The digital age.

Social media.

Wide audience.

Strategizing.

Marketing.

That’s just how the world works!

Are you interested in learning how to use data to determine whether to launch, pause, or scale your marketing initiatives?

Let us get you a plan!

 

Data: It’s not as dull as it sounds

Building a strategy based on unreliable evidence and hope without statistics? Sounds terrible!

We build our plans based on things we like, things we’ve been told, and ideas we see other people using well, and we’re blind to whether they’re working. 

Do your efforts, resources, and conversions all add up?

Data removes bias.

Your efforts and money can be linked through data. You may assess each component’s importance in the overall scheme of things by knowing how it ties to revenue for your marketing plan. Since data reveals where you’re losing money, it is powerful in social media marketing.

Pretty useful, isn’t it?

Tip: Start gathering data before you need it. If you’re beginning a new firm, track data anyway. Google Analytics doesn’t function retrospectively because data collection takes time. 

 

Data is pretty cool, but where do I start?

1. Choose the Analytics Data You Want to Track

Setting goals is the first step in social media marketing. How will you know when you’ve achieved your goals?

Many firms’ foundations are based on boosting sales or profits. Each channel’s goal isn’t always to generate cash. When analyzing your marketing plan as a whole and your channel as a component, you may want to consider how this channel fits in. Is it meant to increase brand recognition, generate leads, or facilitate customer calls?

Once you know your business’s goals and objectives, you can reverse-engineer the customer journey’s touchpoints to evaluate if you’re meeting them.

Consider a certain eCommerce brand. Your goal may be to sell so much each month. In this case, you’ll want to track how often users add the product to their carts, complete checkout, and search for it.

Complex purchases, such as luxury products or B2B services, may require more data tracking, which can be done using a (customer relationship management) CRM. Customers may phone, visit your website, or look up directions. With the correct tools and methods, you can track every customer interaction, in-person or online. 

These are the items you monitor and review to see if your efforts are paying off if you’re on track to meet your goals if money is leaking through your funnel, and if you can improve. Most of the time, you’ll monitor micro-conversions to measure macro-conversion progress.

 

2. Analytics Software to track your Data.

The most effective online tracking tool is Google Analytics. You might concentrate more on Facebook’s statistics than Google’s if you just use Facebook.

Because Google Analytics is free, small businesses can use it. Additionally, it offers sophisticated features that enable you to analyze the online behaviours of your customers, making it an excellent tool for seasoned marketers.

There are numerous resources for Google Analytics. Almost any question can be answered using Google or YouTube. It is easy to use and seamlessly integrates everywhere.

Analytics has never provided the complete story; it is only an estimate. Consider conducting a customer survey. Not all consumers will participate in the survey, but enough will yield information that is helpful for your business plan. Any tracking application for popular websites functions similarly to Google Analytics. Google Analytics never reached capacity. The need to estimate missing data has always existed, and the new privacy restrictions haven’t really changed that much.

 

3. Review and decide: Start, Stop or scale?

Use the data to guide your social media marketing choices after deciding which KPIs to monitor and defining goals. Here, you can link financial values to numerical values and work out which sources are most beneficial.

Facebook’s traffic may outpace Twitter’s, or Facebook’s visitors may be more knowledgeable. You can decide after viewing the statistics. Should you put money into Facebook? Do you still want to use Twitter? Why are Facebook users more likely to make purchases?

 

Start new initiatives: These are topics or pursuits you haven’t yet begun. A fan of your brand might write an uninvited blog post reviewing one of your products, which would increase traffic to your website. Or you might find a company to work with that is appropriate.

It might be time to look further and test the waters in any case. Think about forming an alliance, a partnership, or working together with influencers in your niche.

Make a list of your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor as you sit down to brainstorm. We’ll then see if this new opportunity is successful.

 

Scale what’s working: Successful activity doubles when it is scaled.

For instance, Facebook’s ad managers. The cost of daily commercials and creatives is in the hundreds of thousands. When they log into Advertising Manager or Business Manager and discover that one ad is now performing better than in testing (or that a situation has changed and one ad is now yielding 10 times what they had anticipated), they begin to close down less successful advertisements in order to put more money behind the successful ads.

Paid and organic social media marketing are effective.

Make more if an Instagram post does well. Make additional videos in a popular YouTube video format. Write extra if a blog post is really good.

Scaling costs time and effort rather than money.

 

Stop, It’s not working out: End a business’ non-profitable operations. 

That could mean cutting the budget for an advertisement or ending a losing advertising campaign in the scenarios mentioned above. It can entail limiting or closing a channel in organic social media that is ineffective.

Think about whether these behaviours encourage conversions without directly feeding them. It could be tempting to stop using a video if a lot of people watch it on your YouTube channel.

You can discover that YouTube viewers are visiting your Facebook page or website to study more before converting if you look at your assisted conversions in Google Analytics. Even while each touchpoint leading up to the final click helps, Google Analytics defaults to credit the conversion to that particular click. Your business and conversion rates could suffer from any of these touchpoints.

 

Consistency, track, Improve and repeat

• Collect data continuously: Don’t catch a break 
• Use performance statistics to identify what is and isn’t working as your campaign develops.
• Take notes: How frequently does your audience do the required steps? (It demonstrates how consumer behaviour impacts your marketing initiatives)
• Identify patterns in high-performing content, reduce ad waste, and focus on your target audience. (Similar audiences might be found via insights to expand your reach.)
• Your advertising needs to be regularly evaluated and improved. (Your goals will be more quickly and consistently met as a result, and your future marketing initiatives will also benefit.)

Data will drive every aspect of marketing in the upcoming years. Businesses will have an advantage over rivals if they can use the insight that may be derived from the data they gather about their clients. 

More crucially, data-driven marketing drives brand loyalty and affinity, which will pay off well into the future, at least until the next transformative technology is developed.

Why wait? Join hands with data now

Writing Credit – Drishti Shah