Supercharge your Digital Marketing with Data
In a data-driven world, “Choosing your Goal” is the first and most important piece of the story. From there it will show you how to progress forward. To “Track your Goal” you need tools. These tools generate data, siloed data. Eventually, you end up with a huge pile of data.
The value of data multiplies when sources are combined. When the exchange of data between two systems, allows the optimization of the performance of both.
For example, data coming from the website make it possible to optimize the drip campaigns. The drip campaigns drive more visitors to the website. That generates more revenues and more data. These data can be again used to further optimize the user targeting process.
So you can supercharge your Digital Marketing with data…
Difficult? Maybe Not.
Where do you start? Start with the basics! Choose the tools that you need.
Where Are They Coming From?
Where did my customer come from? From which channel? From which source? Which landing page?
Enter Google Analytics, the tool that most people start with. The one-stop-shop to setup a basic to advanced analytics infrastructure. You can track website actions, events, or set up goals. There are so many ways that someone can customize it, so he may not need to proceed with other tools.
Hints:
- In case you need to find Google Analytics Alternatives here is a great post by Ankit Oberoi.
- If you need to learn how to get the most out of Google Analytics check this great post by KISSmetrics.
- If you like open source, take a look at Open Web Analytics.
What do they do?
OK, “a customer” came from Facebook or Twitter of a referral. But what did she do on my website? Who did what?
Two of the most known tools are:
KISSmetrics, provides Customer Intelligence and Web Analytics (They also have a great blog). It’s a great tool for SMBs with an online presence. As they say on their website, ‘Google Analytics tells you what’s happening. Kissmetrics tells you who’s doing it’. You can set up KPIs, funnels (the steps people need to go through to help you with your KPIs) and, the events you want to track.
Mixpanel. In my recent post, I wrote that Mixpanel helped us to easily create funnels and visualizations of how people are using Blendo. Mixpanel helps you dive into your events, analyze them, discover trends or create weekly cohorts. Other than the events, Mixpanel has People analytics that focus on the user and Engage that allow you to act with emailing or push notifications.
Hints:
Engage!
Having setup and tracking everything you will probably need a way to monitor your engagement with visitors / Leads / customers. How do you track your social media interactions (shares, likes, follows)? My personal favorite combination is Buffer and Mention.
Buffer is my favorite social media scheduling platform. I love their product as I love their blog (check the posts from Kevan Lee for Marketing) and culture of transparency. They also have a fairly good analytics dashboard that can provide you with information like which post was shared more, which created more engagement. With Buffer, you may create a number of posts at one time and select your social media channel to send them to. You can either schedule it yourself or let Buffer do it.
Mention is a real-time social media/web monitoring platform. You may create alerts on your name, brand, or anything you would like to monitor. You get real-time updates about the most relevant mentions over social media and the web. It provides you an easy way to react on all of them.
Hints:
- A nice trick is to create email alerts in case you are mentioned or for anything you want to search in the web. Services like Google Alerts or Talkwalker Alerts(both are FREE!) will inform you when they find something relevant in the web.
- Buffer just launched Respond. Respond is a Customer Service tool that utilizes social media. You can see community’s tweets in a real-time twitter stream like, where you can reply and keep track of conversations. For the time being I love it!
To Lead or not to Lead?
There are too many CRMs and, even more, CRM add-ons. I have read many discussions on the value or not having a small CRM tool. Frankly, I think you can use an excel to track everything or even Kanban (check here and here). Though the easiest to scale is a CRM tool.
Hubspot CRM is an easy and intuitive tool to help you keep track your sales and communication in general. It has free and paid versions. There are some features that you expect to like: templates, prospect intelligence, tasks, deals, integration with Hubspot Sidekick (nice and useful! get it if you want to get insights on your email recipients), integration with Hubspot Marketing Platform. It lags a bit in reporting (none in free and automation). Though I personally like it and use it a lot.
BaseCRM is Sales platform, as they call it. Sales people use Base to win more deals faster. Sales leaders use it to gain powerful pipeline insights. It is great if you have salespeople in the field, as it provides real-time access to contacts and deals in progress. In addition, their mobile app displays an interactive map with all the nearby contacts.
SugarCRM one of the most popular open source CRMs. It can provide you with functions from customer, lead, and contract management, to reporting and marketing tools. They provide a hosted version (paid) and the Community edition. The community edition has fewer features than the hosted, but still it may worth the try.
Hints:
- An alternative of Sidekick is Rapportive.
Customer Success!
Got the product running, got the users, got the customers. Selling is important but only half of the journey. How do your users feel for your product? What problems do they face?
Intercom is my favorite customer success tool (or Customer Communication Platform as they call it). It is very easy to integrate with your website or app. It shows you your customer data and help you filter, tag and segment your client database. It provides functionalities like live chat with visitors on your website, onboarding, feedback functionalities through in-app or by email and customer support. It also integrates with many other tools and allows you to import your customer data from them.
Zendesk is a customer support tool. It allows you to set up a customer support team by monitoring and following up on all the issues that were reported. It offers ticket management, monitoring of customer support channels, has a nice UI and a stellar support.
Are you Data-driven?
You have all the tools up and running, they generate data, you answer to your customers… Just great!
How can you utilize all this data generated in all these places in order to optimize and benefit your digital marketing efforts?
How can you easily combine and remix data from your marketing tools, customer success, analytics and your transactional database easily and without having to wait on other departments?
Blendo, is the missing link between your data sources and the various tools that may help you analyze them. If you are a Product Manager or a Data-driven Marketer get the data you need in minutes in one place and use a BI tool to start asking questions or just get a CSV file. As a Data Analyst, you will need only to think about the questions. Start writing the SQL queries directly to your data warehouse. As a Data scientist start working your R magic to discover trends and build prediction models, no more waiting other departments. Blendo will get your data consistently and available to the destination of your choice.
Closing
What tools do you use, What questions do you ask about your customers? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Originally published at blog.blendo.co.
