April 16, 2020 •DJ Team
With hundreds of thousands of different marketing data points available to analyze, how should you and your team determine which insights are actionable and which are simply muddying the waters of your analysis? When you consider the volume of information generated on a daily basis is in excess of 2.5 quintillion bytes, it's not surprising to find that the role of data in marketing and business continues to expand.
Fortunately, most marketers are able to define a structure that provides insight into their daily work, such as the details from website and marketing channel reports. While this information is certainly beneficial, leaving your data analysis at this level doesn't take full advantage of the possibilities available to enhance your marketing strategy.
Role and Uses of Big Data in Marketing
The true power of marketing is unleashed when you are able to leverage the insights gained from big data to make decisions about individual marketing campaigns and strategies. The thought of tying together the massive quantity of information that flows through a business on a daily basis can be staggering, causing marketers to take a step back and stay within the shallow pool of data gathering. By definition, big data consists of datasets that are too large or complex for traditional databases and simple analysis to accurately make sense of.
It can be extremely difficult to categorize big data, as it includes vast quantities of structured and unstructured information. The challenge for marketers comes in defining the right metrics to consider in terms of providing proactive data analysis to impact current and future marketing campaigns.
Gathering Marketing Data for Analysis
Marketers and data analysts often work together, with marketers defining the specific metrics they would like to capture or analyze and data analysts attempting to tie the information together. Often, the most challenging aspect of the relationship is helping find a correlation between disparate data points or siloed data sets, such as understanding how one channel’s marketing campaigns influences conversions or engagement with another.
Working with a data scientist or cross-channel analytics vendor may be the missing link that marketers need to review and utilize these meaningful connections. When marketers are able to connect these pieces of information, it can create a "Eureka!" moment - allowing innovative marketers to streamline campaign tactics to align around the most compelling message or actions taken by buyers.
Evaluating Marketing Data
When you consider the evaluation of a marketing campaign, it's important to define the right metrics for your decision-making. For instance, you wouldn't want to stop running an ad that has been delivering solid leads unless you determine that those leads are not converting into purchases.
In this case, marketing attribution and funnel analysis tools can be used to assess which channels and tactics convert leads into customers most effectively. In this instance, it sounds like you may need to tweak the audience or messaging to ensure that you're getting access to the individuals that are most likely to make a purchase -- as opposed to simply filling a sales funnel with leads that will ultimately pull resources away from actually valuable prospects.
This is one of the ways that innovative companies are targeting their marketing tactics, gaining new insight into multi-touch attribution models and finding options for following customers throughout their journey. Each activity that a prospect and customer takes as they interact with your brand can help you identify needs and improve the overall experience, in-turn leading to greater sales opportunities and customers who convert to committed fans. With marketing evaluation tactics and controls in place, each strategy that you work through should have actionable metrics that are tied directly to business goals and objectives.
Funneling big data metrics down into a results-focused analysis can prove frustrating for marketers that do not have access to the right tools to help provide additional insight into the marketing metrics being captured.
Is the marketing data that you're gathering overwhelming your team, or providing actionable insights that help improve your campaigns and boost revenue?
When you are ready to simplify your data gathering and analysis efforts, contact the team at DemandJump to learn more about our comprehensive marketing data and analytics platform. We help pull together data from a wide range of sources and present the information in an easy-to-use format that will have your marketers becoming analytical rock stars.
