Being a data-driven marketer takes more than just constant analysis. The real goal is to find insights that empower new ideas and higher ROI. If you can't use your own data effectively, you’re likely to drop well behind competitors in just a few years.
Big data is probably the most useful resource you have for developing a productive marketing machine. Here's how big data can drive your marketing campaigns to greater success.
Understand Your Customers
Data analysis lets you identify and segment your target audience to focus your marketing where it matters. Gathering and analyzing information on your audience allows you to determine their ages, ethnicity, income, education, geographical location, and much more. You're able to learn who your best customers are and discover the best means of reaching them.
For every marketing segment you need to determine what best engages their interest and leads to a purchase decision, whether you use the data for social media, video, or the layout of your online store. This way you're consistently marketing just the right content to each group over the channels they prefer.
Establish a Pricing Strategy
Proper research can help you to determine optimal pricing strategies. Regardless of how many leads your marketing produces, if consumers feel that your prices are too high, they'll move on. If prices are too low, you're undermining your own profitability and value as a brand.
You can use your own data to explore variations of price and consequent customer reactions. This helps you to sustain healthy profit margins without pricing yourself out of the market. Your prices must benefit you as well as your customers.
You can break down data to discover the highest profit margins by area, by channel, or by product. You can capitalize on high-profit items while eliminating low-profit product lines. Retailers utilizing big data could improve margins by as much as 60 percent.
Perfect Your Message
A primary reason that marketing campaigns fail is that the message doesn't connect with customers. Big data and analytics will help you to determine which messages are currently having the best impact.
Every bit of advertising content can be tailored to stimulate market-specific interest. Bringing the focus to more effective advertising will also help you to avoid unproductive marketing and raise your leads and ROI. In addition to discovering what content and formats appeal to customers, you can learn about the factors that turn leads into purchasers.
Payment systems, emails, website navigation, and even the size, font, and color of buttons can all be factors that compel customers deeper into the customer journey, or cause them to abandon it. Providing the best possible customer experience will keep them coming back.
Cohesive Campaigns
All of these factors must be rolled into each campaign to consistently achieve good results. But these ideas only begin to reveal what's possible with big data. The new generation of analytics tools are designed for particular needs, and to be flexible but simple tools even novices can learn quickly.
Increasingly, these are only part of big data solutions that bind everything together into one comprehensive platform. This can include tools for story-telling and powerful visualizations, tracking performance metrics, and linking to related business systems such as CRM data through marketing dashboards.
In effect, you can have closed-loop marketing where every minute and every dollar is tied into your campaigns for a clear and cohesive picture of the ROI you get with your current marketing strategies.
Big data allows you to track and store information on how your efforts affect every part of the customer experience. You get a precise picture of where your revenue comes from and insights on creating more.