Recently I attended Adtech, Australia’s leading conference for Digital Marketing types. Conferences like this are always a good way to uncover trends in the marketing world. There were a range of trending topics bandied around – from mobile marketing to content marketing. And one of my personal favourites – BIG data.
So what exactly is BIG data? Well breaking it down, it’s simply using all the data available in today’s information-rich world to make well informed decisions about where to spend your marketing time, effort and dollars. Big picture statistics like the type you can access from the ABS, combined with analytics tools in your own business to track your leads and customer interactions within your own promotions.
Gone are the days of placing a big print ad in the newspaper and waiting for the phone to ring. Today’s consumer is active in a multitude of digital media channels, which provides the opportunity to track and measure their behaviour – from how they found your website, to who’s talking about you in social media and exactly who opened that email newsletter you just sent.
Here’s just a few of the top tools Threesides uses to gather data for our clients and inform the marketing recommendations that we provide. They are also used to measure the results of clients’ marketing activities:
Google Analytics: A free website analytics tool that can be embedded in your website and used to measure a range of useful data such as which keywords people used to find your website, which other websites sent traffic to your site, how many people visited, how long they spent and what pages they viewed, which page they entered and exited on, and which content was the most popular. All this data can be used to constantly assess and improve the effectiveness of your website and promotions used to attract visitors to your site.
SEOMOZ: This subscription based tool trawls your website like a search engine would and generates data on any issues that you need to address that are influencing your search engine ranking. Issues could be the way your site is programmed, influence of inbound links or webpage descriptions. It also allows you to benchmark your website against your competitor’s sites so you can continue to stay a step ahead.
Sprout Social: This is a handy tool that we use to manage multiple social media accounts from the one dashboard and report on the effectiveness of our social media activities. This includes data such as the level of engagement you are getting with channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, the most popular content and level of reach you are achieving. All of this can be used to constantly revise and update your effectiveness in social media.
Threemail: This is our own customised electronic direct marketing system (for enewsletters and offers). It allows our clients to measure open rates, click through rates on various offers and success of contact list acquisition campaigns. We use this data to constantly refine and review our approach to using targeted email as part of our clients marketing program.
Is there any tools and data you use in your business to measure and improve the effectiveness of your marketing? – Clint Wright