By Modern digital marketing services produce a wealth of data, and agencies that master the skill of interpreting that output and extracting digital marketing insights set themselves up for success. Digital marketing insights refer to the sum of valuable information and statistics obtained from the digital marketing channels, platforms, and analytics tools used to deploy and track marketing efforts.
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Marketing data serves as a pulse check in real time of how a given marketing campaign or strategy is performing. Collecting, interpreting, and drawing conclusions from data are among the most valuable agency skills a marketer can have because they act as a counterweight to the biases we all naturally have. Instead of making decisions based on feelings and personal preferences, you can act confidently based on quantifiable facts. The result is better decision-making and, ultimately, more performative and impactful marketing campaigns. In this blog post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about drawing insights in your digital marketing practice, why it matters, and how it can lead to better results for your clients.
What are digital marketing insights?
Digital marketing insights are the conclusions marketers draw from the data collected about their campaigns, which can be used to improve decision-making and optimize campaign performance. These aren’t just random numbers: they’re generally figures relating to key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics defined ahead of a campaign based on business goals.
Let’s take a look at various types of online marketing insights that are regularly used by digital agencies and marketing consultancies to deliver better results for clients.
Consumer behavior insights
By collecting data points related to browsing habits, purchase patterns, and engagement metrics, marketers can gain actionable insights into their target audience's preferences, needs, and motivations. This knowledge empowers marketers to tailor their messaging and campaign strategies to more strongly resonate with their ideal customer.
Market trend insights
Trends move faster than ever, and agency startups that want to stay competitive must track trend data to keep up with new developments. By collecting and interpreting this data, you can identify emerging trends, shifting consumer preferences, and evolving market dynamics that impact your agency’s niche. Armed with this information, it’s easier to be proactive in your digital marketing approaches and to capitalize on emerging opportunities when they’re most fresh and impactful.
Campaign performance insights
One of the most important areas of digital marketing insights for longstanding and startup agencies alike is campaign performance. Clients pay for marketing agency services expecting a return on investment (ROI), and campaign data enables you to demonstrate the impact of their marketing spend.
Relevant performance insights depend on your client’s goal. If they aim to build brand awareness, reach and click-through rates are appropriate KPIs to track. If they’re more focused on getting sales, data such as conversion rate and return on ad spend (ROAS) are key. The idea is to track insights that reveal whether a campaign or approach is working, or whether it needs to be adjusted or nixed in favor of a different digital marketing strategy.
Audience segment insights
Audience segmentation is a powerful digital marketing strategy for making budgets go further. By breaking up audiences into smaller segments that share key characteristics, each segment can be more effectively targeted. Online marketing insights can be used to reveal relevant segments based on things on-site behaviors, demographics, and psychographic characteristics. Then, campaigns can be tailored to those smaller audience clusters based on their preferences and pain points, leading to more resonant communications that ultimately drive more conversions.
Competitive landscape insights
Insights in digital marketing approaches can be gleaned about competitors, not just about your client. You may not have the full behind-the-scenes picture of competitors' marketing campaign data, but you can still use analytical tools to gain information that can help you compete more effectively.
These include analyzing competitors' online presence, studying their social media engagement, monitoring keyword strategies, dissecting their content marketing approaches, tracking reviews, and more.
The importance of digital marketing insights
In today’s marketing world, data is power. Knowing what information to look for and how to translate it into effective decision-making is an indispensable skill for modern agencies. If you’re not gathering digital marketing insights on every client project, here’s why this activity needs to be on your radar:
- It helps you find clients for your agency. By gathering online marketing insights, you can put together case studies showcasing your most impactful campaigns. This is a highly effective way to build trust in your boutique agency and turn prospects into paying clients.
- It enables optimized marketing campaigns. There’s no better way to fine-tune your campaigns than by following the data. Knowing which numbers matter and how to interpret them will help you turn up the effectiveness of all your client campaigns.
- Data insights improve communication with clients. Client relationships are an important form of currency in the agency world. The stronger your relationships are, the more your business will thrive thanks to long-term contracts and regular referrals. Data, when presented effectively, can communicate information quickly and efficiently to clients, helping them understand the impact of your agency’s efforts.
- Digital marketing insights give your agency a competitive edge. Businesses that understand how to collect, interpret, and present insights from their digital marketing activities have a major edge over competitors that lack this skill set. Remember, you can use these insights to support your agency’s goals too, not just your clients: your agency can use insight in digital marketing to better understand your niche and find more clients.
How to collect digital marketing insights for clients
When it comes to collecting digital marketing insights for clients, a structured approach is the key to success. Follow this step-by-step process:
1. Set clear goals and define the KPIs for each project
Before diving into data collection, you need to know what you’re measuring and why. Campaign goals should be a product of consultation with your client to understand their requirements and challenges. Based on those, determine the most appropriate metrics to focus on as you work toward their goal.
2. Set up analytics tools
Analytics platforms offer a wealth of data about website performance, user behavior, traffic sources, and other metrics that are important for cleaning digital marketing insights. Google Analytics is a powerful free tool, and platforms for managing ad campaigns, social media, and SEO generally come with built-in analytics features. Make sure all of these are properly set up to collect data before launching campaigns so you can capture data from the start.
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3. Set up social listening tools
Tools can be used to listen in on conversations about your client’s brand that take place on social media and elsewhere online. Any time their brand is mentioned, these tools collect data about the nature of the communication. It may not be feasible to manually comb through every mention, but with the right tech, you can gather important information such as customer sentiment. If the brand experiences a negative mention, having listening tools in place ensures they can take swift action to rectify the problem before it snowballs.
4. Use customer surveys
Don’t underestimate the value of feedback from customers as a source of marketing insights. By deploying surveys via email, website pop-ups, or social media polls, marketers can gather qualitative data about preferences, satisfaction levels, brand recognition, pain points, and more. This firsthand feedback may feel comparatively low-tech, but it provides invaluable context for refining marketing strategies and enhancing customer experiences.
Leveraging digital marketing insights to generate leads
For all those digital marketing insights to help your client’s bottom line, they need to be translated into action. Here's how to do just that:
Understand the underlying customer preferences
Ultimately, no matter what your client’s goals are, all businesses need to generate regular high-quality leads to grow. Attracting those prospects largely comes down to understanding what makes them tick: what does the data say about their preferences, motivations, and interests? Armed with this knowledge, you can better tailor your messaging and approach to resonate with potential leads.
Embrace personalization
Taking a personalized approach greatly increases the chances of capturing the attention of a prospective customer. Insights from digital marketing data can be used to craft experiences and content with a personal touch, helping your client cut through the digital noise and get noticed by their dream clients.
This can take many forms, from personalized email campaigns to dynamic website content. The idea is to use personalization to foster engagement and enhance the likelihood of the prospect taking your desired action.
Use data insights to optimize
Implementing changes and refinements based on digital marketing insights isn’t a one-time thing. Instead, you should adopt a culture of ongoing optimization and refinement to deliver the best possible experience to audiences. Continuous A/B testing of multiple facets of your digital marketing campaigns is sure to deliver more lead-generation wins and conversions over time.
Experiment with audience segmentation for better lead generation
Segmentation is a powerful strategy for maximizing the impact of lead generation efforts. By dividing their audience into smaller segments, you can deliver highly targeted and relevant messaging to each segment. Digital marketing insights play a key role in identifying how you should break up those segments and understanding their unique needs and preferences. The result is well worth it: deeper connections, more brand loyalty, a healthy lead pipeline, and more conversions.
