August 7, 2018

6.6 : Learning from digital results

6.6 : Learning from digital results

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

If you’ve taken the effort to import all of your social media network data into your spreadsheet and you’ve started to identify some trends and patterns, the time now is to learn from those results.

The trends from different networks can help you to identify the right times to engage or stop engaging on a certain social network.

Regular reviewing of your activities can increase your accuracy of where, when, and how to engage on which social media network.

One of the important things to remember is that you don’t, as a brand, necessarily have to be on every single social media network all the time. It may well be to your disadvantage, but you can only know this once you’ve received enough data from the different networks, and once you’ve spent enough time analyzing what’s coming in.

It could, for example, be that certain periods of the year you’re actually wasting money being present on a social media network where there isn’t the right type of activity for your buyer persona. It could be that you need to be constantly active to be able to stay pace with competition and to stay engaged with your buyer persona, but you can only know this by looking at, and analyzing, those results.

By analyzing the results, you can make more careful use of limited funds that you have in your budget for social media networking and marketing, and you can make clever use of those results to focus your activities when you require them at the right time of the year on the right social network.

All of these means that you’re getting more value for your budget and more value for the time that you’re spending with these social media networks in a way that produces the best result and the biggest expanding community for your buyer persona. The more you do this, the more effective you are, and the more careful you can be with your placement and perhaps even more focused to the extent that you can recognize with a great deal of accuracy where, when, and how you need to be in which social media network.

Asta Cepulyte, Chief Executive Officer, Sharecruit, Lithuania

To control and analyze the activities of the market we get very analytical reports, very important information which we can analyze and we can track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

The Sharecruit case study finds that trends analysis is best done in-house because you are better placed to understand your buyer persona

So that’s why it’s very important decision to make to have your own professionals in organization rather than to order media agencies for help. But of course either it’s your professional team member or a media organization, but to build brand awareness is very important nowadays when we live in milenium and transparence age.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

So the data that’s on the spreadsheets and the data that’s produced needs to be taken and used in order to make good decisions for your business. They produce results, they produce the ability to be able to analyze and they allow us to optimize our actual activity.

Data is a guide but it cannot make decisions for you – The Candidate Ltd identified that on a weekly basis their digital profiles are popular on Monday and Tuesday –

Should they engage with candidates on these days or focus on developing engagement on other days?

We use data from downloading SEO reports so that we can see how much time and investment to put into developing content is needed in order to produce the different areas of traffic. We can look at the data that’s produced across our website, and the peaks and the troughs.

We know that a strong period for our business is Monday and Tuesday from the different traffic that’s produced and through the data and Google Analytics, and that our quietest days is the weekend. So the decision there is should we continue to invest in Monday and Tuesday and make that peak even higher, or should we in fact be releasing and doing more digital marketing activities at the weekend so that we actually prop up the low amount of traffic that’s going through at the weekend.

But traffic isn’t everything, and obviously you need to make sure that it’s converting into sales and into, for us, candidates coming into the business. So we just need to make that call, whether we’re using the right area and producing the right results from our investment.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

You have some quality data there – you can find some, you can make some assumptions, but it’s not everything is based on quality.

Data can present challenges for interpretation and should always be considered in the context of seasonality and the context of the activity in question.

Use multiple sources to track your profiles data with that of your industry and seasonality – for example, compare a Google Trends report with Google Analytics visitors flow

Lets say if you have an SEO report, you can see if you have an increase in organic traffic or not. So if you see decrease in organic traffic coming from SEO, the client will have an assumption something is not going very well with our campaign. But actually the truth is the queries for the specific product are not high during summer season so you have to be ready for a situation like this. So first of all, examining the data based on quality metrics, and after that we need a human factor to identify what is going on.

Exercise

Digital Marketing Measurement Model

Read the Digital Marketing Measurement Model proposed on this page:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-and-measurement-model/

Think about when you started this course. If you have engaged in activity 1.3 you might have written your SMART objective already?

What is the key segment that will help you to understand why you succeed or fail with this objective? Share your views below and comment on the ideas of others.

Additonal material

Generating intelligence

Understand your Audience in Google Analytics https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012034?hl=en
How to Analyse Google Analytics Data http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/google-analytics-tips-data-analysis-reports/
How to Analyse Ecommerce Data https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6014873?hl=en

References

Understanding your digital marketing data

 http://acquisio.com/blog/digital-A…

Learning the habits of getting better results

 http://www.clickz.com/clickz/colum…

Understnading analytics’ outcomes

 http://www.deloittedigital.com/us/…

Improving the results

 http://www.business2community.com/…

For chapter 6 relations sections, follow:

6.0 The importance of ongoing monitoring and learning from your engagement
6.1 Understanding of Social Capital and its importance case study
6.2 Accessing data in Google Analytics
6.3 Accessing data from Facebook
6.4 Accessing data from Twitter
6.5 Using spreadsheets to analyse and populate reports
6.7 PPC report