Your company has to market in order to grow business. In fact, you probably need to be marketing just to stay in business considering how competitive the current economy is. If you’re not using your company’s current data for marketing efforts, then you need to start. Even if you’re already doing it, you need to find ways to do it better. Knowing the right marketing hacks for better usage of your company data is a big step in the right direction. Actually using those hacks is an even better step towards more profit and success.
7 Marketing Hacks Using Customer Data
Customer data can be a gold mine, but that only happens if you dig into it right. Not sure where to get started? Consider these seven marketing hacks for the customer data your company collects:
- Product Optimization: One thing customer data is really primed for is creating a great user experience. Your company can learn customer pain points by analyzing user feedback. Do this to improve not just products and services but your entire customer service approach.
- Improved Customer Experience: Your data shouldn’t just lead to improved products or services. Your entire customer experience should be upgraded as a result of using the information that you have available. Reviews and feedback are probably your biggest single source of customer data, so use them.
- Customized Offers: Customer data lets you see the forest and the trees. Look over your clients to see who might respond to special promotions and offers based on their personal preferences. Just one algorithm can boost your conversion rate.
- Individual Marketing: While customer data can help you run broad marketing campaigns, you can also run personal marketing efforts specific to a particular email address. This is closely related to customized offers, but those might be one-offs while this is a more sustained effort. This is particularly useful for marketing affiliate products.
- Future Predictions: Predictive analysis is possible through customer data. Find user behavior patterns, and you can target them in response. This can be crucial in seeing not just who might be buying particular products but also how they’re using them.
- Loyalty and Rewards: Loyalty rewards programs generally account for more than 30% of all repeat business a company gets. You need to know who is involved with this, and you also need to see who might benefit from it. Make the most of this part of your customer base.
- Better Content Marketing: When you identify the pain points in your audience, you can better create content that will prove valuable and useful to them. Offering answers and information to them free of charge builds trust and loyalty. Likewise, authoritative status online has tremendous SEO perks with search engines that lead to higher rankings and traffic. Content marketing is complicated that’s why you should consider hiring an international SEO consultancy to help with the right content strategy.
Utilize an MMM
A media mix model is something to try if you haven’t before. These models have been in use for multiple decades. They’re prevalent in B2C marketing but still have room for growth in B2B marketing.
Using an MMM approach can yield serious benefits for your marketing efforts. They’re very powerful in terms of planning. However, they also help out considerably with calculating ROI and allocating your budget.
Some modern MMMs are built on combinations of Tableau and Python. Using Python allows for automated tasking of data collection and organization, whereas Tableau is a visualization tool that lets you see marketing results on a live dashboard. This one-two punch helps your company see if a particular data model yields opportunities for signals and optimization.
When you find windows of opportunity, thanks to the data, that same information can also show you the way forward. Generate more revenue from current clients, and also attract new ones. For that matter, you can optimize your current products and services in ways that make more money off of everyone involved.
Building Your Better Mix
Taking a statistical approach to a mixed media model can be effective, but only if you do it right. If you need some ideas on how to approach this, then Forbes is a good place to look. It’s not always fun, but it’s certainly worth it.
Make sure your data is accurate and reliable. If the precision isn’t there, then productivity simply won’t follow. Getting statistics from multiple sources can help you mitigate the potential downside of one bad input.
Be consistent in your approach. Marketing budgets can sometimes be the first thing to get slashed in a tight quarter. A steady hand is crucial for effective results over time.
Know how much to invest in your overall marketing efforts so you have enough resources free for an MMM approach. If you are in a B2B sector, then anywhere from 2% to 5% of your overall revenue should be headed into marketing efforts. Given the broader complexity and number of channels you have to hit for B2C marketing, that should be closer to 5% to 10%.
How many employees you have might also impact your total marketing spend. If you have 19 or fewer employees, then your marketing costs might be as high as $30,000 each year, but it could double that for having from 20 up to 49 professionals on your payroll. Businesses with 50 employees or more are likely to be spending at least $100,000 each year on their marketing efforts.
Making the Most of Things
If your company doesn’t currently have customer data, then start acquiring it in an ethical and legal fashion. Then, start using it. Find new features and areas of potential expansion, give your loyalty rewards and marketing efforts a tune-up, and get better at identifying your target audience and their pain points. So much as you make sure you get and use customer data, make sure you aren’t using just one source. Data diversification is what paints a pure picture for your business so you can do things better than ever.
