The world is changing. New technology is evolving — and so is marketing. With new ways of connecting with customers and potential customers, digital marketing channels have evolved. As a result, traditional marketing methods are being disrupted.
In our digital era, consumers have more control over the products they use and buy. They have instant access to a variety of options, comparison shopping and research on the go. Additionally, digital marketing allows for greater precision and targeting of advertising efforts.
Traditional methods of marketing, such as advertising on television or in print media, are now being supplemented by online marketing. According to HubSpot Blogs research, 75% of consumers have used the internet to research products and compare prices before purchasing a product in person. E-commerce websites, such as Amazon, have made comparing prices and finding product reviews as easy as a click.
Thanks to the internet, consumers have more power than ever before over the brands they encounter. This trend towards greater consumerism and empowerment is now influencing how businesses develop and market their products.
Traditional marketing spends about 20% of its time on paid advertising, according to HubSpot Blogs research. In comparison, online marketing strategies focus more on building brand awareness and gathering consumer data — usually for marketing purposes.
While it’s still essential to have a steady stream of traffic coming in from search engines and social media to effectively utilize the internet, businesses can now achieve this with a variety of marketing tactics.
Businesses should adopt an integrated marketing strategy to leverage the full power of the internet. This could include using SEO (search engine optimization) tactics to gain a good placement in search results, using PPC (pay per click) campaigns to generate clicks to your website and implementing social media tactics, such as engaging with customers through live chats, to attract potential customers and strengthen your brand identity.
The evolution of online marketing is driving towards creating content that is more in line with what consumers want to see. Additionally, with consumer data being so accessible, marketers can learn a great deal about what attracts people to their products and what influences their buying decisions. This is where marketing analytics, or the measurement and analysis of marketing and sales information, steps in to help. Analysts can extract valuable insights from customer data to shape and modify marketing and sales strategies.
Understand The Value Of The Data You Have
Marketing analytics can be used to measure the success of your marketing and sales strategies — both online and offline. It provides a clear view of how marketing campaigns performed and which strategies were most effective. In addition to giving a good idea of the performance of your campaigns, analytics can help you identify areas for improvement. For example, if you launched a marketing campaign recently and the results weren’t as good as you expected, it might be a good idea to drop a few of the old tactics and try a few new ones.
The most effective marketing analytics platforms allow you to collect and view data from various sources, such as e-commerce platforms, social media, websites and even your own customer database. These platforms make it easy to see everything from the performance of different campaigns and marketing materials to traffic sources and customer engagement levels.
The more you know about the value of the data you have, the better you can utilize it. If you’re aware that the majority of your customers come from organic searches on Google, for example, you might consider investing more heavily in SEO tactics. Knowing the performance of different campaigns and seeing how different tactics influence this is vital to properly deciding which ones to use. For instance, a PPC (pay per click) campaign that focuses on getting clicks to a web page might seem like a good idea. However, if those clicks don’t convert into sales, it might be a bad idea to continue spending on PPC.
Create Visually Stunning Materials
While it’s still important to have a strong marketing message behind your content, marketers should also make sure that the content they create is visually appealing. In the past, most marketing materials, whether it was a brochure, flyer or advertisement, focused mainly on text. Thanks to design software like Photoshop, it’s easy to create stunning visuals for your marketing materials.
One of the most important things marketers can do to make sure their content is effective is to test it. Before launching a marketing campaign, businesses should run a pilot program with a small sample size of their existing customers. This will ensure that the content and the message of the campaign is appropriate and converts well. When running a pilot program, businesses should track the results of their marketing efforts both online and offline — and adjust their strategy as necessary.
Incorporating customer feedback into your strategy is essential if you want to create content that is both effective and desirable. While it’s great to get ideas and suggestions from customers, you must have the courage to implement these suggestions and change your strategy as necessary. To determine which changes to make, you might want to run another small test program and then make adjustments to your strategy.
Keep Track Of The Data You Collect
Effective marketers store all of their collected data in a systematic way, ensuring they can always find what they need when they need it. This is critical in today’s world, where data can be both vast and cumbersome. Without proper database and spreadsheet management, it’s easy for your data to become unorganized and difficult to follow — and this, in turn, could lead to serious challenges in terms of being able to draw clear conclusions from your marketing efforts.
To ensure you have all of the necessary data you need, when you collect it, it’s essential that you enter this data directly into a database. This way, you can ensure that all of your relevant information is organized and easy to find. When it comes to marketing, having all the necessary data readily available can help you make better decisions and have better results. The data you have should be clean, reliable and up-to-date. Additionally, it should be easy for you to understand and work with.
Analystics Software provides the perfect database for marketers to keep all of their data in one place and easily review it at a later date. With this software, all of your marketing data, such as email communications, website activity, sales and order data, can be stored in one place — and it’s fully integrated with your existing systems, such as salesforce.com, so you don’t have to worry about data being stored in multiple places. Analystics Software provides a clear view of how marketing campaigns performed and which strategies were most effective. In addition to giving a good idea of the performance of your campaigns, the software can help you identify areas for improvement.
To learn more, visit Analystics Software or call 1-888-BIG-MARK (1-888-226-9226).
Above all, businesses must understand that while the internet is great for marketing and sales, it is only effective when it is utilized as part of an integrated marketing strategy.