Data-driven marketing is the best way to be sure that your marketing efforts are accomplishing your goals, right? If you’re still just randomly picking out a marketing tactic based on your gut feelings every week or so, then you’re the last lame marketing director that does that, right? Maybe not.
Econsultancy’s new Internet stats report includes some interesting findings:
- Fewer than half of marketers use first-party data.
First-party data — information from your own web analytics, your own research, and your own POS — is used by only 42% of marketers surveyed in their decision making about ad spend. More than half must be using third-party data such as aggregate market reports… or no data at all.
- Inbound marketing is only about 20% of spend now — but that’s changing.
74% of mainstream marketers surveyed said that the decision makers at their company see content-based inbound marketing as their main media channel in the future. Among leaders in their fields, the proportion is 78%, while the followers of the pack say 51%.
- Consumer insights are key.
80% of the leaders in the survey base their decisions about content marketing on information from their customers and from consumer behavior.
- Data and content work together.
Content marketing is used to increase demand, leads, and brand awareness. High quality data is important in marketing because it provides savings and efficiency.
- Data comes from the web.
Websites are the top source of consumer data collection, with 73% of those surveyed naming this means of collecting data.
- It’s all about the strategy.
Strategy was the top choice for the most important aspect of marketing among those surveyed.
Let’s put this all together.
Content-based inbound marketing is the future of marketing. Information to drive strategic planning for content marketing needs to come from consumers, preferably the company’s own customers and their behavior, and the company website is the best source of that data.
And yet fewer than half of the marketers in the survey that produced these conclusions use the first-party data they can easily gain from Google Analytics, CRMs integrated with their websites, or CMS solutions including web analytics data.
What’s more, only about 20% of those surveyed were putting their money where their mouth was when it comes to inbound marketing.
This is your average competitor. Knowing that content-based inbound marketing will soon be the top media spend, they’re still putting their dollars into legacy media. Knowing that they need insights from their customers’ behavior at their website in order to build actionable strategies for their inbound marketing, they’re ignoring (and perhaps even failing to capture) that data.
They’re probably having some depressing moments when they think about this… or they’re due some when they start thinking about it.
What about you? Are you moving now on content-based inbound marketing? Are you collecting that essential data now, even if you need analytics support to make the most of it?
If you need help getting there, we’d love to talk to you. Call Rosie at 479.966.9761 or fill out our simple contact form.
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