How data can empower savvy marketers

Analytics and other information about your consumers are readily available, but to be successful you must know what you’re looking for and what to do with that knowledge.

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Marketers and communications teams live in a time of abundance.

Over the last 15+ years, the incredible growth of digital channels has helped us learn more than ever before about target audiences, track website visitors’ behavior and monitor customers’ activity.

There is such a wealth of data being generated, logged, analyzed and packaged that we coined the term “big data” to underscore just how much stuff is going on.

An outgrowth of this has been the explosion of analytics and intelligence tools to help wade through and understand these oceans of information. Between free tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Page Insights and the plethora of paid tools at the modern marketer’s fingertips, it’s understandable that we can fall into the trap of simply reading out the information that is provided rather than first asking ourselves what we’re trying to learn.

How’d that Facebook campaign do? Here’s the CTR. What’s happening on the website? Page views are up.

The problem is that we’re responding to an inquiry, but we aren’t answering the question in a useful way. Here’s how you can adjust your mindset to successfully gather and use data:

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