Understanding data-driven marketing

Stepping outside of what you know about your business, customers and industry from time to time is very important. All too often, we can get caught in echo chambers and make assumptions about market performance, without fully understanding how the digital landscape has changed, how it’s impacting consumer behaviour or how your competitors are responding to digital innovations and online marketing trends.  

Investing in data-driven strategies is vital for business growth. 

These strategies mean decisions can be based on real numbers and not assumptions. 

Instead of guessing what your audience wants, you can invest in strategies that appeal to what your customers need, ensuring your activations and campaigns actually work and deliver results. 

Collect data from your website, ads, social media and email marketing and investigate what’s working and what’s not. You’ll be better placed to test campaigns and continually take learnings to optimise your efforts to boost ROI.

5 Popular tools for tracking digital data

1. Google Analytics / GA4: Perfect for measuring traffic from channels (e.g. organic, direct, referral and social), campaigns and devices. It allows you to view popular landing pages and measure engagement metrics like on-page sessions, scroll depth and bounce rates.   
2. Hotjar / Crazy Egg: Great for behaviour tracking on your website. You can use this information to see how people really interact with your website to improve the user experience (UX) and make improvements to the journey to enhance conversion rates. 
3. CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce: These tools help you manage your sales pipeline, nurture leads and manage customer relationships. They’re fully customisable to your business and can be automated to help reduce admin time too.
4. Ad platforms (Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, TikTok Ads): You can create targeted campaigns to reach the right audiences quickly. Great for helping you capture important data that you can feed into long-term marketing campaigns. 
5. SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz: These tools can help you track the keywords that are driving traffic to your site and help you spot gaps in your content marketing to improve organic performance. You can also review competitors and understand the competitor landscape more specifically.

How you can use data-driven insights to change your approach

Bounce rates: If you’re driving traffic to your website but bounce rates are high, it would indicate that your web pages are lacking relevance or your user journey could be improved. Use tracking like Hotjar to review user behaviours and make changes based on these insights. Then measure user behaviour changes to monitor improvements. 

Open rates: If you want to increase open rates on email marketing campaigns, you could A/B test subject lines. This will help you to understand what type of headlines capture attention and lead end users to take action. You can also play around with template styles to see how ongoing engagement through email marketing can be influenced. 

Test the user journey: If you discover a high number of cart abandonments, understand why this is happening and tweak the checkout process. Use focus groups and see how people outside of your organisation find the process. This will help you make appropriate changes that will transform. 

SEO analysis: Doing a deep dive into SEO will show you exactly what keywords are driving people to your site, but more than this, you can do a full competitor analysis to see how you compare and what they’re doing to attract customers. This includes a deep dive into content production and link-building activities – all of which impact organic rankings. 

Paid advertising: Building organic relevance can take time, so if you want to drive website traffic quickly and get immediate data, invest in paid advertising through PPC (pay-per-click). Test, learn and refine your campaigns to improve performance and see what’s driving customers to take action. You can use these insights to inform other aspects of your digital marketing strategy too. If you have conservative budgets, you could also try advertising through social media channels – use a hook to draw people in – discounts, giveaways, downloadables and webinars are always great initiatives. 

Invest in the right strategies 

Don’t waste valuable marketing spend on what you think will work; invest it in marketing strategies that will help you move the needle. If you’re interested in data-driven strategies, contact us and let’s chat through the options.