The trends in marketing have evolved over the years, and today we have moved on from watching advertisements on televisions or newspapers to digital channels like websites, mobile applications, emails, search engines, and social media platforms.  This process of the promotion of products and services on such digital channels is called digital marketing. It is more cost-effective than traditional marketing and provides an equal opportunity for all companies irrespective of size and available resources. Moreover, the results of digital marketing campaigns are measurable and the efforts can be tweaked to attract more customers.

Digital marketing trends are evolving constantly as marketing executives find better ways to interact with their target audiences and inform them about their products. Today, consumer personalization, artificial intelligence, voice search, mobile optimization, virtual reality, account-based marketing, and more are affecting the field of digital marketing. You can become aware of such latest trends by enrolling in digital marketing and data analytics courses. Another important factor that highly influences digital marketing is data science. Apart from impacting industries like manufacturing, aviation, entertainment, retail, banking and finance, insurance, and information technology, data science is also penetrating the field of digital marketing.

This article discusses some of the top ways digital marketers are leveraging the power of data science to launch successful advertising campaigns and generate more leads.

The Use of Data Science in Digital Marketing

We mentioned earlier that digital marketing efforts are measurable. It means companies are getting a lot of information on how many people are following their brand on social media platforms, the number of people visiting their website, how much time they spend searching for products, the number of queries for their products, leads generated from a specific campaign, and so on. By getting such detailed information regarding their digital marketing campaigns, companies are able to make better decisions and serve their customers better. Evidently, data science works in the back-end to give companies actionable insights from their business data.

But, what actually is data science? Well, data science is a multidisciplinary field that involves the transformation of raw data into actionable insights that help in decision-making. This transformation is carried out through a number of processes like data acquisition, data wrangling, data cleaning, data modeling, data analysis, and data visualization. Raw data generated at the source is of no use until it gets transformed through data analysis, and hidden trends and patterns can only be drawn when the analyzed data is visualized through interactive charts and graphs. Now let us understand how such a process is beneficial in digital marketing.

Let us first take the scenario of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), an important aspect of digital marketing. By using advanced tools like Google Analytics, SEO Specialists gain many valuable insights on the organic traffic reaching their website. Metrics like Number of Clicks, Impressions, Click-Through Rate (CTR), and Bounce Rate can be visualized for a desired period of time and the following useful information can be obtained:

• Which web page is performing better than the others on a website
• How much is the traffic coming from each geographical location
• The average time users are spending on a top-performing page
• How is the festive season affecting the organic traffic
• What percentage of traffic is coming from mobile devices

Data science gives answers to all such questions and more through effective representation of analyzed data.

Now, data science can also help in budget estimation. Often, companies allot specific budgets for SEO, PPC (Pay Per Click marketing), Social Media Marketing, email marketing, or other digital marketing components. However, these budgets tend to get utilized inefficiently and do not give the desired results. However, if data science is used, companies can look at the performance of each campaign, how much budget was utilized in the past, and how to optimize each channel to generate the best Return on Investment (ROI). It can also be used to track the number of people engaged through previous campaigns and trends in each marketing channel.

Another area where companies can luxuriate data science is consumer experience. Data science can give valuable insights on the customer behavior, their purchase history, and what products they are interested in. When a marketer has all this information, he can tailor his outreach accordingly and give a personalized experience to each customer. For example, if he knows that the customer has viewed a certain product but didn’t buy it, he can send an email to the customer informing him of any discounts or offers applicable on that product. This process of personalized engagement can be automated as well.

Bottom Line

The points discussed above were but some examples of how data science is used in digital marketing. There are, in fact, more applications of data science in this field, like segmentation of customers based on desired parameters, identifying the kind of audience to target you didn’t think earlier of, setting improved business goals, doing competitor analysis, and so on. If you want to learn more about this topic, you can enroll in a digital marketing course online.