Page 388 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

and might buy a product without ever speaking to a salesperson. For that reason,
collecting data and analyzing customer behavior in every part of the funnel is
critical.

Analyzing the customer journey requires you to make sure that you provide
content on every conceivable channel and social media platform that your
customer may find to evaluate your product and interact with your brand.

In Chapter 3 we provide an in-depth look at navigating the complete marketing
funnel from awareness to loyalty.

Integrating Marketing Technology
with Analytics Systems

As previously mentioned, the most successful marketers are uniting their market-
ing technology with their analytics systems. The reason for this is simple. Most
marketers are drowning in social media data. What they don’t have are customer
insights. To gain these insights, you need to combine data from disparate plat-
forms such as your website, mobile apps, email, automation, advertising plat-
forms, call center logs, and your e-commerce sites.

Facing data problems

The key to analyzing data in all the ways that are available to you is to have data
that is prepared for analysis. (See the next section.) Unfortunately, this isn’t easy
for most organizations that are overwhelmed with the volume of data they gener-
ate. Here are some of the issues marketers face when trying to bring all their data
together. Do some of these problems sound familiar to you?

» Data trapped in department silos: Departments are protective of their data
and don’t want to release it to others for fear it will be misused or degraded in
some way. This prevents the organization from benefitting from a more
comprehensive look at the customer.
» A lack of automation systems in place: Your organization is doing a lot of
work with spreadsheets rather than using automated processes. This wastes
a lot of time and prevents you from analyzing the data at the level you need it
to extract insights.
» A lack of accurate data: When was the last time your data was cleaned? Has
it been checked for duplicates, wrong addresses, and out-of-date purchase

372 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM