 

Providing valuable information after someone has become a customer is paramount to delighting then and keeping them as a long-term customer.

Marketing Data

Use your information to uncover such metrics as number of subscribers, average time spent on your website, click through rate, and overall customer satisfaction. These numbers are valuable when determining the effectiveness of your Internet marketing data efforts.

 

When focusing on customer retention you need to identify why customers are leaving in the first place. By being able to track customer behavior you can see at what points they are dropping out and come up with a plan to keep them in your ecosystem.

 

 

4 – Topic Discovery

 

You can also discover what topics your audience wants to know about. You can then serve-up the information that they are seeking the most.

 

There are many ways to come up with topics to create but one of the easiest is through keyword research. What words and phrases are your customers searching for the most? Once you find this out you can easily create blog posts, videos, and infographics around these keywords.

 

Another way to come up with topics is to look and see what your competitors are putting out. Dive into their website and take a look at the blog posts and lead gen items they are offering. They may have a case study or whitepaper that is doing well. It would not be difficult to create something similar for your company and offer it to your prospects.

 

 

5 – Choosing The Right Delivery Channels

 

It is important to deliver information to your customers via their preferred channel. Some may want to interact via social media while others may prefer to be contacted via email. By harnessing the power of this information you can discover which channel to send information through and the format they prefer.

This will include:

  • Format type (blogs, videos, infographics, ebooks, etc.)
  • Desktop vs. mobile
  • Length (short social media posts or long form blog posts)
  • Value
  • Quantity or quality

 

By choosing the right delivery channel you increase the chance of that information becoming an integral part of the buying process. Each piece will move the prospect to the next step in the buying process.

 

 

Conclusion

 

Big Data is here to stay. In fact, it will become a larger part of every company’s marketing data going forward. It is time to embrace this growing trend and reap the benefits of turning big data into your critical marketing data.

 

 

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