The Age of Data-Driven Marketing
Here at Demand Gen, we have been working with various technology companies – both big and small – over the years to successfully market their products and services.
Given that most of these companies were selling software of some form, you would expect they would be tracking their customer experience, collecting data points and redefining their marketing strategies based on plentiful data. However, and rather surprisingly, on many occasions we have seen quite the opposite.
Why is this? Here are some of the common apprehensions we hear about marketing from technology companies:
“Our solutions are too complex and too expensive to be sold online”
“Our customers don’t look for us online”
“Data -driven marketing is for e-commerce clients”
However, we have found some statistics to contradict these comments:
- 80% of the B2B buyers have a made a decision through online research before they decide to contact a sales person
- 50% of B2B sales start with a Google search
- More than 50% of the B2B research about suppliers happens on mobile phones
Are you convinced about rethinking your marketing strategy for 2023? We would encourage you to put aside some of your 2023 marketing budget to understand how your customers behave online and create a market strategy to complement their buying behaviour.
If you don’t where to begin with building data-driven strategy, here are some tools that could help.
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far the most common tool used to analyse website data, taking the market share (31.55% in 2021) when it comes to web analytics.
Using Google Analytics you can see how many visitors you get on your website, where this traffic coming from, the age range and other demographics of your website visitors, how much time are they spending on your website and which pages on the website are most visited on the website.
These basic data points will help you understand your customers better and help you draw insights on which content is popular and what is the high-level profile of your customers. For example, if your website is being read by males between 40-55 based in the UK between 2-5pm, you might want to write your next blog keeping that persona in mind.
Google Analytics now provides limited search term data but search terms data is very useful to identify the relevance of the content on your website.
- Hot Jar
Hot Jar is a very useful tool that provides visual data and heat maps of how people navigate your website.
You can survey your existing users on their experience of the website and hence make changes to the webpage layout or content based on the feedback received from the users. For example, one of our customers was seeing zero conversions on their “book a demo” page. It was their main call to action on the website. After a Hot Jar analysis we noticed that 99% of the visitors to the demo booking page were leaving the page to check the pricing.
Based on the behaviour we added the pricing on the demo booking page and saw a significant increase in the time spent on the page and the requests for demos started to trickle through. Optimisations to content and UX based on data collected from Hotjar can often be a game changer
.
- Social Media Analytics
B2B business mostly use LinkedIn and Twitter as their main social platforms although that might be changing soon with more and more creative content available on TikTok.
TikTok is proving to be hit with businesses as a marketing channel, and according to a recent Capterra TikTok marketing survey “well over half of small retailers and restaurants that market themselves on TikTok say their organic and advertising content on TikTok is extremely valuable to their overall marketing performance, and 78% say they’ve realized a positive ROI with TikTok ads.”
Social media behavioural data can provide great insights into people’s behaviour. It’s difficult to integrate all social media platform data into one report that provides a 360 degree view of customer behaviour.
Yes, we are now talking about multi-channel tracking to be able to track exactly how customers interact with your brand across various platforms – social, website, physical paper-based marketing, affiliate marketing, webinars, events and mobile phones. Gathering all data into one reporting and drawing insights is a huge challenge for businesses and often a grey area. We have worked on various projects helping clients reconcile data from various sources and provide a true picture of what’s happening with online presence and overall marketing.
We would love to hear from you if this is something you are struggling with – not because we want to sell you a solution for it – but we are keen to understand how big this issue of data gaps is and even with the availability of so many reporting tools, there is a gap in the market to enable accurate data driven marketing.