How Data Can Inform Your Marketing Strategy

For a long time, people have had the misconception that data and creativity are opposites – that data, with all its numbers, stifles creativity.

But whether you’re in the marketing department or business administration, you should not shy away from using data. In fact, the most effective marketing campaigns are created when both data and creativity are used to their full potential.

There’s no need to compromise data for creativity, or vice versa. Learn about the different ways data can be used effectively to help generate creative marketing campaigns.

How Data Can Help with Marketing

Understanding Your Competitors

Collecting data is invaluable in helping you understand your competitors’ strategies. Knowing which strategies have been successful for your competitors can help guide the creation of your own creative campaign.

In the world of digital marketing, there’s a great deal of data you can collect on your competitors, such as:

Digital Ad Campaigns – Learn about the keywords that competitors are attempting to rank for, the various ads they have created, and the landing pages used to convert customers.

Website Information – Discover some of the hidden details of a brand’s website- domain authority, most-visited pages, highest-ranking pages, and relevant meta tags used for SEO.

Social Media Clout – Which networks are your competitors on? How frequently do they post? What does their audience look like? Social media can give an insightful picture of current and potential customers.

Backlinks – One of the most important factors in SEO, knowing where certain backlinks come from can be advantageous in improving rankings. Certain tools can allow businesses to identify backlinks from various domains.

Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your audience is just as important as understanding competitors. Data can tell stories about customer intentions and motivations. Consumer insights are key to building creative campaigns that speak to and resonates with your audience and potential customers.

Online Behavior – For example, data collected on how long a consumer spends on one page of your website versus another page can tell you a lot about the value or optimization of that content. If certain services are explored more frequently on your website, perhaps that is a competitive advantage you have over competitors that you consider should advertising and marketing further.

Right Place, Right Time – Audience data can also give good indications as to when and where you should be marketing to your audiences. Knowing where your potential customers are in their purchasing journeys can help you tailor messages that drive them further down the consumer journey funnel. Tactics such as retargeting or email drip campaigns can be further personalized to address specific inquiries or needs your potential customers may have.

Automated advertising – Programmatic advertising, or programmatic ad buying, is an automated process of ad-buying, allowing businesses to target potential customers based details such as their buying history and media preferences using artificial intelligence. Through programmatic advertising, media and ad buying can become much more cost effective and efficient with the use of user data.

Understanding Your Industry

Each industry differs in its products, services, and audiences, and change is the only constant. Staying on top of industry trends is necessary to stay competitive and ahead of the curve.

Trends – Your industry may sometimes center heavily around a particular topic or conversation depending on the current events. Trends may take the form of a particular genre people are into (such as zombie films) or a national conversation (such as privacy and politics). Resources such as Google Trends and Twitter’s Trending Topics can provide a cursory glance at ongoing developments.

New Technology – From the early days of the Internet to smartphones to cryptocurrency, technology is one of those things that penetrate all industries. Take social media for example. While it may have been for college students in the beginning, it would be difficult today to find a company that isn’t on at least one social network.

Changing Laws – Politics and economics have a way of influencing industry legislation, which can influence everything from operations to sales. For example, GDPR recently set a new precedent for how businesses collect data on consumers, which affects businesses around the world.

Your Bottom Line

As stated above, data is an extremely powerful ally when it comes to helping you measure the success of your campaign, and ultimately, your bottom line. Through collecting data and figuring out what is most valuable to your consumer, you can optimize your creative marketing campaigns to be the most impactful. Better yet, you can actually see your business’s greatest strengths and the areas for improvement.

Although creative marketing may generate general awareness, data can tell you what the true dollar value of your campaigns are, driving smart business strategy moving forward.

Get an in-depth competitive analysis of your business today.