Using Data to Optimize Your Digital Marketing Mix

With the right tools and deep data science expertise, you’ll grow your business faster, sell more, and increase profits.

Whether you work in the marketing or advertising industry helping clients grow their business — or within an internal marketing team — part of your role may be determining the most effective digital marketing mix for promoting products or services. And all while ensuring your business goals are aligned with objectives.

The start of a new year is the best time to evaluate your marketing mix to ensure you’re set up for success. A few questions each business should ask are:

• Are your current campaigns meeting your goals and objectives?
• Are you generating leads?
• Have you noticed an uptick in website traffic?
• Are sales increasing?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, it’s time to make some changes.

In today’s landscape, digital marketing is more complex than ever. That’s also why you must use a powerful business intelligence tool to evaluate your marketing campaign performance. Business intelligence applications (BI) gather, analyze and report mission-critical marketing data to help you make more informed decisions.

CIO magazine cites the following benefits of BI applications:

• Data-driven business decisions
• Faster analysis and intuitive dashboards
• Increased organizational efficiency
• Trusted and governed data
• Increased competitive advantage

BI tools provide a broad range of features to help you influence marketing mix decisions, such as dashboards, visualizations, reporting, and data mining. When you’re tracking website traffic, for example, seeing a traffic uptick indicates your web-based campaigns are helping drive results. Conversely, if you’re not using BI to analyze your data, you’re making decisions based on gut feelings and guesswork.

At Digital Mouth, our data analytics team uses DOMO, a leading BI tool, to measure and analyze the client’s KPIs on each digital marketing channel, including search, social, display, video, CTV and others. Domo is a cloud-based platform focused on business-user-deployed dashboards designed to solve complex marketing challenges, such as optimizing the marketing mix for multi-faceted digital campaigns.

Through our data science experts and tools like DOMO, we’re helping agencies and businesses determine a strategic mix of advertising tactics across every channel, platform, and device. These tactics typically include paid search, paid social, online audio, connected TV, online video, mobile, and online display, on desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

Moving further into the world of big data means uncovering how media activations support one another and predicting how that information can benefit your clients and end-users. Again, tools like DOMO provide unlimited visibility into your marketing mixes, which yields actionable performance insights. 

Finally, the ability to layer in external data from third parties allows a more robust look into how the data performs relative to an independent control element. This customized approach means decision-making is no longer limited to a single viewpoint but a blend of data points across all entities — from the first user interaction to the last conversion event.

When it comes to designing an ideal marketing mix, there are no off-shelf solutions. Every situation is unique. Factors such as demographics, psychographics, competition, goals and budget drive your marketing-mix composition.

For example, a healthcare organization we worked with ran a top-funnel awareness-based campaign. As the campaign progressed, we tested other scenarios and identified openings further down the conversion funnel around social activations that provided opportunities to turn visits into full conversions. 

Integrating Google Analytics allowed us to see visitor behavior on the website and layer in expected performance. The results suggested a strategy shift and budget to a heavy social campaign that combined awareness and conversion goals would yield better results. The new strategy saw immediate success by converting users previously considered outside the ideal conversion target. It also meant we could easily use this scenario in future activations.

BI tools will take on added importance in the next few years as third-party cookies disappear due to user-privacy concerns. Apple, Google and Mozilla have all announced plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in their web browsers, which will begin taking effect in 2024. The alternative to cookies is zero-party or first-party data, which is information that users voluntarily provide.

This transition may involve shifting focus towards more first-party data collection and using other technologies such as device fingerprinting and browser fingerprinting. Additionally, a shift to contextual targeting and lookalike modeling based on the data collected will be crucial. Further, the end of cookies will likely lead to a change towards more privacy-centric, data-driven marketing strategies as companies work to maintain their competitive edge while respecting user’s request for anonymity.

Moreover, we can also rely on contextual targeting and other targeting tactics to work around the data gap when cookies disappear.

Yep, modern marketers have at their disposal powerful business intelligence and other digital tools that provide unprecedented insights into the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. The key is leveraging and analyzing your terabytes of data and using the information to improve the performance of your digital marketing mixes, which grows your business and helps you make more informed decisions.