Marketing Measurement: Assessing Data Correctly

Proper measurement is an essential part of forming a successful marketing strategy. However, many marketing agencies, online business owners and professionals seem to falter when it comes to using those numbers in determining a return on investment. Fortunately, this is less of a problem than it once was, as there are now many tips and solutions available to help you leverage your data and analytics in a useful way. So how do you use the data you have to get more out of marketing?

Pay Attention to the Right Things

It can be easy for companies to get quickly overwhelmed when dealing with customer data. After all, they have customer action, website visits, sign-ups, click-throughs, unsubscribes and more to track. Most of the time, you can’t pay attention to all of these things at the same time, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t pinpoint the things that really matter. Find out what is relevant to your brand and focus on that. This could mean reviewing the number of times someone has read or shared your latest blog post or downloaded an application. Understanding what really matters helps you to make the right marketing decisions.

Assess Data with Digital Dashboards

Rather than logging into a number of different accounts to access data, consider the benefits of using a dashboard that utilizes all of the measurable data you’re going to need in a single location. Once you can see a clear picture of the things your customer needs and wants, as well as what he or she does, you can use that information to add some kick to your marketing efforts.

Get Involved with the Right People

If the people in your team who need to start improving your marketing scheme don’t have access to the right data, then you can’t expect anything to improve. Make sure your marketing and sales divisions are constantly logging into your digital dashboard to check the data. For example, marketing will be able to assess how effective a subject line in an email project is, by looking at when an email is most regularly opened. In the same way, sales can see which offers appeal most to buyers by evaluating when most purchases are made.

Do Something with the Data

Measuring these marketing efforts is just one part of your overall job. Once you have all the data that you’re going to need, you also need to decide what you’re going to do with that information. If your results show you that your pay-per-click options are not doing as well as email marketing, you may need to pull out of PPC and focus more on your emails.

Remember, data is useful, but only as long as you actually do something with it. Create a solid strategy for what you’re going to measure, and be sure that you’re using the right tools. From there, it’s simply a matter of making your data easy to access for the people who need it and making plans to change according to what will improve traffic, sales, and marketing in the long run.