Using Customer Data
Using customer data to inform marketing decisions, aka “data-driven marketing,” can make or break your business. With a clear understanding of collecting and analyzing customer data, you’re well-equipped to generate actionable marketing insights. Plus, you can utilize these insights to help you make the best marketing decisions faster than ever before.
Here are five tips to help you use data for marketing based on your customer’s activities.
1. Retrieve Customer Data from Multiple Sources
Get all the customer data you can eat. To do so, you first need to figure out what data you want. This action requires you to consider how you’ll use the data to improve your marketing. Next, establish a time frame for data collection. Or, you can perform ongoing customer data collection.
From here, determine how you’ll retrieve customer data. You can then collect data via customer surveys, social media, and other sources. Multiple sources of data will improve the quality of your insights.
Finally, you can transform this data into insights you can use to bolster your marketing. When you have multiple sources of data on customers or visitors to a website, you can more accurately make predictions about who to target.
2. Streamline Your Customer Data
Develop and refine your data collection and analysis processes. Learn the ins and outs of business analytics, as this allows you to determine which customer data collection and analysis processes the best suit your company. Hiring a marketing specialist or another business analytics professional may even be beneficial to support your customer data efforts.
Furthermore, ensure your data is high quality. Your data should illustrate the customer’s mindset and help you figure out the best ways to engage with your clientele. Thus, it must come from credible sources. It must also empower you to deliver personalized content that consistently hits the mark with your target audience.
3. Establish Goals
Encourage your marketing and sales teams to work together to create custom data collection and analysis goals. Both teams can collaboratively define what constitutes a lead. Then, they can decide how to collect and analyze customer data at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Leverage a wide range of key performance indicators (KPIs), too. KPIs like marketing campaign responses and leads created from a campaign show how customers engage with your brand. And you can then explore ways to meet or surpass your customers’ expectations.
4. Develop Customer Personas
Utilize data to create customer personas that define your target audience and how you want to engage with it. You may have a good idea of how your company wants to connect with an audience. Meanwhile, you can make a plan to collect data from your current customers. Next, you can use this information to determine ways to keep your existing clients happy. Moreover, you can discover ways to engage with new audiences.
As you collect customer data, search for patterns within it. You may find specific demographics prefer your company’s products and services over others. Over time, you can ensure your company delivers timely, relevant, and engaging content that has results across various audiences.
5. Leverage the Right Tools
Evaluate various data collection and analysis tools. Ideally, you should find tools that can support your business for many years to come. These tools should make it easy to collect and assess data. They should provide you with the ability to retrieve data from several sources and quickly capture insights from them.
Before you choose data collection and analysis tools, consider the implementation process. If these tools work in conjunction with your company’s existing data collection and analysis methods, you can hit the ground running with them.
The Bottom Line on Using Customer Data for Marketing
Your marketing remains a work in progress. Thanks to multiple ways to access customer data, you can find a range of approaches to improve your marketing. And you can utilize this data to transform your marketing into a competitive differentiator for your business.
Use data to help you understand your target and their pain points. Keep in mind, the trick is converting data into insights and insights into action.
This is a guest post by Amanda Winstead, a Zillenial who can’t be reached via cable ads. Amanda is a writer focusing on many topics including technology and digital marketing. Along with writing she enjoys traveling, reading, working out, and going to concerts. If you want to follow her writing journey, or even just say hi you can find her on Twitter.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
