5 Ways Data Can Supercharge Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The modern world of business is saturated with data. Data is the medium through which we understand markets, customers and our own performance. It allows us to identify opportunities and fix mistakes.
Data is a critical ingredient in digitisation, helping businesses to become more efficient, productive and customer-centric through the effective use of technology.
There is, however, a danger in the extent to which all of this is universally accepted as fact. Not that we’re suggesting any of it isn’t true. But blind acceptance carries a risk of complacency. A risk of taking data for granted. And a risk of forgetting why data is such a powerful tool.
As specialists in digital marketing strategy services, this is something we’re always keen to emphasise to our clients. Data does wonderful things in marketing. But its impact is neither automatic nor a foregone conclusion. Data delivers when you understand how to use it in a strategic way.
With that in mind, we wanted to share the ways we use data to help clients get maximum value from their marketing as part of our digital strategy services.
Setting Smart Goals
All strategies start with setting goals. You need to know where you want to get to in order to plan a route for getting there.
In digital marketing, there are various models used to guide goal-setting. There’s the ‘5S’s’ framework, which advises marketers to break targets down into sales, speaking (i.e. communication with customers), service, saving (money) and sizzle (a bit of a stretch this one – it means extending your online reach!)
Then, of course, there is the widely used ‘SMART’ acronym for making goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.
But as catchy as these and other acronyms are, there’s something missing – the context of each individual business. Without knowledge of what success in sales or cost savings would look like to a business, or indeed what’s achievable, relevant and timely, these snappy slogans are pretty meaningless.
We use data to fill in the blanks and give us the contextual details that allow us to define genuinely smart marketing objectives for each client. Data allows us to benchmark previous and current performance and define what achievable success in different areas looks like. Then we can use data to hone in on what is specific and measurable, too. Crucially, data also enables us to tie marketing goals closely to business objectives – that is, the financial ‘bottom line’ that is the ultimate bellwether of all business success.
Measuring What Matters
Let’s dive further into the ‘measurable’ part of a smart data-led strategy for marketing. What we’ve just said is that data lets us set appropriate, business-relevant goals for our marketing strategies and campaigns. Measurement is all about evaluating whether or not you achieved these goals. After all, what’s the point of a goal if you don’t know whether you’ve hit it or not?
This is achieved by gathering and analysing data about your own performance. This is most useful in marketing when you gather data throughout the journey, not just at the very end when you judge whether you’ve hit your goals or not. That way, you can continually keep track of whether you’re on target or not and make adjustments to steer you back to your goal. Think of it like a ship continually adjusting direction based on navigational data.
It starts with measuring the right things. In marketing, we call the things we measure metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs). There are plenty of things you can measure in marketing, as this list from HubSpot illustrates. So, what are the “right” KPIs?
You’ll sometimes hear marketers talk about choosing different KPIs depending on the type of marketing activity they are engaged in or the types of channels they are using. But we believe this is the wrong way round. Again, it should all start with your objectives. What you want to achieve will shape how you measure progress along the way. So, for example, if your focus is driving sales, you might choose to measure conversion rates. If you’re looking to save money or increase marketing value, you might concentrate on customer acquisition costs or customer lifetime value etc.
In this sense, the choice of KPIs goes a long way to shaping the nuts and bolts of your marketing activity, not the other way round. The best approaches to take to drive conversions are usually very different to cutting back on customer acquisition costs. As long as your KPIs and goals are properly aligned, every measurement is a piece of information about whether you’re on track to hit your business objectives. And with modern real-time analytics providing continual feedback, you’re always empowered with insight about whether you need to make tactical changes to keep on course.
Read about how, as part of a website rebuild project, Key Element delivered an integrated analytics solution to trade consultancy Export Unlocked, giving the company the tools to monitor performance across all of its digital assets.
Audience Analysis and Journey Mapping
Goals and KPIs shape where you want to go and how you get there. But this ‘journey’ of strategic marketing success depends fundamentally on a parallel journey taken by your customers – one which, if you get things right, will see them move from initial interest through converting as customers to long-term engagement and loyalty.
Data is just as critical to getting this customer-focused side to marketing right as it is to setting smart strategic goals and measuring progress and success. These days, customer data is arguably the single most important type of data you will engage with in marketing. And that makes total sense.
Data helps you understand who your customers (and potential customers) are, what motivates them, what their needs and preferences are, so you can deliver the right messages and experiences to attract and inspire them. Customer data opens the door to personalisation. Customer data lets you map out exactly how to attract, convert and retain different cohorts of customers with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
The good news is that there is no shortage of customer data available to marketers. Every interaction across every channel and touchpoint – every click on a website, every email read, every like and share on social media, every search and every product browsed or purchased – is a resource you can use to build detailed pictures of your customers. From these pictures, brands can group customers into segments based on shared characteristics, which then inform how to target and engage different customers in ways that feel more relevant to them.
Just as important to understanding who your customers are and their preferences, needs and expectations, is knowing how they move around the digital ether as customers. Marketers refer to ‘shopping journeys’ these days because it very much is a process, often involving a complex web of different touchpoints – a click here, a browse there, a discussion or recommendation or moment of inspiration in one place, then research and (hopefully) purchase in another.
Thanks to data, we can track the habits of different customer groups or even individuals as they embark on customer journeys, and analyse what combinations of channels and inputs and experiences are most likely to lead to a purchase. We then build these journeys for them. We call this customer journey mapping.
Data-led Content Strategies: Right Message, Right Time
You often hear commentators refer to businesses needing a ‘content engine’ in order to succeed in marketing. That neatly captures the fact that marketing is increasingly an exercise in publishing, and businesses have ti focus a lot of time and resources on churning out enough of the right material to keep audiences engaged across all their channels.
The metaphor also works in another way. We might call content the ‘engine’ that drives digital marketing, fuelling campaigns, attracting attention, building relationships, and scoring conversions. If we pick up on our last section, customer journey mapping builds the course your customers want to race on. Content gives them a ride around it.
And just as data is critical to mapping out what your audience wants, it’s also essential to creating the content that delivers the right messages at the right time.
There are several layers to building a successful data-led content strategy. One is understanding the topics that resonate with your would-be customers, and staying up to date with hot topics and trends. There are various ways you can approach this, from employing social listening analytics to keep tabs on conversations and sentiments on social media, to SEO analytics to understanding what (and how) people are searching for. When combined with your customer data, you’re in a good place to create content that resonates.
The second part is performance tracking your own content, and using that to refine your understanding of what works best. This usually comes back to using good old fashioned digital marketing KPIs – open and click rates for email and ad campaigns, traffic to a blog, engagement for social posts etc. You can use performance data retrospectively to inform future campaigns, which has become much more powerful with the advent of predictive analytics. Or you can A/B test content by publishing different versions to samples of your audience, compare how they perform to choose the final version for release.
Finally, data plays an important role in judging when and where to publish content. Different types and forms of content don’t just resonate differently with different audiences. They work better on different channels, too, as well as suiting different purposes. For example, advertisements are still a reliable tool for driving sales, and therefore suit direct selling messages. But you wouldn’t be advised to fill paid-for advertising space with thought leadership content intended to establish brand authority and trust.
Optimising the Digital Marketing Mix
This leads neatly on to the final area where data can make all the difference to your digital marketing strategy – which marketing activities or tactics you are going to use to achieve your goals, as well as which channels you are going to focus on.
You will often hear the word ‘omnichannel’ used in marketing, which in its most literal interpretation means taking an “every channel” approach to marketing, or having a finger in every marketing pie. The theory is, customers and potential customers are everywhere these days – online and offline, mobile and desktop, using email, social media, apps, websites and more. If you want to maximise your chances of growing as a brand, you have to be everywhere potential customers are, and moreover create compelling journeys out of any combination of the above.
But this purist’s interpretation of what omnichannel means is neither practical for most businesses nor particularly smart. Unless you’re a global enterprise, you just don’t have the resources to be everywhere at once. And it’s not even clear that you need to be. Going back to your audience analysis and customer journey mapping, data tells you where your customers like to hang out online and how they prefer to engage and shop. Unless one of your goals is to gain traction with a brand new audience, you don’t need to invest time and money in having a presence on channels few (if any) of your customers use.
Optimising the digital marketing mix is therefore all about using data to be smart about the channels and media and tactics you use. What combinations give you the best results? Which channels or tactics are not pulling their weight in terms of returns? Are there any options that you’re not using that could make a big difference to achieving your goals?
Data is essential to answering these questions. Ongoing performance monitoring and comparison is crucial. But there is also plenty of valuable insight to be gained from techniques like attribution modelling, which unpicks where conversions are coming from in complex customer journeys, and media mix modelling, which analyses how the combination of different marketing approaches and channels impacts performance.
Ultimately, a data-optimised digital marketing mix gives you agility. You can double down on what works, pivot away from what doesn’t, and even switch things up as you go based on up-to-date intelligence. It’s about creating a strategy that’s not just omnichannel for the sake of it, but uses the options available to drive the best possible results.
Why Video Content Outperforms Written Content
While written content still plays a crucial role in SEO and long-form storytelling, video offers greater immediacy and accessibility. It’s easier for most people to understand a concept when they can see it play out rather than decode it through complex text.
Moreover, not everyone enjoys reading or has the ability to do so effectively. Video content supports users with cognitive disabilities, visual impairments, or those who speak English as a second language. Subtitles, audio descriptions, and pacing controls allow viewers to consume information at their own comfort level, increasing overall inclusivity.
It’s also more time-flexible. People may not sit down to read a 10-minute blog post during their commute, but they will often watch or listen to a 90-second video while multitasking. This passive form of consumption aligns perfectly with modern lifestyle patterns.
Conclusion: Turning Insight Into Impact
Data isn’t just another marketing tool – it’s integral to the foundations on which effective digital strategies are built. From setting goals and tracking KPIs to understanding customers and optimising content, data makes your planning smarter and shows you the path to achieving the results you want.
But none of this is inherent in data itself. What matters is how you use it. Data’s value is only realised in the context of every individual business, their goals and their customers.
At Key Element, this defines our approach to digital marketing strategy services. We help clients harness data to shape smarter strategies that are meaningful and impactful to them, not off-the-shelf solutions. This is how we help clients get the best possible returns from their digital marketing investment.
As technology evolves, with AI in particular offering new levels of insight and automation in data analytics, being data-savvy is becoming more and more accessible, but also more and more essential. Success in digital marketing increasingly belongs to those who recognise data as the key strategic asset it is – a source of clarity, creativity, and competitive edge. We’re here to help you get there.
Frequently Asked questions
Why is data important in digital marketing strategy?
Data enables marketers to make informed decisions based on evidence rather than guesswork. It helps define goals, understand audience behaviour, optimise campaigns, and measure performance – ultimately improving ROI and aligning marketing efforts with business objectives.
What types of data are used in digital marketing?
Digital marketers use various types of data. For defining marketing goals and monitoring and evaluating the performance of campaigns in achieving them, marketers use a wide range of metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide various types of information about the impact of any activity. KPIs typically quantify things like audience reach (e.g. traffic volumes, click rates, open rates etc), levels of engagement (dwell time, time per session, sentiment analysis and social listening) or conversions (not just how many sales were driven by a campaign, but how many people followed a CTA).
Customer data is particularly important in marketing, as it gives marketers invaluable insights into who their target audience is, and what their preferences, habits and expectations are. This allows marketers to tailor campaigns and content to have maximum impact. Types of customer data collected include demographic and psychographic data to aid audience profiling, and behavioural and tracking data from online activity to show what people do online and how, where and when best to target them.
How does data improve content marketing?
Data reveals what content topics resonate with your audience, what formats drive engagement, and when and where to publish for maximum impact. This allows businesses to create more relevant, personalised, and effective content strategies.
What is customer journey mapping and why is it important?
Customer journey mapping visualises the steps a customer takes from awareness to conversion, and beyond that into long-term engagement and loyalty. Data helps identify a) how customers move about and interact online, b) which journeys are most successful from the business’s perspective in delivering the most desired outcomes, and c) how journeys can be optimised with the right combination of channels, touchpoints, content, and interaction to deliver those desired goals consistently
How do digital marketing strategy services use data?
Digital strategy services use data to tailor marketing approaches to a business’s specific goals and audience. This includes setting SMART objectives, selecting the most effective channels, allocating budget wisely, implementing effective measurement and continuously optimising tactics based on real-time performance insights. Beyond that, at Key Element we actively use data to inform our understanding of any client’s target audience, for customer journey mapping, and for putting in place winning content strategies, which are all key to delivering the goals of any digital strategy.
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