One of the amazing things about Digital Marketing is the access to real time data, allowing advertisers, businesses and brands to move quickly with consumer behaviour and trends. With this incredible access to data, can come with an overwhelming amount of data. How you can interpret that data in a meaningful way to your digital strategy, can be a little hard to manage. It’s no surprise from this that we see a lot of businesses stuck in data silos, and most don’t even realise they are doing it.
What are data silos?
You guessed it, siloed data. Sounds pretty self explanatory, but we want you to work this term into your thinking, planning and actions.
A data silo is one set of data either only accessible by one team or a set of data not being analysed in your overarching digital strategy.
Does that sound a little familiar? probably because it is super easy to do and as we hurtle toward 2022 [what the f*ck] and the Metaverse [umm no thank you]. This is the time to change your data silos and seed that data out into your digital eco system.
Why is this bad for your strategy?
They stunt growth. Creating long term growth is more important than ever before, gone are the days of running a quick campaign to bump up your results. Start thinking of longevity of your business and how your marketing strategy needs to support this.
You splinter your data and stifle decision making – ooofftt.
You don’t have a complete picture of your digital strategy and how these channels are, in fact, working together. Of course, if you look at one channel and everything is going swimmingly, it’s easy to forget the other channels that may be doing all the work to support that one channel
How can you avoid this?
Start thinking of your digital strategy as an eco-system, each element balancing others to create a world of how you engage an audience with your brand.
Understanding behaviour from different channels is key to getting to know you ecosystem and what actions people take, on each channel. Once you can clearly see how each element works to build your customers journey, not only are you reading you data better, but you will empower yourself to make better decisions.
As an example, you may see an audience not converting in your conversions campaign, so you switch this off. All of a sudden you notice your retargeting campaign fall away. What you didn’t realise was that audience was driving your ads to cart and enable that retargeting to seed with new people to target. Most people won’t convert on first interaction with your brand, so think about those steps it takes to nurture new people to that purchase.
Another example might be you are seeing super high costs on Facebook but really low costs on Google. Each of these channels will have a different level of competition, and while you may think Facebook is super expensive, this channel is actually helping your costs stay low on Google. How? Facebook is working your top funnel, prospecting new customers and pulling them into your ecosystem. They might take some micro actions like engaging on a post or watching your stories. Then when they are in their moment of intent, you are front of mind and they return to Google. Just like that, you show up as the first result and they convert.
At TDP, we don’t get many conversions from Instagram and this would probably surprise most people, because a’hem we’re bloody good at Instagram. ‘Good’ as in creating a community and engaging that community who then convert from our Facebook ads. Taking a lil peep under the Google analytics hood helped us uncover this incredible piece of information and transformed our digital strategy.
By looking at all your reports and finding key trends that might connect channel results, will help you fill these gaps and better understand your channels roles.
Google Analytics is great for this. It’s a free tool and can give you a one stop place to overview all activity.
Finally, if you engage a team to support your marketing activity, sharing data between teams empowers them to see your business as a whole picture. Being super transparent about what you see from your side if they don’t have access to other reporting data and letting them know what your business goals and KPI’s are.
I’m willing to bet, most of you get stuck in the metrics of one campaign or one channel easily, because we do too. It’s really easy to get sucked into the results from one platform and forget what your audiences is doing on other channels.
Working in data silos is impacting your business, your team and more importantly, your results. It’s a huge task in itself and learning to read data can be tricky, but here are a few key takeaways to remember:
- Think about your primary metrics but also secondary metrics. Do you see a certain campaign driving micro actions that support macro actions?
- Start looking at your reports together and see if you can identify trends
- Use a free tool like Google Analytics to help you bring all channels together
- Start understanding the different behaviour of each channel and how this creates a customer journey.
- Keep learning – Don’t ever think you know it all, you don’t, I don’t, the marketing gurus don’t. Digital marketing is a fast moving landscape, you need to learn to collaborate and accept if you don’t know something and lean on experts for help.
Working in data silos is costing you money and hurting your strategy, save that money and reallocate it into your business.
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Oh and don’t worry, I hear ya, ain’t nobody got time for that!
So let us do the hard work for you and book yourself in for a 1:1 strategy session ready for the new year … and then a facial so you can look just as good as the strategy we will deliver you.
Go awn, click here, we’d love to have ya
Or lighten your load in 2022 so you have more time for facials and less time reading blogs about data and check out our services.