Featured article by Calvin Paige, Independent Technology Author
Data is one of the key resources that marketers can use to their advantage. By collecting, organizing and analyzing the data you have and using that to plan for the future, your outcome can be better. This article highlights some of the key benefits of data when making marketing decisions.
Audience Segmentation and Message Personalization
One of the key benefits of data is that it can help in segmenting your audience based on demographics and interests. When you segment your customers, you can then create a campaign for each segment based on their shared characteristics. Such marketing efforts are much more likely to bear fruit compared to when you treat all your customers as one group. Even if you are selling one product to all people, your group will contain some who have bought the product a couple of times and others who are yet to make their first purchase. You should not be sending the same email to these two customers. One needs nurturing to convert, whereas the other needs some reminders and cool tips to keep them engaged and loyal.
Identify Key Customer Sources
Data can tell you where most of your customers are coming from. If you are marketing on YouTube, via email, and through Facebook but you only get customers from Facebook, this can be a clear indication that Facebook is where most of your audience hangs out. As a result, you may have to invest more in Facebook marketing. Also, it can be an indication that you are not doing things right on YouTube and email. Thus, before you give up on the other two, you can try changing your strategies. You may also want to study your target audience again to see if they are likely to be using those channels.
You will never identify the best channels if you don’t review the data you have. To make your work easier when analyzing data from different channels, consider making use of marketing dashboard software that will give you a summary of all your traffic sources.
Find New Opportunities
Analyzing a business’s data and market data can improve your marketing by highlighting new opportunities you have never paid attention to before. This could be a channel that is bringing you customers or a study that reveals how consumer preferences are likely to change in the near future. When you have that data, you can have a strategy that will tap into the identified opportunity.
Identify the Weaknesses
Another good thing about data is that it can show you exactly where your weakness is. For instance, if all your prospects from social media are bouncing back, this shows that something is wrong with your landing pages. Also, if you have a huge mailing list, but nobody reads your emails, this is a sign that maybe you need to work on your subject lines, change your emailing frequency or ask subscribers to update their preferences.
When collecting and analyzing data, ensure you have the right tools. Without these, your data may be incomplete and these can lead to wrong decision making.
