About this episode
In this episode, Emma Lo Russo, CEO of Digivizer shares how we can tackle global growth challenges with a data-driven yet people-centric approach. Insights include:
- Emma’s perspective on why businesses need to take a data-backed approach to strategy.
- The need to associate numbers with individuals to better tell their stories.
- How privacy and GDPR laws impact the collection of data.
- How Digivizer builds relationships with their customers at scale.
- Why a people strategy is essential for global business growth.
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The need for data
In a CMO study, the number of businesses that were unable to measure the effectiveness of their social media outnumbers those who could by at least three to one.
The results from the study highlight the issue that many businesses have with obtaining and analyzing data in order to create informed growth marketing strategies. This would also indicate why a different CMO Deloitte study forecasts that the portion of overall marketing budgets allotted to digital marketing analytics will increase by 200%.
What is digital marketing analytics and why use it?
When most people hear the term digital marketing analytics, they think of metrics associated with web analytics like bounce rate, unique views, etc. Web analytics, however, are only a part of what digital marketing analytics encompasses.
Digital marketing analytics provides a comprehensive and detailed view of what’s working and what isn’t with a marketing strategy. By providing a data-rich perspective, businesses can develop a data-backed marketing strategy, which is more likely to provide an accurate ROI and be scalable.
Learning to understand and leverage digital marketing analytics, therefore, becomes incredibly important. Analytics data not only indicates if the marketing is working (or not), but it also shows precisely how and where improvements are needed. This type of insight can benefit any business.
How digital marketing analytics connects every business activity
Today’s marketing extends well beyond a website to include channels like email, social media, organic search, paid advertising, etc. In other words, it includes the other marketing platforms utilized and how they interact with each other. This then provides the essential data and insights a business needs to measure progress and make changes.
In turn, this allows a business to build out a digital marketing strategy, delight existing customers as well as attract and engage future customers.
How digital marketing analytics can optimize growth strategies
As a business develops its growth marketing strategies a question that can help sharpen the focus on achieving business objectives is “How can a business goal be structured to visualize your marketing efforts in the most accurate way?”
Digital marketing analytics help clarify the effectiveness of the entire marketing strategy and how the various initiatives compare against each other to determine the ROI of activities and how effectively they contribute toward achieving business goals.
Diagnosing issues as well as adjusting strategies and tactics to improve results based on data from digital marketing analytics is also possible.
This is where a tool like Digivizer can help by saving hours that would otherwise be spent on slicing and dicing data and on reporting in order to gain a comprehensive view of the performance of marketing initiatives.
How full stack digital marketing analytics can paint a more complete picture
Emma Lo Russo, CEO of Digivizer, Australia’s leading social and digital analytics and activations company, understood the need for businesses to have a comprehensive picture of their marketing activities in 2010. She realized that, while companies at the time were providing volume-centric data, what businesses really want are ways to acquire potential customers and how to best engage them.
The best way businesses can do that is by keeping the person at the center of the data acquired. In other words, the focus should be on identifying each customer’s digital footprint and mapping their journey from complete unawareness of the brand to a loyal customer who advertises for the brand. Businesses can also use that information to design effective strategies for reaching more of their ideal customers.
The fact that all of this is happening in a digital environment means everything’s measurable, too.
How can digital marketing analytics drive business growth?
To obtain data, we need to look at our digital marketing analytics. The data from analytics can then be used to create reasonable business goals based around three key areas that are critical for driving growth. These are:
Establishing relationships between different marketing channels
Digital marketing analytics allows a business to determine direct correlations between marketing channels and how efforts can be amplified by the effect of these multiple channels.
For example, data can be gleaned by just one email sent to a segment of an audience. Digital marketing analytics can tell how many people clicked from the email and went through to visit a post on your website and how many converted into sign-ups. Digital marketing analytics can also compare the performance of one email with a tweet sent out and/or traffic via a paid advertising campaign.
Gaining customer-centric data and insights into the customer journey
Digital marketing analytics enables a business to track how future customers interact with marketing initiatives and channels as they encounter content and engage with team members and content through their customer journey.
The full-stack digital marketing analytics provide a great level of detail and lead intelligence that can help determine which marketing activities to use at different stages in the buyer’s journey. It can also help with lead scoring and identification of activities that contribute to marketing qualified leads.
Attribute ROI to specific marketing efforts
A useful function of digital marketing analytics is the ability to attribute revenue to specific marketing activities and, in turn, measure ROI.
Closed-loop marketing analytics can provide information and connect data to an individual via a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. It can also tell which channels are vital to gaining leads and sales.
For example, blog content may be more effective at generating customers than social media, while social media may be more effective at engaging with future customers.
Measuring the relationship between marketing channels and tracking data around the customer journey and revenue associated with specific initiatives will inform goals that support business objectives.
Areas that digital marketing analytics should address
In order for digital marketing initiatives to work, they need to not only solve issues of cost optimization, but they also must engage your future customers and lead them to a conversion or a next step in their journey.
With that in mind, there are 5 areas that digital marketing analytics should be geared toward:
1. Determine which organic content works best — Content that resonates well with an audience via organic click-throughs, shares, and comments provide an indication of what would work well in a paid context.
The video below shows you a snapshot of what this data looks like in Digivizer.
2. Determine your advocates — Finding those customers who most actively promote the brand and share content can play a vital role in extending reach and encouraging brand champions. Having a multi-channel view and knowing what works well with the intended audience segments is key.
The videos below shows you a snapshot of what this looks like in Digivizer.
3. Themes and topics — It is paramount to understand the content that performs best and the elements that go into creating it. This understanding helps optimize the time and financial investments as well as conversions.
4. Content types — Content is not just limited to text-based but can include audio and visual media as well. Understanding formats that work well in each stage of the customer journey and for each segment helps to improve the ROI.
5. Compare and benchmark — To save time and make reporting easier, the best practice is to have one single platform to compare and benchmark the performance of content across different digital channels.
The video below gives an overview of how tracking paid performance can be done via Digivizer.
How to use digital marketing analytics effectively
Why do businesses still struggle with measuring the impact and ROI of their marketing activities? It is usually because of one of the following:
- They don’t have goals in place for their initiatives.
- They don’t have the ability to measure success.
- All of the above.
The solution lies in having the right metrics and analytics in place to provide the data needed to make informed decisions. Data that better reflects the customer and their journey can help achieve better business growth results. A digital marketing analytics tool can help bridge the gap in the data needed to create better marketing strategies and connect with target audiences.
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