Making Big Data Work For You

When preparing your business and marketing plans, careful attention is placed into preparation of data, financials and other necessary facts to illuminate your chances at successful funding. Within the data being presented to potential investors are factual expenses you’ll expect to pour into your business and expected returns from those expenditures.

When speaking of data collection, segmentation and warehousing, an expected return should be in place when collecting this data using proprietary marketing methods. One major data set that seems to perplex business owners and marketers, however, is the usefulness of analytical website data and its inherent relationship to invested monies across numerous marketing campaigns.

To make positive strides with big data, you’ll first need to understand what areas of analytical information are even necessary to collect before, during and after other data is collected. Then we’ll look at who truly wins by having this data.

Leveraging Site Architecture For Behavior Patterns

For many growing businesses, obtaining customers — no matter how or why — is the main objective and most concentrated tangent during the marketing phase. However, if you’re not paying close attention to who enters your site, or from where, marketing dollars are flying out without returns flowing inward. Therefore, finding usefulness in analytics specific to visitor behaviors is necessary, and conducted as shown below.

• Enable analytics on each page of website to assure entrance and exit information is recorded
• Each page of your site should have specific goals: collect information, allow contact, post business hours, etc. Within each page, track the visitors and how often they come, or stay, to establish the most popular pages. This assists in tracking what potential customers are looking for the most.
• Adjust your marketing campaign to match your highly visited pages since more purposeful campaigns tend to convert quicker.

Analytics allows your customers to be heard through data measurements while giving your marketing team focused tracking data to restructure marketing pushes with. Without proper website architecture to enable this collection, however, you’ll miss out on data and watch your marketing dollars spin out of control.

Assigning Dollar Values

Every piece of data is worth something, all the way down to an impression. You’ll already know the value of sales since they’re self-assigned; what you need to track is cost per acquisition, cost per email address or phone number, etc.

With everything having preconceived worth, taking data collected and dividing by how much went into these campaigns will tell you where ROI is coming from, or lacks, and allows your marketing team to adjust campaigns accordingly. When you purchased lead lists from major data companies, did you gauge the amount spent divided into the number of viable data lines? This is all you’re doing here: taking each worthwhile visit, email address, newsletter signup or free report download and dividing it into the amount which went into creating or maintaining each area.

We can craftily use analytics data to comprise total ROI for futuristic adjustments. Some key areas you should consider focusing analytics data tracking include:

• All opt-in areas
• Social media marketing responsiveness
• Contact information pages
• Sales pages (whether sales are made or not)
• Every page with key product or service information which you’d like to present

Although marketing executives like to see the whole picture, the tiny portions of said ‘whole’ are the vitally necessary areas where having analytical information will render the best breakdown of your advertising or marketing spend.

Support Tracking

Those companies who rely on customer support to field concerns, refunds or process sales will find analytics tracking particularly useful as it allows easy referencing of how much is being spent per phone call and how customer support times can be cut down. With this data, you can clearly understand how much to spend hiring personnel, if online support ticketing needs implemented to drive down costs, and what questions are being frequently asked via phone so the answers can be posted to your websites.

For example, should your representatives make $10.00 an hour, each toll-free incoming call costs $1.00 and your potential customer uses 20 minutes of time asking questions without making purchases, these data pieces can be entered and tracked financially on the support end, and marketing or programming implementations can be rerouted on the website end. All of this happens seamlessly through collection of analytical data.

Who Actual Wins With Big Data?

Now that we’ve circumnavigated the analytical data world and what areas are useful in collecting customer actions from, we now turn our attention to who wins by taking the time to implement tracking measures for deeper understandings of how the human psyche really reacts to information sought, and found.

1. Customers Retain Control

Businesses who spend time in tracking, analyzing, adjusting, and analyzing again the customer page views and data collected can give control to the customer who seeks controlled shopping environments suitable to their lifestyles instead of receiving guided choices solely based off previous sales data. Customers seek their right to control purchases and questions asked; big data can still be collected to bring a sense of comfort to each user’s on-site experience.

2. Businesses Maintain Cost Control

Starting mass marketing campaigns means money will fly out of your business bank account. The greater part of those monies may currently reside in someone’s spam box or garbage can. With useful methods in collecting big data, businesses can maintain cost control simply by having clarity in marketing campaigns necessary to propagate brand awareness.

This means by businesses measuring everything incoming and outgoing, analyzing what’s being reaped versus what was sowed and paying attention to how many impressions your webpages are receiving, they can clearly adjudicate proper advertisements that speak clearly to pages frequently visited and the demographics of visitors who visit them.

3. Passing Out Rewards

Those who wish to reward customers in some manner, albeit through bonus buys, reduced costs or freebies, can do so simply by analyzing the amount spent versus how much went into maintaining the business before and after that purchase. The rewards can be assigned so little loss to bottom line is feared while keeping excellent customers coming back.

4. Allows Test Marketing To Be Conducted

If you’re relatively new to some particular niche, test marketing can be conducted utilizing live analytical data collected from web visits, comments posted on how-to articles and by downloads of interesting eBooks or newsletters. Test marketing allows customer engagement while getting your feet wet using different tactics to spread brand awareness — all which is done by tracking, segmenting and purposing data collected from visitors.

Big Data In A Small Business

Small businesses seem to need big data more than most companies since budgets are smaller and brad awareness is already an uphill battle. Amazon, Nestle and even HP have little trouble making their voice be heard since television, radio and millions in marketing dollars are spent freely on well-known household brands.

The objective of analytical data in small businesses is simply amplifying smaller advertising budgets through actively listening in on your customers’ visits, interactions and where they are going next. Taking this exacting data and re-targeting your marketing campaigns to match what’s been collected will allow your marketing dollars to stretch farther while letting customers build your company for you.