Data drives product development, marketing, and significant decisions. The aim is to find the most accurate data through the most efficient methods.
Increasingly, business owners are looking to alternative data to thrive in a heavily competitive environment. It is hard to get an edge on rival companies using the same information sources and drawing unoriginal conclusions. An innovative approach to data is the key to creating successful strategies.
What Is Alternative Data?
Alternative data provides unique insights that may not be available from traditional sources and are derived from diverse sources. Data is generated by individuals, businesses, and sensors. A major source of alternative data is customer reviews, social media posts, and comments on websites.
Data is also derived from analyzing internet behavior, including internet traffic, clicks, subscriptions, purchases shopping cart information. Alternative data provides a close-up view of consumer activity and more detailed insights into the preferences and behaviors of potential customers.
Why Marketers Are Using Alternative Data
It is useful for any marketer to know how many unique visits a website receives every week or what customers say about a brand on social media. Also, satellite technology and artificial intelligence can be incorporated to create an automated digital monitoring strategy that gives marketers in-depth information.
Marketers seek cutting edge alternative data to stay ahead of the competition. The benefits of knowing more about existing and potential customers are apparent. Since browsing behavior and purchasing history are reliable predictors of future decisions, specific alternative data can dramatically improve campaigns and focus on marketing strategies. There are several ways marketers are using alternative data, including SEO automation, competitor research, and understanding customers to create a personalized marketing strategy.
SEO Automation
Creating attractive and informative content is a great way to improve your site, but all of that effort could be wasted if there aren’t enough people viewing it. Every content strategy requires a strong SEO component to leverage search engines’ data to attract users to a site or product page. Also, a call to action on every page is an effective way of engaging visitors and encouraging them to subscribe or make a purchase.
Researching keyword and linking placement, analyzing ranking, and algorithms require time and effort that would otherwise be spent developing products and running your business. Thankfully, many SEO tasks can be automated for greater efficiency and time savings.
A website audit is an ideal place to start. It is important to know what is working well on your site and what should be improved. Software, sites, browser extensions, and other tools create audit reports in a matter of minutes.
Rank trackers can keep tabs on your website rankings, and advanced tools can help you evaluate your SEO strategy to determine whether it is getting results. Also, automation can help you decide how best to implement the content you already have and what kind of content to create. It can also provide feedback on backlinking and refine lead generation.
Competitor Research
No company operates in a vacuum. Getting the full picture includes keeping tabs on your competitors if you want to take market share and attract the same customers. Competitor research is a necessary component of every market strategy. It involves determining who your competitors are, what information you need to acquire from them, and how to acquire and analyze it.
Competitor research allows you to fill in the product development and customer service gaps between what you and your competitors provide. Getting to know your rivals’ strengths and weaknesses will help your brand develop a niche and offer a unique value proposition. Advanced software and tools automate the process of discovering your rivals’ pricing patterns, promotions, revenues, sources of funding, customer information, and partnerships.
Using Google Alerts, tools, and bots facilitate competitor research. Retrieve content from pages with the help of SEO proxies that make it easy to scrape web competitor pages anonymously. Bots to measure engagement and activity on rival sites provide a clear picture of how your rivals are doing and what is working for them as well as their vulnerable spots.
Leverage eCommerce Data to Understand Users’ Needs
In previous decades, marketers were required to guess at consumer sentiment based on purchases and surveys. With the internet, customers provide direct feedback on product pages, websites, and social media.
The issue is accessing data so it can work for you. Automation tools capture reviews, comments on social media, and customer service interactions for market analysis. The time and tedium of these tasks are eliminated with advanced tools that update information regularly. User behavior and comments are integrated to create a personalized strategy focused directly on the customer. This is a big argument for why you should invest in e-commerce development in the early stages.
Boost Your Results with Alternative Data
Data is the driving force of marketing, and it is getting more plentiful and detailed. Leveraging data from a variety of sources requires effort and attention. Automating these tasks with proxies, bots, software, and tools fine-tune marketing efforts with advanced SEO automation, competitor research, and consumer insights.
Baburajan Kizhakedath
