How important are key performance indicators (KPI), metrics and benchmarks when it comes to digital marketing? Well, if you want to make stronger, more informed decisions about how and when to engage your audience, then getting a grasp on data metrics is key to better positioning your company with customers. In fact, without data metrics, there’s simply no reason to have an inbound marketing strategy. You’re just guessing and hoping for the best.
Migrating from Assumptions and Guesswork to Data-Driven Business Decisions
Think about all the data you gather from your customers, your market and your competition online. Think about how you’re able to track the performance of separate email marketing campaigns, different social media channels, the performance of digital advertising campaigns and all your content pieces. You get all this data in real-time but it's how you act upon that data that makes a difference.
Every time a customer initiates an action on your website, interacts with your landing page, clicks on your call-to-action (CTA), or posts something to social media, you're getting invaluable customer data about what customers want and need. Companies have access to all kinds of data points. Unfortunately, keeping up with that data, and making sense of it, can often seem overwhelming. More importantly, acting upon the right data at the right time becomes even more problematic when it can't be managed. So, what’s the solution?
An All-Encompassing Digital Marketing Dashboard
A strong social media channel is more about what’s liked and disliked as opposed to just collecting as many likes as possible. Making sense of social media is critical to increasing customer engagement. A sudden and drastic increase in likes for a given landing page or content piece should coincide with an increase in click-through rates (CTR) and an eventual increase in conversion rates. If not, then something is amiss. Do you need to change your call-to-action? Are you driving the wrong traffic to your landing page? Do customers like your content more than your offer, or, is your offer not enticing enough?
A dashboard makes sense of all your customer data. It quantifies that data and allows you to follow the natural path from customer endorsement to increased revenue. After all, a "like" means nothing if it’s not impacting your bottom line. Understanding customer data is much simpler with a dashboard you can understand, a dashboard that enriches your customer data and one that allows you to make instantaneous decisions that can save money and increase sales.
Every portion of your digital strategy will improve with a dashboard. You’ll know when to change a digital advertisement, which email campaigns are driving the right kind of traffic, which landing pages have the highest conversions, what your customers think of your campaigns in real-time, and finally, what social media channel works best. Using the right data the right way will help you identify the type of customer engagement that drives sales and increase that engagement.
Yes, digital marketing teams have plenty of useful data and that data is needed to make better business decisions. Ultimately, having too much customer data isn’t the problem – consolidating all of the information into one cohesive dashboard so that you can make better business decisions takes an experienced team. All you will have to do is execute and watch your dashboard to determine which lever to pull next.
Contact us if you want access to a simplified dashboard that will empower you to make better business decisions .
Written By: Doug Milnor
