While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital marketing, there are commonalities that can be applied to most campaigns. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how you can use data to make your online marketing more effective.

Understand Your Target Audience

If you’re reading this, I assume that you’re already quite familiar with online marketing. If you’re new to the field or in need of a refresher, don’t worry — there’s plenty to cover.

Getting to know your target audience is an essential part of any marketing plan. After all, you’ll be designing marketing content and strategies to reach them. And, as you already know, getting to know your audience is a critical part of converting potential customers into paying customers. So let’s take a closer look at how to do that.

Use Behavioral Science To Your Advantage

While it’s great to have a thorough understanding of your target audience and the problems that they face, you also need to understand the _reasons_ that they behave the way they do. In other words, you need to know their _behaviors_ _._

When you use behavioral science to your advantage, you can design strategies to alter inappropriate or harmful behaviors and adjust your offers and messages according to each individual’s unique situation. For example, you might want to encourage individuals to make healthy food choices by offering them incentives such as discounted meals or coupons. Or, if your target audience tends to be more risk-averse, you might want to adjust your marketing strategy to focus on increasing their trust in your product or service.

Create Specific, Measureable Goals

When you’re developing your strategy, it’s important to set realistic goals. Setting impossibly high sales targets or marketing goals can actually have the opposite effect and result in you losing sight of the bigger picture. That’s why it’s important to set measurable goals. For example, if you’re aiming to drive sales of a product or service, set a goal of how many units you’ll sell during a specified period. If you’re aiming to raise brand awareness, set a goal of how many people you’ll reach with monthly blog posts. The choice is entirely up to you, but it’s important to pick strategies that you’re able to track and measure so that you can see how much (or little) progress you’re making.

Understand Your Campaign’s Role In The Overall Marketing Plan

Marketing is a complex process, and when you’re starting out, it can be difficult to know how all the pieces fit together. To make things a bit simpler, you can think of your online marketing campaign as a small part of a bigger puzzle. Just like a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle, your small snippet of marketing content might form a part of a larger strategy. To illustrate, let’s say that you’re aiming to generate leads for your product or service. To do that, you’ll be using a combination of content and technology to attract people to your website. When they come across your piece of content, they’ll either be interested in what you have to say or they’ll click a link to learn more. In the first case, you’ve successfully drawn them into action and landed them on your website. In the second case, you’ve successfully drawn them into action and landed them on your website. In either case, you’ve successfully followed up with a lead — the difference is in the quality of the lead.

Use Big Data To Your Advantage

Data is the fuel that drives the digital age. Without it, we’d be flying blind.

Big data is data that’s been gathered and stored in larger quantities than usually found in a traditional database. This usually comes in the form of either structured or unstructured data. Structured data is data that’s been classified and cataloged into predefined categories. For example, let’s say that you’re running an eCommerce store and you’ve collected customer data such as product purchases and where they came from (i.e., either typed in the store’s URL or clicked on a link from another website). With that information, you can do a lot to improve the experience of your customers. You could, for example, provide recommendations of similar products based on what your customers have bought in the past. Or, you could target ads to encourage them to make further purchases.

Unstructured data is data that doesn’t fit into predefined categories. For example, you might have text files, word processing documents, PDFs, or images stored on your computer. When collected, this data is referred to as semi-structured data. Unstructured data can also be referred to as grey data or simply data. As with all data, there is massive potential for analysis of unstructured data. However, just like with any new data, you first need to educate yourself on the processes available to you.

Measure Performance Regularly

After you’ve set your goals and developed your strategy, it’s time to measure the results of your efforts. Without data, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether or not your efforts are paying off. To keep things simple, you can start by monitoring and analyzing the performance of the strategy as a whole. For example, let’s say that you’re using Google Analytics to track the performance of your online campaign. You can use the Site Optimizer feature to measure the effectiveness of different content groups or landing pages. You can also use the Traffic Source feature to see where people are coming from and determine the success of various marketing channels. In addition to using Google Analytics, you can also use HubSpot to monitor and analyze all your marketing communications (i.e., emails, social media posts, and web content).

Review, Revisit, and Reflect

Once you’ve established a track record of effectiveness, it’s time to review your strategy and make necessary adjustments. Just because your strategy worked well in the past doesn’t mean that it will work well in the future. Nor does it mean that you should simply stick with what you already have in place. Instead, take a step back and reexamine your strategy from a different perspective. Perhaps you’ll discover that some elements aren’t working as well as you’d hoped or that there are some alternative approaches that you hadn’t thought of.

As you make these adjustments, be sure to revisit your goals and the reasons that you set them in the first place. In addition, it’s important to take a step back and look at what you’ve accomplished so far. This will allow you to track your progress and identify areas where you’re falling short of your goals.

In The End

Hopefully, after reading this, you have a clearer idea of how you can make your online marketing more effective. Even if you’ve been doing this for a while, it’s still important to keep things fresh in your mind. Just because your previous attempts at marketing worked doesn’t mean that they’ll work for you again. However, by taking the time to familiarize yourself with the basics, you’ll be able to utilize data and analysis to come up with a more effective strategy for your next campaign.