Marketing today means using data and analytics to determine which tactics and strategies have the highest return on investment (ROI) and measuring initiatives that aren't performing to find new strategies to replace them. Data should always be used to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns to ensure you're spending your marketing budget wisely. In addition, companies that use analytics can help increase their return on investments, which directly increases profits, so paying attention to numbers can go a long way in helping your business succeed.
Unfortunately, many people aren't numbers people, and looking at data can be daunting and confusing. However, organizing your data is key to understanding it. With tools like Google Data Studio or marketing analytics platforms, you can start to visualize your data to make better marketing decisions.
Knowing how to use data effectively is necessary for business, so it's time to learn how to use it to improve your marketing strategy. This article will discuss the best ways to use data to improve your marketing efforts and increase your ROI. Let's get started.
Check Your Customer Personas
Data analytics can be used to change the way you approach customers. By collecting information about your current customers, you can better determine the right approaches to market to them based on information such as demographics and interests. In addition, by proactively using data to learn about your customers, you can improve your marketing efforts by determining their pain points and addressing their problems.
By looking at your customer personas, you can let new data shape your understanding of customers. For example, you can look at stats such as age groups and demographics and may even learn your target audience isn't your audience. You can also use data to learn where your customers spend most of their time. For example, using social media analytics, you can figure out which platforms are most popular among your target audience so you can market to them in the right place at the right time.
Improve the Customer Journey
Data can improve the customer journey and ultimately result in higher sales. Understanding the customer journey can help you refine your sales process; luckily, you can use data. A free tool like Google Analytics can help you determine the most popular pages of your website and those that aren't keeping your customers' attention.
Personalization
Data can help you personalize customer experiences online and off. Your customers understand that you gather data on them, especially when they're using your website. You can use that data to discover ways to make the sales process more personalized to help your company build rapport with customers and increase trust.
Personalization is easy in marketing and communications, thanks to digital marketing efforts like email marketing and marketing automation, which can help you send personalized emails based on lists.
Measure ROI Effectively
If you measure your leads and conversions on your website, it's time to start effectively measuring the impact of your marketing efforts. Data allows you to understand how much you're spending on marketing and how much you're earning from it. However, your ROI might not always deal with conversions; instead, you can create milestones and develop performance indicators to help you measure and evaluate different parts of the sales funnel.
A/B Testing
Through A/B testing, you can determine which elements, copy, images, and more are performing best and optimize all of your marketing campaigns based on new information. For example, if you're running a social media advertising campaign, you can use A/B testing to test copy. Once you understand which copy resonates with your audience, you can start to use that copy across all of your marketing campaigns to increase conversions.
A/B testing allows you to test many elements, depending on the medium. For example, you can test button placement on websites or copy and images on ads. Of course, when A/B testing, try to make one change at a time and measure the impact before running another test.
Identify Top Performing Campaigns
Data allows you to identify top-performing campaigns and strategies. If you find that some campaigns are doing poorly and you're losing money, you can choose to optimize those campaigns or stop them altogether. Marketers don't need to invest in all types of marketing; they need to figure out which campaigns work best to reach their goals.
For example, you may find through email marketing insights that your emails have a high ROI while traditional advertising campaigns are less effective and more costly. You can make a conscious, data-driven decision to reduce your spending on traditional marketing campaigns and invest more in digital marketing.
Reduce Marketing Spend
A higher ROI means you're spending the same amount of money for more leads or customers. However, if you're a small business, you might not be able to handle more leads. For example, a small marketing agency can only handle so many clients. In this case, you can use data to effectively reduce your marketing spending without losing the number of leads.
Improve Cross-Strategy Performance
Data provides you with a unique opportunity to continuously improve and test theories, which can be used throughout the rest of your marketing efforts. For example, you can change images on a website and measure their impact. Then, if you notice that customers are responding well to new images, you can start to use those images across your other marketing efforts.
Data Offers Learning Opportunities
In the past, marketers never had an exact way to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. However, with data, you can start using data from your website and other digital marketing campaigns to learn about your customers and enhance your marketing strategy.
Additionally, data allows you to test, continuously learn, and improve upon mistakes or successes. With data and analytics to help you understand everything from website performance to the pain points of customers, you can start to save money on marketing and increase ROI.
Julia Olivas
Julia Olivas graduated from San Francisco State University with her B.A. in Communication Studies. She is a contributing writer at 365businesstips.com where she loves sharing her passion for digital marketing and content creation. Outside of writing, she loves cooking, reading, making art, and her pup Ruby.