Using Data to Improve Your Marketing Strategy
Sales and marketing initiatives have begun to flourish significantly since big data became relevant almost twenty years ago. Today, business to business marketers have developed as leaders in data-driven selling, and the ones that use analytics in their marketing projects are usually the ones that show the highest rates of profitability and productivity, with rates that are 5%-6% higher than those not using data.
In order to use data effectively in improving your marketing efforts, you need to make sure that you have the right tools and the right understanding. Without these things, data will just be a useless collection of numbers that represented a wasted opportunity. Here are just some of the ways in which data has helped to improve the concept of marketing.
- Competitive Advantages
One of the greatest things about marketing is driven by data is that it can be used to gain a competitive advantage. Knowing how you rank against competing companies and how you can improve their marketing initiatives is an important power.
Social data is one of the kinds of data that might help you to learn more about competing companies. You can use analytics for social media to see how many retweets a competitor receives, or how many likes or followers they have in comparison to you.
Another form of data that you can use for marketing is search engine analytics. The more you improve your search engine rankings, the more likely you are to overcome your competitors and achieve the top spots on Google.
- Creating Better User Experiences
One thing that digital marketers need to hone in on is user experience. The majority of your readership may end up on your website after clicking on one of your advertisements, seeing your social media posts, or entering into a contest. It is important to make sure that the experience they have after performing the initial call to action is a good one.
Organize your website with the user in mind, and use data from website heat maps to find out which parts of your webpage your audience is clicking on the most. This kind of data can help you to improve customer experience, and increase conversions at the same time.
- Providing better Content for your Audience
Every content marketer should know that content has to be valuable and relevant to readers. If you create content that isn’t capable of serving those two specific purposes, then you’re wasting valuable effort, and time. At first, you might think that content and data are not connected – but using marketing data to come up with your next blog or content piece can be incredibly useful.
You might even choose to use data to analyze the performance of the content that you have already posted. This could help you to understand what types of content are most likely to convert readers into customers, or subscribers.
- Going to Your Audience
Sometimes, an essential part of marketing can be knowing where to find your audience. Marketing data gives businesses the information that they need to know to find the geographic location of their audience, as well as the social networks their audiences use most regularly, and their general device usage. For example, if you create a YouTube video, you can then use YouTube analytics to find out which regions of the world are viewing your video the most, and which devices they are using to access that video.
Knowing information like this can help you to create content that is tailored more towards your most engaged regions. For example, if you find that people find your content most frequently through Twitter, you can make sure that you promote your videos on Twitter more aggressively in the future.
- Creating a Personalized Process for Lead Nurturing
When you have loyal customers, they want to feel as though they are important to you, and that you care about their custom. With data marketing, you can make your lead nurturing process far more personalized. This may mean simply using the name of your customer when you address them in emails, often, addressing someone by their name is much more effective than using a generic greeting.
Conclusion
Every marketer is constantly searching for new ways to enhance the loyalty of their current consumers and improve their user experience. With so many different players in the online marketing game, data can be the most important weapon in your arsenal when it comes to out-ranking your competition and discovering new opportunities.
As the digital landscape that we live in today continues to change, data in marketing allows professionals to treat their customers with the consideration and compassion that they want.
