How to Take a Data Driven Approach to Boost Your Site's Traffic

The online marketing landscape is in constant flux. New developments and better practices emerge on a regular basis, which can bring new energy to a marketing team, but it can also make it harder for companies and marketers to stay on top of the latest and greatest practices and trends in optimization. Thankfully there is one constant that all marketing teams can use to keep up with industry changes and add some new life to their marketing campaigns. What is it?

Data.

Businesses that use data to make decisions in their sales and marketing campaigns are better positioned for success than their competitors that don't study metrics or rely on too many "soft" measurements. Comprehensive and precise data gives marketers the ability to examine current market penetration and develop stronger campaigns for targeting their most desired customer. Having incorrect or incomplete data can render entire databases and data sets almost useless when it comes time to design strategies for driving visitors to a website.

Bad data causes problems all across a company, but marketing programs are especially affected because inaccurate data can lead to misguided campaign decisions, which then result in flawed customer data capture and lead generation. Accurate data, meanwhile, helps marketing teams to make better campaign decisions and allows them to create strategies that successfully attain business and sales goals. Data can feel intimidating to beginners, SMBs, or small marketing teams that worry about the scope of their marketing projects. In actuality, data is nothing to fear. It’s not about the size of the data - but how the data is used. Data-driven strategies can lead to higher ROI, increased web traffic, better sales leads, and more on-site signups and registrations, according to a report from Statista.

In what ways can marketers take data and use it to develop strategies that drive more traffic to their websites?

Leverage internal data first.

Examining, scrubbing, and enhancing existing customer information databases can help marketers segment their current customers and design campaigns to more effectively target them. Internal data can be segmented in a variety of ways, including past purchasing behaviors or interaction with the company's website. Once a marketer understands how a customer uses the website they can deploy targeted calls-to-action and communications to each segmented group.

These communications can push users to the website and drive them to perform specific actions, such as fill out a form or watch an embedded video. Having detailed internal data on these customers makes this process possible. It is also advantageous to study other internal data, particularly that which relates to past successful content or website metrics. For example, there are a variety of Google Analytics reports that marketers can pull to look for trends and insights, such as queries, landing pages, and geographic information.

Improve marketing processes.

Busy marketing teams don't have time to waste. Most organizations that have relied on bad or inaccurate data have stumbled and experienced a loss in productivity as hours were wasted on a project that was doomed from the start. Businesses can eliminate this waste of resources and streamline their processes through the use of accurate, task-related data.

For example, a marketer may be spending hours each week posting on Facebook and interacting with the page's fans. But is this time well spent? What do the analytics and the insights say? Does the ROI justify those hours spent on Facebook? By closely examining the related numbers, a marketer can determine whether or not he is spending his time wisely on this network. If these hours result in qualified leads or sales, it's probably worth it. On the other hand, if there is no return, the marketer can then re-examine priorities to determine if that time is better spent on other marketing strategies, such as email funnels, or landing page development.

Use data to target prospective customers.

Marketers can use their own historical data or purchase trusted and verified third-party data to study their key demographics and learn more about their customers, such as their goals, needs, wants, and where they go online. With this information marketing teams can create targeted campaigns to drive potential users to the website.

By using data to better understand the consumer marketers don't have to spend any time communicating with unqualified leads. The communications and content created during this process will be more robust and specific, as it is meant to speak to one core group. The MozCast Feature Graph shows that just over 11% of Google search results contain in-depth articles and content.

Design for the customer.

When data helps businesses better understand their customers, it also helps them understand the sort of experiences they want from a website. By diving into customer data and past engagement metrics, marketing teams can learn what's worked in the past and begin to develop more campaigns with these ideas in mind. Collecting data on what worked for the brand and the website in the past gives marketers an educated foundation for developing new online experiences that delight the customer. Customers will return to websites that deliver positive experiences - and they will probably tell their friends about it, too.

Marketers shouldn't be afraid of numbers. Data-driven strategies allow businesses of all sizes to increase their web traffic and improve marketing campaigns across the board. The only regret with a data-based strategy is not having implemented it sooner.