It used to be you’d fly in to a new city, pick up a car or hop a train and you’re on your own – without a roadmap you’re lost and lonesome. These days GPS Sat-Navs and mobile networks provide the tools we need to navigate more effectively than ever before. In a similar way, data can be the Google Maps of marketing. Use it to navigate your way to better business.
Marketing is about testing ideas: ‘We think the market needs this’. And for a long time businesses would spend, spend, spend, with few ways to measure real effectiveness. You could put up a billboard, track the numbers of people coming through the door and the number of phone calls, or use market research to test your assertions, but the only real metric you had was number of sales at the end of the day.
These days every interaction is measurable, you can track a range of touchpoints with customers and clients. Through analytics, all of a sudden you know which ads are working, who’s opening your emails and newsletters, which social media channels are attracting the most traffic, how individuals navigate your pathways, where your customers live. But it’s what you do with these enormous pools of data that’s important. The challenge is applying this information to draw meaningful insights and prove a hypothesis or influence a product.
Learn to harness data and there’s no need to run marketing strategies on instinct – it provides the tools you need to get your business from A to B. Miss a turn? No problem, it’s easy to get back on track. You can better understand your customers, measure, test and adjust on the fly, inform products and services, and ultimately generate better user experiences.
