One of the greatest advantages of doing business in the digital era is a luxury of precise measurement and evaluation of marketing and communications activities. Today, with support of analytics, we have an opportunity to eliminate a large number of “what if” risks in an early stage of planning future campaigns. How?

By analysing and monitoring traces that the Internet users leave in the digital dimension every day, we can obtain precise results and conclusions about how a target group acts online, discover its sentiment towards a specific brand or our competition and thus create messages targeting it in a much better and precise fashion.

Based on its experience and work in this area so far, Digital Element highlights 3 things that will help you bring smarter decisions using digital analytics in future campaigns:

1. Check how SoMe users comment on campaigns, products, messages and competition

Although it is best to learn from one’s own mistakes, sometimes it is much smarter and more cost-effective to learn from the mistakes of others. Check how an audience reacts to messages served by the competition or similar campaigns.

If a brilliant, but tricky idea emerged during a brainstorming session, digital analytics will provide you with a large volume of data about your target group’s conduct on SoMe, thus helping you create highly substantiated hypotheses and significantly reduce risks.

2. Check the tone of a current hot topic

By collecting and analysing a myriad of data, digital analytics may discover a sentiment of SoMe audience towards specific topics, brands or events. We are witnesses of the use of attractive, instant viral content for the benefit of brands themselves (Game of Thrones, FaceApp, 10 Year Challenge). If you want to make such a step, use the data to master what it is that you want to leverage, what the audience reacts to and how and reach a conclusion about the best way to address it and maximise gains for your brand.

3. Check how/whether media reported on topics similar to the one of your future campaign

If your future campaign includes PR activities or you simply want to get additional information and research a topic – digital analytics will significantly reduce your workload. Search in detail the media coverage of a topic you need and be one step ahead in planning your marketing activity.

And finally, in addition to huge support in planning before a campaign launch, digital analytics also enables you to monitor an ongoing campaign and evaluate and analyse it in detail upon its completion.

Measuring success and monitoring reactions of an audience enables us more than ever to react promptly in case of a crisis and to listen carefully to a pulse of a target group, thus gaining a deep insight in it.

And therefore, if you want smarter and better-devised campaigns in the future – digital analytics can be your loyal companion in that process, provided you use it adequately.