How important is data for marketers

Hi Sandra,

For me, it's about having the right data, knowing how to interpret that data to get results. And of course then taking action. If you are going to build a website, then you're going to take a close look at your competition to see if you think you can realistically rank for the keyword/s your thinking about going after. It's better to spend some time on this now, instead of building links month after month to discover that you are wasting your time because it's just too competitive.

Of course, if you were to keep building links you may get theri one day, but you will probably have lost the will to live by then. So with regards to SEO I think it's vital every marketer does his homework before starting on a project.

If you were to set up a FB ad campaign for example ( or other paid advertising)you would still want to look at data, but you don't need to spend as long doing it because there isn't as much data needed compared to SEO. Plus you can set up a campaign, let it run and then interpret the data to tell you if that campaign is working or not. If it is, you'd run with it. If not you could tweak it and test it or start a new campaign.

Not enough people test their marketing efforts. People should split test and split test. It's not exciting, but if more people spent time doing it they would increase their chances of having success online instead of moving on to the next shiny object.

Pages and pages could be written on which specific data one would use for each form of marketing, so I'll leave it there.

Hope that's of some use.

Marketers are like a bunch of scientists. The ones who will succeed have a project that they decide will make them a success story. The go into it with a idea but do not necessarily know the exact journey steps. We then have to test and track everything to see the small successes. We tweak and tweak to increase conversions. Just like a mad scientist that is trying to formulate his potion. When we get a small success we take note of the formula and keep repeating. We then create a whole system to scale that up to eventually make a full time income.