Blending the art and the science of digital media marketing means staying ahead of the curve. In today’s digital marketing landscape there are two important ways that help achieve this; leveraging metrics and developing intuition.

Leveraging Metrics

In the age of big data, there is one cardinal sin – making a decision based on a single anecdote. The Internet, social media, search engines, mobile tech, haptics, and gamification are being used to generate more data than a human being can even think about. Human behavior in digital spaces is complex. The behavior of crowds in these same information environments is more complex. For that reason, making decisions based solely on intuition can be ruinous.

In digital marketing, there are ten essential metrics that must be tracked ruthlessly. They are;

  1. Overall Traffic: the number of total site visits
  2. Channel-Specific Traffic: indicates where visitors came from
  3. Conversions: indicates when a visitor becomes a paying customer
  4. Bounce Rate: the number of visitors who visit once only
  5. Search Trends: indications of forces beyond your control
  6. New vs. Returning Visitors: indicates a site’s growth potential
  7. Queries: Clicks, searches and other behavior- often protected, valuable when you find it
  8. Top 10 Organic Landing Pages: AKA ‘landing pages,’ they are your most ‘visible’ pages
  9. User Demographics: traditional user information indicating geographical location, and other cultural considerations
  10. Brand Sentiment: perhaps best measured via social media, this tells you whether or not the exposure your brand gets is positive

When it comes to taking and leveraging these metrics, there are solutions and experts that can be tasked with the job- and if you’re new to the practice- it’s ok to ask for help. Managing and interpreting metrics can sometimes take a village, but they can also be handled by someone with vision, someone who is inspired to take the time and expend the mental energy to commit the information that metrics provide to the imagination.

Developing Intuition

Humans are supremely intuitive beings, and all creative efforts are inherently the products of intuition- even information technology itself. People who are immersed in a subject long enough- and with sufficient interest- develop an intuition for it. That’s why those who grew up with gadgets and computers are the family IT experts. In digital marketing, the same rule applies. Developing the intuition to forecast trends means being immersed in digital media. To this end, for those who do not have it naturally, taking some time to get submerged in social media could be a good way to enroll one’s self in a crash course in digital marketing forecasting.

Developing, blending and using these two critical components of digital marketing is no small task. It will take dedication; real-world practice; and a generous serving of inspiration. But for anyone who wants to master blending art and the science of digital marketing it can be done.