As today’s marketing industry becomes more metrics-driven and the hype around big data grows, businesses are approaching their marketing strategies in ways that are different than before. It is no longer enough to measure sessions and conversions, discover anomalies and explain them in meaningful ways.

As a marketer, you are now required to gain a deeper understanding of user intentions. These include the paths users take on the website, how to do advanced segmentation, how to correlate data outside of Google Analytics, and so on.

To answer these complex questions, you need to get your hands on some of that big data – and you need to do it fast. Here are three tips that can help you make sense of your data while staying ahead of the curve.

Make Sense of Your Data

Big data is already contributing to marketing and sales strategies in various ways. These ways include allowing higher differentiation for pricing strategies, attaining customer responsiveness and gaining customer insights, improving customer relationships, and more.

But what to do with all of this data? If you’re dealing with massive amounts of complex data and have no way of converting it into action then the time and effort was wasted. This challenge introduces the need for advanced and fine-tuned web analytics and BI methods coupled with technologies to analyze the customer journey.

Make Sense of the Space

The challenges of advanced web analytics are accompanied by unanticipated changes in the industry. Marketing professionals are required to learn fast overcoming learning curves at different levels as additional complexities are introduced and different levels of analysis are required to answer burning business questions.

Businesses need a set of tools to provide a deeper understanding of customer behavior, for example, web analytics dashboards, or customer experience, session recording, heatmap, and BI tools. Getting to know these new technological areas is crucial in order to gain a deeper understanding of user behavior and improving business results.

While you’re expected to gain expertise on these technologies and toolsets, you also need to become more familiar with the entire space of web analytics, customer experience, BI, and big data. You need to get a feel for the different technologies and methodologies, which to choose, and how to utilize them correctly.

CoolaData is one of the companies that area making efforts to analyze, unify, and share all your data at a single place. The company very well understands the importance of collecting information across multiple channels. They help your business to connect or upload data from any source the customers tries to share with you. The company lets you connect or upload data from any source. Its algorithms then unifies all its data to get a complete picture of your company’s performance and your customers.

The team at CoolaData – maker of an end-to-end big data behavioral analytics platform – took on a project to make the available content about web analytics and BI for digital marketing more accessible. They built the Web Analytics & BI Wiki – the first knowledge hub that collects all the relevant information on the subject and organizes it into a meaningful structure.

Additionally, there are several additional resources that can help you get a better grasp on BI and big data concepts, for example, IBM’s Big Data University provides free learning paths for big data, data science, and even Hadoop fundamentals and programming.

Secure Your Data

There is no doubt that deepening the knowledge about your users and acquiring expertise in new and additional areas is key to reaching your business goals. But don’t get so caught up in trends that you lose track of data security.

In 2016, new rules and regulations concerning data privacy have forced companies to put data privacy front and center, for example, enforcing data security policies and ensuring better workflow management.

Additional security-related issues should be addressed to prevent data breaches or other security vulnerabilities. Specifically, when dealing with web analytics data, you should be aware of which data is captured, how long the data is retained, who is authorized to access the data, and how to monitor and audit the data.

At an even broader scale, a solid network is key to protecting the systems running behind the scenes, protecting your users’ data. As not to lose sight of what’s happening outside your system, make sure to monitor and analyze your gateways with network monitoring, perform proper network testing, and keep track of your performance. This will also help you understand your users’ traffic patterns and habits.

The Bottom Line

When planning and managing your marketing strategy, it’s important to take into account the latest trends, tools and technologies. So where do you begin? Do you drill deep into a specific technological area? Keep track of industry trends? Learn a new tool?

The answer is balance. As you deepen your knowledge of user patterns and intent, make sure you have all the information to choose the right tools and technologies. Deepen your knowledge of basic concepts while learning about the newest trends.

The knowledge you accumulate will not only guide crucial marketing decisions, but will also define how you handle your marketing strategy on a daily basis. You never know when your research of a specific trend or technology might pay off, leading you to that one tweak that will make your website stand out from the competition.