How Often Does Real-Time Data Play Into Your Marketing Decisions?

Any company operating within the digital sphere worth its salt knows just how vital real-time data and analytics can be to refining their marketing methods, but where and when do you act on this information and reformulate your digital strategy? That’s the question that’s constantly on the minds of digital marketers who are always looking for a means of attracting new followers and boosting engagement throughout their social channels. As important as this data may be, recent research suggests that many marketers still don’t know when to act on this information, and that could be leaving thousands of dollars on the table.

 

When do marketers utilize their data?

According to a March 2015 poll by Econsultancy in association with ResponseTap, there is a true consensus among client-side and agency professionals in regards to the importance of consumer data. However, while the role of data in informing digital strategy is viewed as a major advantage, marketers and their clients continue to be wary of making wholesale changes to their marketing efforts. According to the aforementioned poll, only one-third of client-side marketers said they were doing an excellent (5%) or good (29%) job at implementing improvements based on insights from consumer data. Agency professionals reported that only one-fifth of their clients were good or excellent at reading data and making meaningful changes to their digital strategy.

 

A similar December 2014 survey conducted by Ensighten also found that agencies and marketers worldwide continued to encounter significant difficulties integrating the copious amounts of consumer data they record into refining the overall customer experience. 70 percent of client-side marketers and 57 percent of agency professionals reported that they had begun to connect the dots with their data, but still had a long way to go to truly take advantage of their consumer data.

 

Where are marketers lagging behind?

It’s one thing to take a piece of information and act on it, but it’s quite another to completely revamp your marketing operation from the ground up, but in many cases this is the best way forward for some companies. March 2015 research conducted by Signal found that the biggest challenges facing digital marketing data collection include a lack of personalization in the customer experience, fragmented data collection and simply misunderstanding the complete consumer journey.

 

Ultimately, marketers are hoping to create a singular consumer view that speaks to the activities, buying habits and navigating tendencies of their consumer base that can help them make informed actions with any of their digital strategy changes. But without consistent testing, putting new plans into action and a healthy dose of trial and error, data will only go as far as you’re willing to take it.