Marcus Richards
Successful digital marketers are data-driven. They use data to understand their target audience’s behaviors, desires, and pain points. In turn, they refine their marketing strategies to align with the needs of their customers.
Let’s say you learn from Sprout Social that the most effective social media content in 2022 is video. You would prioritize video content as part of your social media marketing strategy, right? You would learn the best types of video content that work for your niche and buy the necessary tools to help you stand out. The result will be you attracting and converting more prospects through those social media channels.
Accessing relevant data will help you create digital marketing strategies that impact your business goals. Keep reading for some valuable digital marketing data sources.
1. Social media analytics
Social media analytics reveal the behavior of social media users, such as the time of the day they are active, the types of content they engage with the most, and why they love one brand instead of another.
As a digital marketer, getting accurate data about social media will help you get the most out of your marketing campaigns. Tools such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social can provide you with information on the type of content your followers engage with the most and at what time of the day they are most active.
These social media marketing tools also publish research reports about the most effective marketing trends in the industry and the behavior of social media users. You learn the best ways to approach your social media marketing campaigns by reading these reports.
2. Business statistics
Are you targeting small businesses with your new product? Getting data from websites publishing small businesses statistics can refine your marketing strategies. You will know the right marketing channels for a specific niche and how to tailor your messaging to get their attention.
The website Small Business Administration is an excellent place to start learning about the pain points of small businesses. It provides the latest insights on the state of the economy and population trends. Sites like Crunchbase give data on startups of various industries, including the amount of funding raised and revenue accrued. You can identify competitors and learn their strengths and weaknesses by studying data from these sites.
3. Independently scraped data
Sometimes the data you’re looking for isn’t readily available on the internet. But that shouldn’t stop you from getting what you need. You can get data by scraping the web yourself.
You can use special tools like proxies to scrape any data you need for your digital marketing campaigns. Plus, proxies will allow you to access all geo-blocked content in your region. For instance, certain websites are region-specific. This means that you must be in a specific area to access content on that website. When you have a proxy, you can access all the content available on a website you are interested in, regardless of your location.
4. Census data
Customer personas are an essential part of your marketing strategy. They define how you approach your content marketing campaigns. When you understand your target customer to the core, your content pieces will be more engaging to them. They will pay attention because you address a problem they are looking to solve.
Census data can provide you with the data you need about your target audience. Let’s say your target audience is social media marketers. You can find their demographic and location data by analyzing census data. This will allow you to identify the best marketing strategy to get maximum ROI.
Ensure that your CRM tool can import census data to allow you to compare your current customers’ behavior with that of the nation.
5. Keyword trends
Search engines are among the best ways to acquire new customers. The first place prospects go when researching a product or when they’re ready to buy is search engines like Google. So your business should master the proper techniques to rank higher on search engines.
Sites like Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Backlinko provide you with the latest trends in search engine optimization. They provide statistics and case studies proving why one tactic works and another doesn’t. Visit these sites to learn the keywords you should focus on to get more quality traffic from Google.
Conclusion
Data sources give you relevant information to guide your marketing strategies. If you don’t have access to such data sources, you may formulate strategies that never impact business goals. This is because your marketing campaigns may not align with the needs of your prospects.
Valuable data sources for digital marketers include census data, independently scraped data, business statistics, keyword trends, and social media analytics. While sometimes it’s good to conduct marketing experiments, running marketing strategies supported by data will surely bring you more results. Choose to be a data-driven marketer!
