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According to a survey of business executives, 64% believe strongly that data-driven marketing is crucial to success in the global economy. Data makes e-commerce strategies possible. From social media outreach to personalization, remaining competitive in a digital marketplace requires data and its many innovations.
Data gives businesses invaluable insights needed to generate interest. By examining all the e-commerce strategies available to you, you can begin to apply consumer data for greater success.
All it takes is optimizing and expanding your social media marketing, understanding the way data is changing the e-commerce industry, and applying useful tips to grow your revenues. Here’s what you should know.
Optimizing Your Social Media Marketing
According to Social Media Today, 95% of online adults are likely to follow a brand on social media. This represents a massive demographic for marketing your products and content. By crafting a social media marketing strategy that works, you can bring in interested customers, keep them engaged, and boost your sales and conversion rates.
A thorough and optimized social media marketing strategy includes the following elements:
Planning
Creating a plan for a successful social media marketing strategy begins with conducting an audit of your current approach. This is possible with the help of analytical tools both built into social media platforms and in applications like Twitter Analytics.
Ask yourself: what are your strengths, weaknesses, goals, and ideal metrics? Once you understand how your e-commerce marketing is currently functioning, you can plan for improvement.
Set clear goals, look for connecting opportunities, and be sure to define your key performance indicators. Remember, while the plan may have to change, the goal should always stay the same.
Profile Building
Your social media profiles should be both eye-catching and professional. This requires using recognizable images that are the proper size and quality. Your name should also be the same across social media platforms.
Create a brand with an aesthetic that is uniquely yours. Make your information and bios meaningful, inserting a call to action for your consumers. You want the foundation of your social media approach to be compelling and accessible to further research and exploration for would-be consumers.
Start by assessing successful profiles and emulating useful strategies. Starbucks, for example, features the same name and instantly recognizable logo on their Twitter page, as well as a way to reach them for inquiry.
Then, examine data metrics with each profile change to help you understand what works and what doesn’t.
Research
Any data-driven strategy requires thorough research. This means understanding the competition’s data, your data, and consumer data.
Luckily for you, many data analytics platforms exist on the web — many of them free. Google Analytics is a great example of a free tool that can help you conduct your data research, understand web traffic, and identify areas for improvement.
Built-in social media tools then track insights that can also prove invaluable to your data strategy. Utilize these analytics as well as on-platform surveys and polls to give you a better understanding of your customers’ behavior.
Timing
Social media insights typically provide data surrounding when your audience is online and when your posts are successful. Timing is crucial to effective marketing, enabling the most effective outreach for all your content.
One of the most valuable social media data points you can track is the successful timing of marketing content. You can then schedule posts and product availability when interest is at its highest.
Content Optimization
Content is key when it comes to retaining a loyal and active social media following. Luckily, data is extremely helpful in content optimization.
Using social media and other data-tracking analytics platforms, you can gauge audience reach, click-through rate, and conversation ratios surrounding every post. Use this data to plan for effective content that can best generate sales.
Social media is an invaluable tool in e-commerce success. With such a broad base of consumers active on social media platforms, your approach must be calculated and optimized to remain competitive.
This also requires an active understanding of changes in the e-commerce industry as a whole.
Understanding the Changing E-Commerce Industry
E-commerce is a rapidly evolving field. The nature of big data means analytics can happen in real-time to understand business processes and produce better predictive marketing strategies. Data analytics platforms make these sudden changes recognizable. Your job is to keep an eye on global shifts to best know how to adjust for e-commerce strategies.
Data can help by driving points of focus through the changing industry. It allows businesses to make better decisions across time. With data, you can understand the e-commerce industry, in turn helping you:
- Identify your goals.
- Target audience and marketing approach.
- Analyze effective and ineffective strategies.
- Implement decisions for higher returns and conversation rates.
Understanding the e-commerce landscape is vital for any competitive online business. Data gives you the tools to succeed.
Useful Tips for E-Commerce Success
It’s one thing to talk about the usefulness of a data-driven strategy for e-commerce success and another thing entirely to apply that strategy. Data can assist in nearly every aspect of your online business, but achieving these results often takes trial and error.
Here are some tips to help achieve e-commerce success through data:
- Use content marketing to connect your brand and its customers, keeping interest fresh.
- Build systems to create observability across your platforms, allowing you to find and solve all kinds of IT problems.
- Promote your brand with unique and sustainable packaging based on customer feedback and resource research.
- Use a mobile platform like paGo Commerce to manage transactions and offer better service.
- Constantly reassess your data to look for points of improvement.
Data assists in each of these processes, enabling the plotting of feedback and metrics to produce a larger narrative. Through the story your data tells, you can navigate a successful venture that appeals to a broader base of customer needs. In turn, you’ll see greater revenues.
Final Thoughts
A data-driven strategy in the modern e-commerce world relies on an active finger on the pulse of the market. By building data science and analysis into every process of your e-commerce business, you can keep up to date on your customers’ behavior.
Social media is a great place to achieve this understanding. Then, find and apply useful data software platforms to ensure you make the most of your data integration and communication strategies.
