Best-in-class marketers are 56% more likely to use data and analytics platforms. Why? Because the best marketers know that, when use properly, data is the best way to get results. How to transform data into actionable results. Marketing reports can indicate which strategies are working and which need to be reworke or eliminate altogether. Unfortunately, to gain this kind of insight from all those colorful charts and graphs, you have to know what the data means. Without interpreting the numbers correctly, your marketing strategy will stagnate.
There’s no shortage of data to interpret these days. Between first- and third-party analytics reports for nearly every digital touchpoint, sorting through all of this information can be overwhelming.
The good news is marketers and businesses don’t need to understand every little piece of data that comes through, but what they do need is an understanding of which data points, in particular, impact their goals.
Keep reading for tips on how to take those raw percentages and turn them into future marketing strategies to fine-tune your efforts.
Tips for turning marketing data into actionable results
1. Consider what data is truly important to your business
A common question business owners ask is “What marketing data should I focus on?” While this is an understandable question, it is misguide.
When businesses ask this question, they are looking for industry standards that they can use to measure their success. Unfortunately, focusing only on benchmarks and industry averages can be a distraction from primary goals. While these are a good starting point, they only measure broad goals and won’t tell you whether a specific activity is achieving its strategic objectives.
Every business’ needs are unique, and the criteria for success vary from business to business, campaign to campaign, and sometimes even week to week. When it comes to optimizing your marketing strategy, hitting a benchmark for email open rates in your industry isn’t a very useful metric if the goal is to get more views on a specific video. Maybe people open them, but are they clicking where they’re suppose to?
That’s the beauty of data, it’s specific to your business and its goals. You can decide which metrics help tell the story of success and then use those metrics to make it clear whether yes, this was an effective campaign or no, we have more work to do.
Just because there’s a ton of data at our fingertips doesn’t mean it’s necessary. As A. Lee Judge from Content Monsta said, “All data is not useful data, and more data is not better data.”
2. Regular reporting frequency
The number one mistake businesses make when using data is not reporting. Many companies use native reporting dashboards from their various marketing stacks but don’t compile that data into actionable reports to move forward. If you’re guilty of this, don’t worry! You can start changing that today.
If you’ve been wondering why your generic, system-generate reports don’t seem to be providing you with a lot of valuable information, it’s because they’re not meant to. Looking at a dashboard full of numbers is just that, looking at a dashboard full of numbers. If there’s no one to interpret those numbers and explain how they relate to activity, those numbers can’t be turn into actionable actions.
Of course, taking the time to create reports is an investment in your marketing strategy and it’s not worth skipping. We get it. No one likes reports. Well, except for the data scientists of the world, you are a special bree. Most of us would cringe at the thought of having to put together another report, but these analyses will help guide every marketing decision going forward.
Having someone on your team responsible for reporting also means you’ll be able to increase the frequency of reporting, which will help capture optimizations made while your campaign is running, not just after.
This should be done monthly at a minimum, but large programs should establish a regular reporting schedule at the beginning, middle, and near the end so that successes and improvements can be note throughout the process.
3. Create a story for your data
The old saying “data without context is meaningless” is widely use because it is true. Numbers without context are just numbers and there is nothing we can do about them. It’s like india telegram data someone telling you they receive 3,000 pageviews and asking if that’s good. Well, the answer depends on whether it was within an hour, a day, or a year? Was there paid traffic being sent to the page, or was it all organic? Without context, that’s not an answer we can provide.
With data, there’s always a story waiting to be told, and a good data marketer will be able to paint a picture for you.
Data will give you the answers. Think of your goal connecting marketing to business as a puzzle and your data points as clues along the way. To solve the mystery and answer your questions, look to the story of your data.
For example, to understand if an ad is driving enough leads to a landing page, a marketer might first look at the total number of impressions for the ad or the number of clicks back to the landing page. They can also look at total ad spend, bounce rates on the landing page, performance between different ads, and the best performing ad placements.
What does all this work do? It gives you a comprehensive view of what’s happening in the customer journey. With all these data points, marketers can determine that ad spend cz lists and impressions are where they need to be, but people aren’t clicking on the ads when they see them. This suggests a change in content could fix the problem.
4. Conduct a comprehensive strategic reassessment every quarter
Did you know that 81% of marketers consider implementing data into their strategy a bit complicate? That’s most of us! If you’ve been feeling like your data department is understaffe, you’re not alone.
One way to reduce this stress is to have a quarterly strategy check-in, taking all past data into account when reviewing your marketing plan. Setting aside time may seem tedious, but being able to group everything from social media and emails to website traffic and advertising together and review it can really highlight where your strategy is falling short and improve from there.
Reviewing data in silos also leads to blind spots, which are eliminate when all strategies and their overlaps can be seen together. This also provides an opportunity for marketing departments to learn from each other.
Tied Together
If use properly, data can help marketers make strategic and specific changes that focus on accomplishing goals and proving ROI. Without data to inform it, marketing strategies can never be truly optimize.
Of course, having all the data you need and in the right place is the first step to being able to use it. Creating a share document, folder, or data chart that connects these is a great starting point for small teams. Larger marketing departments will consider an analytics solution that can consolidate information from different sources into one dashboard that is easily accessible to everyone on the team.
To find out if SharpSpring is right for your business’s data needs, request a demo today!
