Data is the foundation of every modern business, technology, marketing campaign, and sales initiative. Your data (and how you use it) is a critical distinction between you and your competition.

At Whereoware, we’re obsessed with all things data. Data drives everything we do—from our Creative team using data to track user experience, to our client marketing team analyzing performance data to optimize every campaign, to our Customer Insights (CI) team (who are all.data.all.the.time) creating sophisticated business intelligence dashboards and predictive models. Before saying go, we look to data to validate our strategy and guide our execution, and then measure activity and results along the way.  

If there’s one thing to commit to in 2020, it’s becoming a data-driven company. Leaders across industries share this goal. A survey from CMO Council and Deloitte found, “more than half (56%) of growth CMOs prioritize data and intelligence analysis as the top skill to help them evolve their growth agenda.”

Depending on your organization’s current comfort level, this might mean undertaking a few specific projects to elevate your data game; connecting your systems to breaks down silos; or starting from the ground up to set a reliable data foundation.

Whether you’re just getting started or doubling down on your data pledge, follow our three steps to becoming a more data-driven company in 2020.

Today’s data-driven marketers struggle to track and measure campaigns spanning a variety of disparate channels, technologies, and audiences. Reporting is time consuming and overwhelming, especially when you manually pull reports from each tool and cobble the insights together. Luckily, a business intelligence (BI) tool, like Domo, is a lifesaver for the time constrained, data-driven marketer.

BI tools turn huge swaths of data into simple visualizations (called “cards” in Domo) to cut through the clutter and reveal the big picture. By letting us connect disparate data sources into a single system, we can layer and analyze complex data instantaneously, without the typical headaches associated with manually pulling reports (and pulling our hair out).

Today, we’ll highlight a few Domo cards demonstrating how combining data sources in a BI tool offers deeper, actionable insights to improve your marketing strategy and business.

Ever feel like Stretch Armstrong – pulled in too many directions?

If you’re like most sales, e-commerce, and marketing teams, you face an overwhelming daily task list that leaves too little time for the fun stuff – analyzing results, optimizing performance, and strategizing your next big sale or campaign.

We’re lucky to have more opportunities than ever to engage our omni channel customers. Accenture reported that multi-channel customers (visiting a combination of our website, social networks, sales reps, and in-store) are 15% more profitable than digital-only customers and 25% more profitable than human-only experiences. The opportunity is huge, but means we’re creating more campaigns, analyzing more data, and ultimately, juggling more balls.

B2B vendors are already in the holiday marketing swing to help their retailers fulfill inventory, while B2C brands are brainstorming and executing holiday campaign strategy for their stores, websites, emails, and more.

Everyone wants a piece of that huge holiday pie. Last year, holiday sales during November and December increased 5.5% over 2016 to $691.9 billion.

A smart digital strategy is step one to getting a big, fat piece of that seasonal spending. Of course, the best way to map out a winning digital strategy is to first look back at what worked last year.

To get started, we’ve outlined 3 Google Analytics metrics to benchmark from last season to help you develop this year’s marketing plan.

Conversions + most popular shopping days

First, identify the days your website saw the highest conversions last year.
To benchmark high-level conversion numbers from last season in Google Analytics, navigate to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview.

The Overview graph at the top of the page displays the E-commerce Conversion Rate by default, but can be modified by clicking the dropdown. You can click “Select a Metric to add additional metrics, like Average Order Value, Quantity, Revenue, Transactions, and Unique Purchases. We selected Revenue and E-commerce Conversion Rate.

Continue reading Analytics tip – 3 metrics to benchmark holiday success →

Marketers use email and website personalization to deliver a hyper-relevant online experience to every customer, but succeeding with online personalization isn’t easy.

According to Evergage, 88% of marketers say their customers expect a personalized experience, while 55% admit the marketing industry isn’t personalizing to those standards.  What’s more, 46% of marketers would give their own company’s personalization efforts a “C” grade, or less.

Developing user personas is key to executing a successful personalization strategy. Personas, fictional representations of key audience segments, help marketers understand the needs and interests of their audience segments, so they can make their customer journey more personal and relevant.

To get started, we collect and analyze available data (both qualitative and quantitative) to understand what makes different audience segments tick, so we can group them within logical and actionable personas. Today, we’ll walk through how to use Google Analytics Demographics and Interests data (a free tool) to capture additional quantitative data to develop detailed personas.

(Already have your data? Get detailed steps on creating user personas and our handy persona worksheet here.)

Continue reading Google Analytics Tip – Using Demographics and Interests Data to Develop Personas →