In the past few years, the digital marketing trend has expanded tremendously, and the majority of companies started claiming to have adopted this new marketing strategy.
Nonetheless, recent statistics show that, in fact, yet about 50% of the companies have adopted the 3 key practices for effective digital marketing, and the other 50% have undertaken campaigns without using the right tools or processes.
Unfortunately, as the companies don’t realize that digital marketing is not about pay-per-click or placing advertisements on social media platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram, they cannot take advantage of the full benefits that this approach offers.
In fact, digital marketing is a complex framework, very much based on the availability of data and the usage of these data to derive customer insights and enhance marketing performance.
In that sense, there are three data-related marketing practices that are a MUST for every organization that wants to adopt an effective digital marketing approach.
Let’s look at them:
Personalization
Yet in 1996, in his essay, Bill Gates claims that “The content is the king.” And this continues to be truly valid even today!
In the decade of 2020, it is not enough to post huge quantities of generic content. Instead, personalization has become the key to genuinely engage not only with the prospects that we try to attract but also with our current and past customers.
The use of data integration facilitates the companies in providing the best-customized content possible to every client in their database. It enables organizations to get to know their customers better (including their interests, preferences, past experiences, buyer behavior, stage in the customer journey, etc.), and use this knowledge to prepare marketing messages, offerings, pricing, and discounts.
What is more, by using data in the form of predictive analytics, the business entities are enabled to gain valuable insights regarding trends in behavior, desires, needs, and expectations, and use those to predict clients desires, and forecast future demand and improve the related marketing materials accordingly.
And here are some fascinating statistics:
- According to “Accenture,” 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.
- On average, 71% of consumers express some level of frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal.
- Lack of content relevancy generates 83% lower response rates in the average marketing campaign.
But what is more surprising?
- 70% of brands fail to use personalized emails.
- Only 46% of the companies adopt website personalization.
What is the challenge?
The challenges, which companies experience in terms of personalization, are closely related to data availability, reliability, and trustworthiness: “The biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%).”
That often happens when the organizations use data, which is collected and analyzed from a third party.
So the answer to tackling this challenge is to adopt a high-quality data integration approach, which to guarantee the right level of data veracity, volume, velocity, and variety.
Omnichannel experience
Nowadays the clients don’t simply go to the store and buy what they need. Instead, the digital space provides them with tons of different channels for researching, evaluating, buying, sharing information, and rating products and services.
And marketers take advantage of those means, by transforming them into “marketing communication channels.” The main ones are:
- Social Media
- Customer Service
- Website
The effective, high-qualitative digital marketing approach ensures consistent alignment of the marketing channels, in order to provide a uniform experience to the future, current, and past clients.
In other words, sending relevant, non-repeating, and personalized content through those four channels guarantees a consistent flow of marketing offerings, reduces the risk of frustrated customers due to spam, and guarantees a high level of satisfaction.
Nonetheless, two major issues exist: 25% of the companies lack proper data sharing protocol to achieve this alignment of channels, and 32.6% don’t have available first-party data.
But how can businesses make sure that they provide an excellent omnichannel experience?
The answer is data integration. When companies have direct access to the data of each prospect and client, they can monitor the flow of content in real-time and achieve a 360-degree view of the marketing communication with each separate individual.
Besides, the use of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence can improve the control on the communication channels, deploying automated systems for communication, which to be aligned with predictive analytics insights. This way, the marketing content can be instantly changed and adapted to the clients’ preferences and desires.
Search Engine Optimization
Pay-per-click is already out of the game for digital marketers. In fact, according to SM Marketing, “Ranking highly for organic search results is crucial; between 70% and 80% of users completely ignore paid advertisements.”.
For this reason, we come back to the “good old” SEO optimization, which to make our brand visible, competitive, and well-positioned in the organic search results. But here is the thing: as regular SEO has become a mainstream trend, it is time to adopt Data-driven SEO practices in order to take our digital marketing to a whole new level. Unfortunately, a very small amount of business entities actually use the available data for SEO.
How data improves SEO?
Analytics, Search Consoles, and other useful tools generate tons of data regarding indexing, positioning, and clickability.
And with so much data available, marketers are enabled to use it for SEO decision-making and planning. For example:
- Get insights about the domain rating of their website and pages.
- Choose focus keyphrase wisely, according to the domain rating (some website simply cannot position on the first page because of the strong domain rating of their positioned competitors.)
- Include relevant terms and keywords that help the content to come forward.
- Identify the perfect number of backlinks.
- Get insights about the number of search queries for a specific keyword/stack of keywords.
- Monitor user behavior on the website and improve the content and interface according to the identified gaps.
- Improve website security and speed.
- Follow up statistical behavior changes with metrics like CTR, Bounce rate, dwell time, time on site, number of sessions, repeated visits, etc.
All those, and many other factors, help organizations to enhance the quality and effectiveness of their digital marketing approach in terms of visibility, competitiveness, and differentiation.
And when marketers use data to predict trends, identify areas of improvement, and gain detailed insights about customers’ and competitors’ behavior, they justify the SEO decisions with evidence-based information.
Conclusion
To achieve a high-quality digital marketing strategy, companies need to use data and analytics as a primary tool for planning and decision-making. This gives them the opportunity to excel in every level of marketing, and achieve better results in engaging, communicating, and delighting their customers, converting them into loyal clients.
