Why Big Data Is So Important To Marketing

Big data is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign, especially in today’s modern-day. Big data enables precise identification of a target demographic and customers and seeks to understand their behavior in a way never previously quantifiable. Big data in marketing represents the new frontier for marketers, uncovering new consumer needs and market opportunities faster than ever.

While big data is merely impossible to analyze by hand, many pieces of technology can now consolidate this data into values used to describe a potential customer. The number of descriptive variables used is excessive and commonly overwhelming. Outlined below are the main marketing statistics marketers need to understand to succeed in today’s marketing environment. 

Social Media Metrics

With over 3.6 billion individuals using social media, and looking to climb to 4.41 billion by 2025. Utilizing social media data is more relevant than ever. Social media can assist in calculating brand awareness, engagement, and conversion rates. A range of social media indicators, such as @mentions, shares, links, and impressions, can be used to measure the attention your brand is receiving. The length of reporting periods varies, although they commonly span a week, a month, or a quarter. Reporting periods are more relevant to the campaign you have in progress. For instance, if you have a 12-month long campaign built squarely around social media engagement, measuring quarterly and yearly will be more beneficial than anything else.

Quantifying your marketing penetration by measuring the speed at which your brand’s following increases on social media is another great social media metric. Not only can you see the number of new followers, but you can identify who outside of your network is viewing your posts. Comparing these statistics against the competition is crucial to ensure positive progression against the competition’s growth. 

To track this data, you can set a reporting period to measure your net new followers and mark the net growth over this period. After this, dividing your net new followers by total audience and multiply by 100, provides your audience growth rate percentage.

Engagement is one of the most crucial aspects of social media to track. According to Sprout Social Index, 45% of consumers will unfollow a brand on social media due to irrelevant content, with 45% unfollowing due to too many ads. Engagement information can help you identify how individuals interact with your brand and quantify the relevancy of the content you are producing. Engagement metrics include applause rate, average engagement rate, and amplification rate, to name a few.

SEO Metrics 

One of the reasons search engine optimization is so effective is because you can track and measure almost everything about it. SEO metrics provide critical insights into how your organic search strategy performs, whether you’re looking at ranks, traffic, engagement, leads, orders, or income. One of the most powerful markers of SEO performance is tracking organic sessions over time. If your organic search traffic is increasing month over month, it indicates your rankings are improving. While other metrics may suggest trends, this one provides quantifiable evidence that you’re bringing in more visits, leads, and ultimately, conversions. 

Keyword ranking allows you to track your progress and provide an early indication of whether your SEO marketing strategy is working. Additionally, rankings show you present organic market share as well as your overall potential. A study found that 91 percent of all pages never received any organic traffic from Google, primarily due to the lack of backlinks. The greater the number of backlinks a page has, the more Google traffic it receives. Google also identified that only 0.78 percent of users go to the second page of results, clearly illustrating the power of a strong SEO marketing campaign.

Heat-mapping

In digital marketing, a heatmap is a graphical map that shows where and how users interact with a webpage. The more interactions there are, the brighter or hotter an area is. A warm color, such as blue, denotes places with the most interactions, while a cool color, red, denotes areas with the least. Online marketers frequently utilize heatmaps to indicate how many visitors engaged with different web page portions, whether by hover maps, click maps, attention maps, or scroll maps.

Hover maps display where mouse cursors have been hovering over a page. The premise is that people gaze where they hover on a web page, revealing how they read a web page. These maps are based on a common usability testing method known as eye-tracking. 

An attention map is a heat map that displays parts of the website the user’s browser is looking at the most. They display which parts of the website have received the most attention, considering how far users scroll and how long they stay on the page. Attention maps can be arguably more informative than mouse-movement or click-based heat maps as you can check whether essential pieces of information are visible to nearly all users. Website heat mapping is arguably one of the most important aspects of marketing, as websites are the central touchpoint in any digital marketing strategy.

Market Research tools

Market research is an important part of every business. It’s a critical component of company success, and in a world where brands are becoming increasingly competitive, knowing your target market inside and out is more vital than ever. Fortunately, gaining important insights is easier than ever before, and thanks to the introduction of market research tools, you don’t need to be an expert researcher to get started.

Tools such as Robotic Marketer use technology to analyze competitors, understand weaknesses and strengths in a way that wasn’t previously possible. AI and other systems have encapsulated millions of data points to deliver a more in-depth and holistic marketing analysis, giving companies a clearer path to success.

Google trends allow marketers to evaluate the popularity of top Google search queries in various countries and languages. When you enter a term into Google Trends, it displays how that term has trended over time and gives it a score out of 100. You can also compare and contrast other words to see how they stack up.

The number of tools on the market that incorporate big data into the marketing world is growing by the day. While the benefits of deep data analysis are yet to be fully reached, companies such as Robotic Marketer have demonstrated a clear leap in the right direction within the marketing world. Harnessing the power of AI and big data, marketing strategies can now be created in record time and to qualities never previously possible. Should your business seek to uncover the potential of a big-data-backed marketing strategy, speak to our expert team of consultants today.