When it comes to assessing what pays off in your online strategy, knowing what you need to measure and how to analyze and interpret your marketing is a necessary skill to acquire.
In this article, we'll explain what the data cycle is, its benefits and how you can use it in your daily activities to help set your goals.
What is the data life cycle
You can use them to help you prepare, act, and decide your online business decisions. The four main stages in the data cycle are: planning, execution, validation, and correction. Let's explore the data cycle in action.
1- Planning
Suppose a marketing team working in a local municipality wants to organize a digital advertising campaign to encourage people to ride bikes to get to and from work. In the “Planning” stage, the team will define its goals for this campaign and plan how to promote it.
For example, the team decides that its goal is to reduce traffic congestion by 25% within three months, using search advertising and social media marketing.
2- Implementation
The next step in the business cycle is “implementation”. At this point, the team designs the ads and launches the campaign.
Weeks after the campaign ended, the team measures the number of people who clicked on the ads and assesses whether the campaign is actually having an impact on the number of people who cycle to work.
The team notes that while search ads drove a large number of new visits to the website, very few people viewed or interacted with the social network campaign.
See: SEM Campaign Tools
3- Verify
These statistics highlight the need to re-evaluate and improve the municipality's social media campaign to develop it. This is where the “verification” phase of the data cycle begins.
4- Correction
Finally, the “correction” step shows where a business can use these findings to improve future campaigns.
In this case, the marketing team can decide to change the social platforms used, review the content they publish, or publish content at different times of the day and see if those changes help improve engagement.
Some tips to help you get the best out of the data you've collected:
- Now that we've talked about the data cycle, let's look at some tips to help you get the most out of the data you've collected. Don't bother trying to collect as much data as possible.
- Focus your efforts on the data sets that are most relevant to your goals.
- Get the right information at the right time.
- Review the information you collect periodically.
This will help you to be aware of any variation in data that may appear throughout the year, such as a decrease or increase in sales according to seasonal times such as public holidays.
Use online tools to help you collect the data you need and derive statistics about it.
Tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Webtrends can provide you with data about site visits, including pages visited, time spent on the site, and whether users completed a targeted action, such as filling out a contact form.
Summary
If you have access to historical or trend-related data previously, use it and learn from past experiences.
When it comes to your business scenario, think about how you can apply the data to make your decisions. How can the data cycle support you in optimizing future marketing campaigns?
See: How to Manage Numbers Using Spreadsheets