Leveraging Data To Outthink Your Competition
Information is one our most valuable commodities. It is no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity, to incorporate data into your marketing campaigns. As the digital marketing portion of media plans continues to grow, the amount of data available is growing as well. Data not only helps you track your results on the back end, but also lays the groundwork for a strategic campaign before launch. There is no question, in our increasingly digital world, that understanding the importance of a solid digital campaign is vital.
Gobble up data early and often.
According to a study done by Forbes, 85% of companies surveyed felt digital and display advertising was a key component to their marketing strategy because it allows them to reach betters audiences. The challenge lies in identifying that online audience prior to the campaign launch. The same Forbes study also shows that 54% of companies agree that finding the proper online persona was their biggest challenge. It’s at this point that data can provide a huge lift to an online campaign. Data gathered during a campaign has value, too, but collecting this information before a launch is vital.
Optimize your spend by talking to the right people.
With our clients, we insist upon pinpointing our audience(s) long before we begin any campaign. By coding key pages of our client’s website, we can gather in-depth information and apply key learnings through several layers of the campaign. This includes information like age, gender, household income, kids in the household, geographic information and psychographics. By understanding your target, you avoid wasting valuable marketing dollars on people who are less likely to convert. You now know who to talk to, where they are, and what messaging may pique their interest. After the campaign launches you can verify – through concrete data – that your ads are being delivered to the audience(s) most likely to convert. By gathering this information prior to launch, you also have audience insights that can be used to inform creative messaging. You’ll know if they like Mexican food, drive Fords or shop at Kohl’s.
Know what metrics to watch. Then watch them like a hawk.
Another valuable insight that data can provide is the time to convert. How many days does it take to drive a conversion? How many ads do you need to serve an individual to drive them down the purchase funnel? This information goes a long way in ensuring you do not over-serve the target audience thus wasting more impressions. In addition, by coding key pages of the conversion funnel, you can track where drop-offs happen and troubleshoot issues that may be causing falloff during the conversion process. That is all incredibly valuable information both during the campaign and on the backend. We see many campaigns that measure success based solely on clicks, impressions and CTR. While we don’t dismiss those numbers, there is so much more that goes into a successful campaign. Many companies don’t track conversions, are not sure what their cost-per-acquisition is and don’t test different messages against each other. All of these metrics provide additional insight into the success or failure of a campaign. By tracking them and optimizing against those metrics throughout the flight, you will increase you ROI and campaign effectiveness.
And here’s the really good news. These practices are not solely reserved for large companies with robust digital campaigns. If you’re a challenger brand working to overcome obstacles, you can embrace these strategies in order to outmaneuver, outpace and outthink your competition.