Digital marketing has been transformed by innovative ways by which businesses use data to create successful marketing strategies and improve operations. It doesn’t matter which industry your business is in or the size of your business, marketing analytics should inform every decision that you make. By analyzing data, you can understand your customers, identify who your target audience is, and develop a strategy that positively impacts the buying cycle.

Here’s how you should be using your marketing analytics to grow your business:

• Customer Profiles

Every marketing decision, and not just your digital marketing strategy, is dictated by the customers’ profiles. You need to determine the different customer personas that the consumers have. This isn’t a one-off exercise; rather it is a continual exploration of the profiles and the traits that the customers share. The greater the insights you gain, the more successful your campaign will be.

• Marketing Funnel and Sales Cycle

By analyzing the metrics that you have, you can see how consumers travel through the marketing funnel and sales cycle. It allows you to identify where you are ‘leaking’ prospects or where your business is failing to maximize opportunity.

• How long does it take for a lead to be a consumer?
• Where do your leads come from?
• What has motivated them to commit to purchasing?

Analysis of data allows digital marketers to tune their efforts for success finely.

The most common data sources:

• From the website
• From social media platforms
• E-mail marketing
• Content
• Lead generation

However, you should also look for new sources of data to inform your business decisions. There are other collections of data that you can access, so if you are targeting businesses with financial stability, the BIS Hong Kong provides financial statistics and analysis that can enhance your marketing strategies and provide valuable business trends and commercial profiles.

By using additional metrics from external sources, you will be able to develop a marketing strategy that incorporates data from around the globe, and not just from your business. It’s about looking at the larger picture and exploiting the data to your advantage. The more data you consider, the more significant the impact of your digital marketing campaign.

Big data is your key to digital marketing success:

• Design better marketing strategies

Analyzing data allows you to target the core needs of customers. It removes the guesswork of what will appeal to the target audience. You will be able to understand the consumer behavior of the segmented customer personas better. For example, you may find that women respond more to e-mail campaigns that contain promotional codes.

• Make better commercial decisions

Traditionally, businesses priced their products and services on the product cost, competitor prices, perceptions of customer value and, of course, demand. Big data allows you to incorporate other factors: inflation, exchange rate, and GDP growth rate.

The possibilities of you using big data are endless, and the only limits are those that you impose. Big data has been a buzzword for many years, but this is not a trend. The ability to process large amounts of data is complex and advanced, but to compete in the global marketplace, it is essential that you get on board.