Marketing is an art. Marketers create campaigns and drive awareness for their product or service by designing creative visuals and writing concise text. As we transition into a hyperconnected society, however, marketing is starting to blur the line between art and science. Data-driven marketers use valuable insights from consumers’ online activities to more effectively target the attention of the desired customer group. This real-time data is becoming the bedrock on which marketers make decisions, and is driving the shift towards more data-driven campaign optimization.
A recent report done by Ascend2 shows that 54% of companies believe that making more accurate decisions is the biggest benefit of marketing data. This proves that organizations want to make more informed decisions with the data they are collecting. The issue is that while marketers might have a general idea or sense of who to target and how to run their campaigns, they need to maximize the collection and analysis of their data in order to inform the decisions that will actually have an effect on digital marketing ROI and overall market share.
Objectively Organized Real-time Data Is Becoming a Goldmine
As a result, relevant data is one of the most lucrative assets for marketing departments and agencies to utilize in their digital marketing efforts. Marketers now expect to know how long customers are looking at their advertisement, how many people interact with them online, and the leads they generate through each campaign (among myriad other metrics, unique to the particular marketer and their organization). These metrics are used to calculate key performance indicators (KPIs), which make up the foundation for measuring a digital campaign’s success, and thus knowing these details is essential to marketing departments.
Access to these metrics and the associated KPIs can put marketers in the shoes of their customers and help them better understand their wants and needs, but on its own, this information does not really indicate to a marketer whether or not a campaign is working. In order to make that determination, relevant historical data from similar internal campaigns needs to be readily available for comparison, and if possible, competitive intelligence from external campaigns (which undoubtedly provide the most objective measure of success, since marketers are not competing for market share with their former selves). Done properly, a marketer can see clearly what is and is not working, and modify or completely remove the aspects of their campaigns that are not achieving the desired results.
How Lexus Did it Differently
While some have questioned the true value of real-time data and analytics in marketing, and been reluctant to change, one needs to look no further than the results it can produce to see the potential value to their own organization. Lexus (the luxury automotive company) was struggling with promotions and campaigns, not knowing where to spend their ad dollars. Their decided to double-down on their use of data and analytics, only investing money from their marketing budget that was based on insights gleaned from the real-time data they had collected. They realized that to maximize sales, they should decrease spending on TV advertisements, and increase spending for mobile and social campaigns. These insights drove 63% better conversion volume, and a 28% global KPI improvement. This improvement was due to the data-driven decision making made by the marketing team. The data they had collected showed which channels needed more spending to optimize effectiveness, and thus Lexus was able to modify its budget across 6 different channels to more efficiently spend its money. In order to reach these conclusions, however, the company had to create a custom framework and response model to run on top of their analytics platform. While this approach was effective, the logical next step is to figure out how to repeat the process without building a custom model every time.
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Not everyone within the industry is taking advantage of data and analytics like Lexus. While some are not using data at all, the more common situation is marketers not using the data they collect effectively. The same report done by Ascend2 reveals that 40% of companies believe their marketing data management strategy is either below average or worst in class, compared to competitors.
This indicates that many firms are aware that they are not properly equipped to handle the volume of data their consumers are supplying, and therefore not able to use it to their advantage. The question then becomes, what tools are available to these organizations that have fallen behind in the data intelligence space?
Getting Historic Data Organized In Step One
The Qoints platform simplifies and streamlines the process of analyzing digital activation data to generate actionable insights. By leveraging data collected through Qoints data marketplace to drive Digital Marketing Intelligence, marketers can harness data and use it to their advantage. This helps marketers make sense of what all the numbers mean with respect to the rest of the industry and product category. Qoints can objectively tell marketers how well a certain campaign did against past ones, or how well it did compared to the industry average.
Qoints Empowers Real-time Data Driven Marketing Intelligence
Instead of creating a custom model for each campaign (a labour-intensive task) the Qoints platform allows you to easily input data and results for any number of campaigns through a .CSV uploaded or API connections. These results and comparisons help marketers spend their money in a wiser manner by centralizing and organizing data, turning low-tech marketing departments into data-driven powerhouses without reinventing the wheel. Mapping historic campaign data to the Qoints crowd-sourced digital marketing data taxonomy allows for an apples to apples comparison across channels, platforms and the overall category. The result is most effective for omnichannel campaigns, and an improved bottom line that can be attributed back to specific marketing efforts. Get in touch with us today to find out how you can simplify your path to data-driven decision making!