CEO at RightMetric, a marketing research & insights provider that helps consumer brands and agencies build winning digital strategies.
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The power of meaningful data-backed insights is undeniable. These are being used to drive decision-making across firms and industries, and in no place is this more true than in digital marketing. And with good reason, as earning a potential customer’s attention online has become increasingly difficult with more and more brands competing for the same attention.
However, having the data is not the same as implementing strategic actions derived from said data. Providing your audience with meaningful content at the right place and at the right time is only part of the equation. One of the key aspects that is often overlooked within a strategic approach to marketing insights is the proverbial “last mile” of effectiveness, which is tactical execution. By employing a structured approach to marketing research, you’ll be able to better tailor your marketing efforts to be more efficient and effective, helping you stay on top of the rapidly changing digital landscape.
The Challenge of Harnessing Data-Backed Execution
When thinking about the power of data-backed insights, it’s easy to get caught up with the data, as that’s what is widely discussed within marketing circles. But the true value is really in the insights, actions and recommendations derived from relevant data. Many companies don’t actually know how to meaningfully leverage their data to their advantage, even when they are sitting on mountains of it. Thus, the interpretation or distribution of actionable insights or recommendations doesn’t come without its challenges.
For one, it’s easy to reflect on the past performance of your own brand, using retrospectives to validate or refute the use of a specific strategy. This is what many marketing teams will do, using a rinse-and-repeat marketing plan to tackle a specific goal. However, past performance is just that: in the past. Whether your brand is getting on a new platform, wants to test a new strategy or is targeting a new audience, you don’t want to rely on data that is largely irrelevant for your present moment.
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The Opportunity of Data-Backed Execution
In conjunction with this, some brands will focus on leveraging audience or competitive insights to try and be forward-thinking with their own strategy, but this is often itself a huge challenge. When watching competitors and industry leaders, it can be hard to isolate what facet of their strategy or tactics is actually driving growth. While it’s smart to keep track of your competitors to generate insights, you need to be able to measure their tactics to ensure that their strategy is reliable.
Having a structured approach to generating competitive, data-backed insights allows you to keep up with best practices without spending all your time on Google, spying on your competitors or hiring another analyst. This is key, as an integrated marketing research approach can free up to 15%-20% of marketing spend. Moreover, the process we use, which I’ll share below, deconstructs winning digital strategies, isolates the true drivers of growth and helps show you how to measure whether what competitors are doing is actually working.
Not sure about this for your brand? Here’s some more context about the framework’s ability to deliver results. One of our major clients — a large, globally recognized brand with multiple product lines — approached our team with a common problem. Not only did they have dozens of social media accounts to manage, but they had multiple audiences to address across their different product lines. This meant that their social media presence was difficult to structure, and thus, hard to draw clear insights from. However, the framework below allowed them to look at competitor brands excelling at reaching the same audiences on the same platforms and adjust their strategy accordingly.
The Framework
Now that you’ve got an idea of the power of the method, let’s dive into the framework itself:
Perform a competitive analysis. Focus on tracking the marketing activities and associated KPIs of your competitors’ marketing activities across as many digital channels as you can. Ensure to keep track of the progress of both activities and KPIs over time, as both will inform later facets of the framework. You can either do this manually or with a few different tools, such as Semrush or Similarweb.
Identify irregularities in growth. Common contributors to growth spikes include factors like market trends and seasonality. Watch your competitors for any isolated growth spikes in activities or KPIs. If it happens to everyone, it’s probably normal, but if it’s just a single brand, it’s probably because they are employing a winning strategy.
Isolate the growth spike. To identify what’s going on with this growth spike, you need to isolate all activity across all channels prior to and during the spike. This will allow you to narrow it down to the items that likely contributed to the spike. More channels are better, in this case, to paint a clear picture. Look at ads, emails, websites, partnerships, etc. — anything you can get your hands on.
Leverage the growth drivers. Once you’ve isolated appropriately to know what helped drive the growth, it’s time to put these drivers into action. With these insights, you can build a step-by-step growth strategy for your team to use as the foundation for related work.
Using this framework is a great way to get actionable insights that will work for you rather than against you. It’s easy to get caught up in clichéd but well-intentioned advice, such as that which promotes regular use of the Instagram Insights analytics feature. Fundamentally, these types of features do not provide any sort of competitive advantage, nor do they help provide any sort of really impactful insights. If you want to know how and why your competitor is garnering more web traffic from social media than you, this framework is the way to go.
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Author: Charlie Grinnell, Forbes Councils Member
