All this Big Data and you’re still making decisions using gut feel?

‘Big-data’ has been one of the biggest buzz-words in the last few years. More and more companies are capturing data about users and all parts of your business. Having all this data sounds great – you finally have as much information as you want on your prospects and customers. The next step after capturing all this data is using it to make informed decisions and improve results.

In my experience, lots of people are capturing everything they can about every aspect of their business but not many people are truly using the data to their advantage.

Believe it or not, capturing the data is the easy bit. To turn yourself into a data-driven marketer you need to use the data to make informed decisions. Sometimes you will be surprised by what the data shows and it may be counter-intuitive. However, by using the data to steer your decisions, you’ll find that you will move your marketing in the direction that your customers want.

From speaking to our customers, some of the changes they have made based on data they capture has been counter-intuitive – but almost always provides the intended result.

81% of marketers say most of their decisions will be driven by data

If you saw the “Brexit: The Uncivil War” film recently, you’ll remember how the main character, Dominic Cummings, trusts the data implicitly – despite the objections of many of his colleagues. The data won the battle in the end. However, it’s rare for businesses to be using this data to its full potential.

According to McKinsey, many companies are lagging behind the top performers, with firms that use data and analytics successfully seeing productivity gains of 6 to 8 percent. By 2020, 81% of marketers say most of their decisions will be driven by data. If you can start driving your decisions with data today, you can get ahead of your competition, give yourself a competitive advantage and start seeing productivity gains.

So, you are capturing all your customers’ journeys on your website – you can now prove your ROI. Unfortunately, as soon as someone moves into the offline world they disappear. The most common way this happens is through someone picking up the phone and giving you a call.

It’s easy to see how many visitors you get and how many calls you get, but how can you tell which visitor links with which call… and therefore what was their acquisition path?

Call conversions: The missing metric?

The only way to accurately track your offline conversions is by using a call tracking solution. If you don’t capture your offline activity and join it with your online data, you’re missing out on huge amounts of data. It’s like trying to drive your car when it’s fogged up – you can’t see the full picture.

Now for the difficult bit. Once you have all your data, you need to set achievable goals. Pick a metric that you want to improve and then aim to improve that over a period of time. When you are measuring regularly, you can see whether the changes you make have the desired improvement. Only by setting goals will you really be able to measure your improvement. Trying to improve everything at once will be too much.

We process millions of data-points for our clients every day, so I constantly need to find ways to provide data to their marketers that will help them make business decisions quickly and easily. Joining data on their customer’s digital and offline journey gives them true conversions.

They most appreciate how little time it takes to get the headline figures easily using customisable dashboards.

Analyse and refine to optimise your campaigns

I’ve spoken with one of our customers who tweak their ad spend across providers multiple times per day. They know that certain hours in a week provides higher quality leads on Facebook and other hours provide higher quality on Google Ads, so they adjust their campaigns accordingly to optimise for conversions.

So how data driven are you?

With all the customer information you have at your disposal, many marketers are still struggling with how to harness all of this data and pull out the killer information. Without all your conversion information, you don’t have the full picture of your marketing effectiveness, especially if inbound phone sales are a large part of your organisation’s success.

With the right tools in your hands, capturing the data and drilling into the key metrics isn’t difficult or time consuming and can sometimes give you unexpected, outstanding results. You just need to pick the killer metric, start monitoring and start driving your decisions.

For more information on how Mediahawk can help you bring all your data together, contact us now for a chat or demo.