You can find data almost anywhere. Social media pages to understand your engagement, Google Analytics to understand you number of website visitors and what kind of devices they are using, marketing automation platforms to understand email open rates and content download rates, the list goes on. With so much data available at our fingertips, how do we know which data points are the most important and how can use them to make impactful marketing decisions? Data driven marketing decisions can increase the ROI on your marketing efforts and provide better results because you're making decisions that are backed behind real data! Here are some ways you can use data to drive your marketing decisions.
Use Data to Understand Where You’re Getting the Most ROI
Oftentimes marketing has limited budgets and resources so it’s important to understand where you are getting the most value out of your spending and resources. What kinds of content gets the most traction and visibility on the website? Which digital advertising channels provide the most leads that turn into actual opportunities? When you’re able to understand which marketing initiatives have the best ROI, you’re able to ensure your resources are using their time most efficiently on those initiatives and your marketing dollars are driving business goals. It's also beneficial to have these data points so if you have MDF to leverage you can use them on high performing tactics.
Gain Insight to Your Customer and Their Behavior
One of the biggest benefits of leveraging data to drive marketing decisions is that you have a better understanding of who your customer is. You can discover what channels they are active on, what kind of content they like to consume and who the decision-makers are. All of these data points are relevant when it comes to your buyer personas and how both marketing and sales interacts with these consumers as they are moving through the decision making process. The more places you can pull the data from the better because each data point can reveal more and more about your customer and their unique behavior.
Get a Better Understanding of the Sales Process
Even though marketing and sales are usually clumped together, the two departments can often be siloed. By working with sales to understand which channels produce the highest number of deals, what kind so content is most used during the sales process, and who the decision-makers are in different industries, you can get a better idea of what the full customer journey looks like. With a full view of your consumer, you are able to create content that is most beneficial through the sales process and better understand the value your solutions bring to their organization. If you leverage a marketing automation tool or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, you can pull many of these data points from those databases.
Discover New Opportunities
Data can be incredibly helpful in discovering new opportunities that you might not have thought about or even overlooked. If you see there are many website visitors coming from a specific geographical market, it could be a great opportunity to penetrate that market with a campaign. If you see a commonality among followers that interact with a specific kind of social media content, it might be good idea to target them with a content specific campaign. By combing through your data you can discover new audiences, markets, and buyer personas that weren’t even on your radar.
Like technology, marketing is constantly evolving and in many cases you are at the mercy of algorithm changes. So be sure to test out new channels and new messaging to see what works best for your organization and be able to pivot when necessary. In some cases you might not even have the data points you need so if that is the case, you'll definitely want to get buy-in from your leadership team because the only way to get data you're missing is through things like A/B testing and trial and error. That way you can see what works well and avoid what doesn’t.
