Using data is an amazing way to improve the performance of your marketing efforts. We discuss how you can start using it to make successful marketing decisions in your business.
Analysing data probably isn’t one of the first things that springs to mind when you’re thinking about your marketing strategy. But it really should be!
You can gain an amazing amount of insight from data, both from your own customers and wider industry research.
I love a bit of data crunching, so thought I’d share 7 simple ways that you can use data to maximise your marketing and get better results.
Identify customer behaviour
Getting into the minds of your customers is a lot easier when you have data at your disposal.
Useful data is readily available to you on pretty much every digital marketing platform, and most are quite user-friendly. It’s amazing what you can learn from the analytics on your business social media pages, on your website, and through software such as email marketing platforms.
Tip: If you’re sharing links to your website, you can use URL tracking codes to easily identify exactly where your traffic is coming from and how users interact with your site when they arrive. Collecting qualitative data through surveys and forms is super useful too.
Make a content plan
Once you’ve identified how your customers act, why they’re your customers and what they like about your brand you can start to create content around this.
Telling your brand story with engaging, relevant content won’t always get you ‘quick wins’, but when you create a valuable piece of content it can carry on working for you and drive free, organic traffic to your website for years to come.
Tip: This is an ongoing process. So when you’ve started implementing your content plan, be sure to look at whether or not people are engaging in the way that you want them to. If they’re not, use the data that’s available to change tactics.
Improve your website design
There are so many factors to think about when it comes to creating a website that looks great and performs well. But (surprise, surprise!) data can help you to test what works best and optimise your website design to reflect this.
If you don’t have a lot of web traffic, spend a small amount of money driving your target customers to your website so you’ve got enough data to act upon.
Tip: Setting up landing pages that are designed differently but provide the same information is one simple way to test which one converts best.
Optimise your marketing channels
Whatever the marketing channel, use data to understand if it’s helping achieve your goals.
Most marketing channels offer data dashboards that allows you to easily find top-level stats. So there really is no excuse not to be looking at this data!
Tip: Try out your content plan for a while and once you’ve started to gather enough data to know that you’re not looking at anomalies or one-offs, you can start to put more effort into the types of content that are getting the results you’re looking for.
Use automation and personalisation
Mapping out your customer journey will really help with this one. In fact I’d say it’s quite essential!
Automation and personalisation can be especially effective when it comes to emails. A well-timed email with the right messaging isn’t that hard to achieve if you use all of the information available to you.
For example, if you have a shop and a person buys a birthday card from you at the same time every year, a helpful reminder email a couple of days before will make sure they don’t forget. If you know the card that they buy is for their mum, you can personalise the email messaging to make it even more relevant to their needs.
Monitor ROI
How many people convert when you send that well-timed email? Does it increase the chances of repeat business? You’d think so, but you won’t know for sure unless you monitor the results.
If you spend time and money promoting an offer, do people redeem it? Are you still making a good profit? How much does it cost overall to get someone to make that purchase from your online shop?
All of these are questions you need to be asking. Analytics can help you work out the percentage of users making purchases and the average value of those. You can then use this to work out your return on investment in order to budget for future campaigns.
Learn from mistakes (and triumphs!)
And finally… You can’t be absolutely certain that something’s going to work if you’ve never tried it before.
This can be a bit of a scary thought when you’re committing to spending time and money on a campaign. But if you flip it on its head, your campaign might also be a huge success – nobody ever got anywhere without taking risks after all!
If your campaign doesn’t succeed, you’ll have data available to help you work out why. If it is, you’ll know exactly what is was that resonated with your audience and can try to replicate this across your other campaigns.
The important message here is to measure and build on your marketing efforts every time.
Get more from your marketing
We love talking data! If you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to marketing your business, let’s have a chat about organising the chaos.