How to Use Data to Drive Your Decisions for Your Company
Most people think marketing for a company is as easy as posting some content on your Facebook page, Tweeting, posting a picture on Instagram with some hashtags, and then maybe writing a blog post. In all actuality, it’s much bigger than that. In a broad sense, it’s cyclical. What’s starts out as a piece of data based on a certain demographic, turns into a varietal micro-campaign.
The first step in learning how to use data to drive your decisions is to understand what your end goal is. For example if you are selling a new product, such as an augmented reality headset, you need to know specifics about your market. So if you post something on Twitter, and write a blog post, and then put the link on Facebook to see what happens, that’s actually not the right way to do it.
Your first step should be to find trends in the market, do some research, and learn the habits of the people who are potentially going to be your customers. There are various tools you can use to expedite this such as: Google Trends, Twitter, Alltop, Buzzfeed, Reddit, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and of course news sites such as this one.
Once you have a handle on your demographic, then you want to curate your content and cater to your audience in a much more efficient manner. The best way to do this is to write an article or blog post relevant to your market but not directly about your product. Make sure you incorporate back links to other articles relevant to your market, so that people will see that you have a lot of knowledge in this space. Of course you want to make sure your title and content is SEO friendly, as well as the inclusion of imagery to help people visualize what you are talking about.
Once you have a compelling story to tell, then it’s time to research the platforms most beneficial to the exposure of it. A good place to start is Reddit where people have actual conversations about specific topics. Make sure you add your post to StumbleUpon (don’t forget to add keywords), and even submit it to blog search engines. From there you want to head over to Twitter, and find the relevant keywords for your market and make sure to tag influential people or keywords along with a shortened link of your article (Bit.ly is a good choice for shortening the URL as well as tracking the hits).
Once you finish posting your content on all the other social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. it’s time to start analyzing your data, preferably using Google Analytics (which you should have integrated into your blog). Now you can see the age groups visiting your content, how long they stay there, which regions they are from, which cities they are in, what gender they are, their interests, if they are returning users, and much more. With this data, you should have a better understanding of who is visiting your site and reading your content, which means you may be able to start curating content based on that information. You can now be more specific in your content distribution, and target the individuals (based on data) that are interested in what you have to offer. From there you can gain a wider audience because you are finding various niches, without having to spend a lot of time and money marketing, because you’re using data to help you make decisions.
Lastly, you can figure out what features or price points work best for your platform if you use these same methods and tactics, along with a survey to drive your decisions.
