Data-driven marketing is the process by which marketers collect, integrate and analyze data to help them strategically plan their future outreach initiatives.
Data-Driven Marketing Campaigns
Here are five things you should be paying attention to in any marketing campaign to maximize your return on investment.
Marketing Attribution
Determine which advertising channels your best leads are coming from. Use this information to optimize future campaigns, increase measurability and maximize your ROI.
Buyer Personas
Learn more about who your customers are and how you can serve them better. Track common characteristics of your best existing customers: income, age, gender, occupation, lifestyle, hobbies, geographic location, purchase habits, etc. Learn what messaging or imagery strikes a chord and what call to action drives the highest results. Use the data you collect to create targeted campaigns with personalized messaging. This data can also help you determine the best time to deliver the message and the best distribution medium.
Engage Prospects
Once you know who your customers are, you can engage them more effectively and more meaningfully. When your customers are able to develop a stronger connection with you – a connection that’s deeper than the typical vendor-customer relationship – your customers will want to hear more from you. In turn, they’ll become more engaged in your brand, excited about your offering and more likely to make future purchases. Perhaps most importantly, loyal customers will tell their friends about your business, helping you earn new business without having spent a dime.
Upsell Current Customers
By tracking the sales data of existing customers, you can pinpoint new sales opportunities for your business. Track industries or groups of customers that frequently succeed by utilizing more than one of your products or services. Use this information to identify opportunities to bundle and sell those products/services together. Likewise, track upgrade or add-on services that benefit specific industries or groups of customers. You can craft your ad messaging intentionally so it resonates with to those people and drives them to act. This type of data is also helpful when it comes to establishing price points, developing new products and creating updates to existing products.
Develop A Strategy
The bottom line is that numbers don’t lie. The data you collect will allow your business to create a strategic marketing plan that will help your company meet its marketing and sales goals. Data-driven marketing gives you the ability to engage your customers more effectively — instead of crafting a generic message, you can craft a custom one that you know will resonate. In addition to helping you choose useful words, data will also help you determine where to place your message and when to place it. By developing a marketing strategy, you can be confident that all of your marketing initiatives will be more successful than ever before.
Time To Start Collecting Data
Getting started with data-driven marketing is relatively straightforward. Data can be collected from virtually anywhere: your CRM system, sales transactions, customer surveys, in-person interactions and even social media mentions. One way to collect data that’s often overlooked is through the phone calls generated by your advertisements. An easy way to obtain data from your phone calls is with a call tracking program. By attaching a unique phone number to each of your ads, call tracking allows you to collect data every time your phone rings. You can learn who is calling, where they’re calling from & which ad drove them to pick up the phone. This information can help you:
- Plan future ad spends (put more money into mediums that generate the most calls)
- Create staffing schedules (schedule more employees to work during the times in which you receive the most calls)
- Determine where to place new locations (if you get a ton of calls from one area, you may want to open up a storefront there.
No matter how you collect your data, don’t waste one more dollar by investing it without having the numbers to support the spend.