By Stephanie Craig, Senior Product Marketing Manager
Making decisions based on data is an afterthought for too many marketers.
If I had wondered about this point before, I was certain of it after attending SMX West 2014, a search marketing expo, last week in San Jose. It was made clear that marketers don’t realize how much users and businesses benefit from data-driven decisions. The result leads to an ineffective campaign, which leads to ad dollars wasted.
Two sessions I attended resonated in particular. The first was led by Cindy Krum, Chief Executive Officer at MobileMoxie, who spoke about why mobile is the most untapped resource of user behavior insights and data.
In fact, understanding mobile users and their behavior is not a choice anymore – it’s a must. Below is her list of five stages of mobile analytics that companies should be thinking about:
- Understanding. What’s trackable?
- Mining. Where is the data across devices (or analytics platforms)?
- Merging. What’s the story from different numbers?
- Sharing. Who else needs this information to make good decisions?
- Selling. Can the stats be sold for other companies’ ad revenues, and how?
Natalie Kortum, Director of Analytics and Consumer Insights for Humana, explained how to leverage mobile data by outlining five phases of data use:
- Reporting on trends.
- Key performance indicators.
- Business intelligence.
- Math modeling. Evolving a marketing strategy or a business model based on analysis of what the data shows.
- Machine learning. Making choices about marketing based on user behavior from data – perhaps even in an automated way.
In order to create a successful project that continually gets funding, marketers need to make sure the data meets a strategic business need. The analytics need to be explained in a way that stakeholders, either product or brand decision-makers, can understand. Marketers must demonstrate ROI or highlight areas where this can be improved.
We all have to prepare for what’s next. Know your business, know what is important to your consumers and collect the data that allows you to deliver.
The post What I Learned at SMX West – It’s All About the Data appeared first on Marchex.