Understanding the Evolving Role of Data Analytics in Digital Marketing

From Digital Marketing’s rise to evolution, data analytics has played a paramount role. If you look into it carefully, you can actually feel it fueling the digital marketing’s engine. However, your data’s quality and the inference you draw out of it determines your digital marketing efforts’ success. As per reports, the majority of the global population is actively using the internet today. This results in a prodigious amount of digital shadow, allowing the marketers to go to great lengths by examining consumer behavior. 

Understanding consumer behavior, presenting appropriate offerings, and targeting them has always been marketing’s essence. However, data has introduced much-needed accuracy to be present for the right people at the right place and that too at the right time. Not long ago, most marketing efforts used to rely on conjectures since there was no ready-to-digest analytics available to tell us if the idea worked. Or whether the content was engaging enough? Or was the market segmentation, right? And the list goes on and on.

There used to be a time when companies could create a product and then search for consumers, but those days are over and done with now. Given the super power that data bears today, digital marketing analytics can very easily help marketers in accessing the who, what, and where of their potential market. Having these three crucial inputs at your disposal will help you create a product that will already have an existing market. Thus steering clear of wild guesses and resulting in further alleviation of risks. 

Nowadays, businesses are paying attention to connecting more and more with their customers and earning their loyalty in order to bolster their presence. Even though the products and services play a vital part here, the success of a business majorly depends on the way they make their customers feel valued and demonstrate that they can solve their problems efficiently. Hence personalized communication today has become an indispensable part of the business where the brand can show how well they know their customers as well as their wants and needs.

Let’s understand this with an example. Add-on covers today are a must-have for people who own luxury cars. Now, if a sales team pitches add-on covers to a two-wheeler owner, they are most likely to lose that particular customer. However, using data, marketers can easily segment their customers, create buyer personas suitable for a specific product, and then target those customers on their desired touchpoint—thereby establishing a long-lasting relationship between them. 

Whilst you have established that connection and targeted the right customers through your campaigns, it is just as crucial to measure your return on investment on the basis of your campaign’s performance. Digital marketing analytics enables the marketers to gauge not only the efforts that worked out well for them but also the ones that haven’t, which by the way, is much greater information as they’ll know where they shouldn’t be wasting their time. Data has also made it possible for marketers to monitor the user journey and organic and campaign level efforts. With the help of real-time insights, marketers can work on the campaign areas that need improvement to boost conversions and track their website’s overall health. Ultimately all these actions help in optimizing the budget. 

Digital marketing analytics enables businesses to make better-informed decisions about actions they should be taking to make things work in their favor. However, data only tells what you should do; it doesn’t do things on your behalf. The analysis can inform you that it will rain; what it can’t do is carry a raincoat for you. It’ll tell you what and when can happen, but after that, the rest is your responsibility to figure out what is being shown to you. We believe this is the area that requires a great deal of work, i.e., ascertaining your data’s accuracy and quality, which is being utilized to build a strategy and how to work out the humongous data pool present before you. Brands need to start working with data scientists closely, and businesses across all sectors need to have someone to extract the relevant data and figure it out. This approach will enable you to put an apt marketing strategy together instead of gathering irrelevant data, devoting your marketing efforts, and then getting disheartened upon not gaining the desired results. 

Conclusion

Besides being a powerful way of managing your spend budgets and maintaining the return on investment of your campaign, data analytics is now letting businesses utilize enormous data sets to build predictive models for their digital marketing actions. This, combined with AI and machine learning in data analytics, will only introduce more capabilities in the future to better infer data in order to acquire rich workable insights that can work in favor of digital marketing in attaining improved results.