Is Your Digital Marketing Agency Data-Driven?

A lot of business owners and marketing executives ask themselves whether their digital marketing agency is data-driven. And that question must be answered with a resounding yes if you want to maintain your competitive advantage in the digital realm.

How to identify if your agency is data-driven?

A digital agency is data-driven when it makes use of strategies that data-driven actions can support. These are simple, straightforward strategies that can be measured through specific KPIs. These KPIs will then be used to understand how the strategy performed and how the digital marketing efforts contributed to the overall campaign's success.

To identify if an agency is data-driven, they need to test, measure, and evaluate the performance of their strategies.

How can marketers use this data?

As a search engine marketer, you need to appreciate that measuring is not the same as understanding. When trying to understand your digital marketing efforts, you will have to consider a lot more than just numbers and metrics.

You will also have to understand your customers better, the trends affecting them, and how they want to be reached. Only then will you be able to use the data you have gathered in a meaningful way.

To use data to your advantage, your digital marketing agency has to know what kind of information they are looking for, how to gather it, and which tools can be used for this purpose. However, identifying what type of data is available is not enough to properly analyse it and make relevant decisions based on it.

Make sure that your customers are being targeted at the proper channels. Determine if you are using the right KPIs for your business. Ensure that whatever data you are looking at can be interpreted correctly, and do not be afraid to ask other people to help you make sense of it.

When doing this, try to focus on the long-term vision of your business instead of the short-term goals. Focus on how important data is for your digital marketing agency.

If you are still not sold on the idea of how data is essential for an agency, here are some tips on why you need it:

1. Data make the entire process more transparent. It allows everyone to see where their input is being used in the overall picture. If there is a problem, it will be easier to identify and resolve it before things get out of hand.
2. Having an accurate record makes it harder for people to question your decisions and actions. Instead of justifying your actions, you can simply point to the data and let it speak for itself.
3. Being a data-driven digital marketing agency will allow you to keep up with trends. Instead of making assumptions based on your experience, you can prove that something is working or not working using the available information.

What tools do you need to create a data-driven marketing firm?

Depending on the size of your digital agency, you might not have the resources to build an all-encompassing data collection system.

But that should not stop you from determining which tools and systems will help. Following is a list of the tools that will be useful to a digital marketing agency in its quest for data-driven marketing:

1. Data collection system - This has to be a flexible tool to handle new data being added every day. Data collection tools include a way to identify the different kinds of data you are looking for. Still, they also need to be capable of storing and organising the information that you have collected.
2. Social media monitoring tools - Tools such as Google Alerts, Mention, and ViralWoot will allow you to keep tabs on everything that is being said about your brand or industry online.
3. Google Analytics - An indispensable tool that you can use to track your website statistics.
4. Web-based analytics tools - You should be able to configure them to pick up on specific information that you are looking. These include a wide variety of tools, from simple likes and tweets counters to image recognition programs.
5. A competitive analysis tool - This will allow you to compare your stats with their marketing performance, based on the kind of data you are looking for. Social media tracking tools will also help in this regard.

Your Key Takeaway

A successful company must be a data-driven one if it wants to be competitive in today's marketplace. The growth of an ecomm business cannot be based solely on assumptions and guesswork.

It is where data comes into play. It allows you to see how your actions have affected the overall campaign and measure its progress.