In discussing how to build your website for growth in the past, we conveyed that your business’s website should always contribute to your marketing efforts. Whether you run a small clothing store or a major hotel chain, the website is the main way for potential customers to discover and learn about the business. The site affects how your target audience sees you, engages with you, and ultimately makes purchases.
Given the growing importance of strong websites today, it’s no longer enough anymore to hire web designers, as experienced as they might be. Today, more and more companies are also using big data to inform the design and functionality of their websites. But why is this necessary? And how can you factor big data into your website marketing?
Brand Positioning
Most marketing efforts go towards influencing people to associate the brand with specific attributes. This is why we connect the most recognizable brands in the world instantly and subconsciously to what they do: See an Apple logo, think devices; see a Nike swoosh, think apparel, and so on. But when you’re running a smaller business and you’re still fine-tuning your approach, you have to figure out how to position the brand to earn that kind of recognition. And today, that is best done by collecting data via market research. In this way, you can learn about the preferences of consumers, find out more about how your business is viewed, and design the brand accordingly.
Increased Engagement
It’s relatively easy to make a sale. However, most business owners will agree that in order to achieve true success, it’s necessary to develop steady relationships with loyal customers, and ultimately earn repeat sales. A person who visits the website regularly to check for sales or read blog posts is more valuable than a person who makes a purchase once and never comes back. Data comes into play through tools like heat maps, which highlight the areas where visitors’ cursors hover or click most frequently –– thus providing valuable information regarding what aspects of the website visitors find particularly interesting. This in turn allows designers to make related adjustments –– repositioning text, changing the types of images on display, re-ordering menus, and revamping SEO and content –– all to cater to the unspoken preferences of consumers and drive more engagement.
Staying Competitive
The use of tools like heat maps and A/B testing to improve websites is gradually becoming more widespread. This is connected to the more fundamental fact that more businesses of all kinds (and of all sizes) are specifically investing in data experts. The change is evidenced in the fact that jobs for people with educational experience in data science are growing at rates far exceeding the average, with companies snatching up experts who can apply the latest tools and methods to marketing efforts. Because of all of this, it has become essential to use big data purely for competitive reasons. If you are not boosting your website through the use of data, and your competitors are, you will fall behind, plain and simple.
More Sales
The objective of every website is to increase the chances of making a sale, whether we’re talking about consumers trying to find more information about a product, asking for a quote, or actually making a purchase. There are different factors that can influence all of this, like how easily people find what they're looking for, the time at which they are offered a discount or reward, which layout they prefer on the payment page, and even the message they receive after buying something. By testing different versions of each one of these variables through A/B testing and analyzing findings, you can make data-driven changes to directly incentivize sales.
Big data used to be associated primarily with massive industries and IT companies. Today, however, the use of big data has spread to smaller businesses of all kinds. Because of this change, it is essential to employ big data in your own website marketing. If you do so effectively, you’ll be able to reach more consumers and convert more of them into customers.
Article written by Renee June Exclusively for Ez Information Management
Image credit: Pixabay
Source: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2019/09/09/08/23/internet-4463031_1280.jpg
