Organizations small and large can benefit from data. Used effectively, data can help generate business leads, enhance profitability, and drive growth more efficiently and rapidly. Today’s landscape, thanks to better technology, allows companies of all sizes to cross-market to the same customer across platforms in a coordinated effort, and create a more seamless experience with their brand.
Here are some of the online and offline data points and KPIs that can be tracked and utilized to strengthen your marketing ROI:
- Buyer Profiles
- Demographics
- Geo and Location
- Open Rates and CTRs
- Conversion Rates
- Viewability
- Video completions
- Frequency
- Reach
- And more
While these are just some of the available data points that can be tracked and measured, they illustrate the diversity and breadth of information available today. The volume of data alone can seem overwhelming, especially because understanding and making use of it is just one of the many hats worn by business owners. An outside consultant can often serve as a valuable guide to help companies better understand their own client data, recommend additional data assets to supplement and enhance existing information, and maximize performance measurement and marketing ROI.
Knowledge is power
Businesses start out by making assumptions — about who their customer is, what drives them, what their pain points are, and how they buy. Data provides irrefutable evidence about their customers as well as the specific actions that make up their behavior profile.
Advances in technology have made it easier to track more data points, more easily and affordably. For example, web heat maps, which display areas of a web page most frequently scanned by visitors, provide data points on website visitors and their online behavior. This helps inform and improve website design and conversions. Data Enrichment provides enhanced insights that help support data modeling and analytics and a more refined CRM and marketing strategy.
Smart companies use this knowledge to their advantage. By capturing, tracking and combining data points from both internal data and external data sources, they can fine-tune their customer profiles and sales leads to a certainty, across every platform and touchpoint.
Data removes guesswork
The power of your available data is the reduction in the amount of guesswork that has previously been inherent in sales and marketing initiatives. When you’re tracking and analyzing data, you have solid information about how a campaign is performing.
Initially, data validated your hypotheses about your customers; you thought you understand and know your customer and how they buy, and data supports or disproves the theory and provides evidence.
Using the insights the data provides allows companies to have accurate profiles of their customers, including their unique behavior across each platform, and even at various touchpoints along the way. It also allows you to detect when a campaign flatlines, as well as forecast overall trends in changing consumer behavior.
This knowledge, and the ability to combine data from a variety of sources, gives you the advantage of maintaining current, accurate customer profiles and behavior tracking. Guesswork is reduced to a minimum, thereby reducing risks, costly errors and unnecessary expenditures.
Precision targeting capabilities
The amount of available data offers a company the ability to be more precise in its sales and marketing efforts. By knowing your customer in detail, as well as tracking individual buyer behavior, companies can create customized, relevant marketing and attractive offers.
The fact that data can be leveraged for enhancing digital targeting offers distinct advantages. It provides the opportunity to identify and segment customers in real-time to gain consumer insights and reach out to them with personalized messaging via multiple channels, such as email, social and direct mail.
Companies can tailor the buyer experience, as well as their offers, based on what the data tells them about their audience(s). Technology can help put offers in front of prospects, triggered by specific actions taken by the prospect, in real time.
Better ROI, less wasted budget
With tracking pixels and real-time reporting, we can monitor online and email campaigns in real time for the most part. This feedback mechanism can be invaluable for continually optimizing campaign performance.
Using the data to guide your efforts means you are eliminating underperforming campaigns and reducing or eliminating wasted advertising spend. On large campaigns, the ability to tightly control campaigns can mean significant profits, from both higher conversions on successful campaigns, to quickly shutting down spending on low-converting offers or total losers.
The data-driven campaign optimization, lets you know when to scale a performing offer to maximize ROI, and when to reduce spending or stop a campaign to minimize wasted advertising dollars.
Marrying online and offline data insights
Combining data from various sources, especially online and offline, can be a very effective way to harness the full power of data to reach your customers. This reach can be across online, social, paid social, paid search, mobile marketing, email marketing to direct mail.
By cross-referencing information, we can reach customers consistently and simultaneously. Campaigns can reach customers both online and offline, offering consistent branding, multiple touchpoints, increased impact and ROI.
The power of data offers companies the ability to know their customers — today, in real time and in great detail. This intimate and detailed data provides a feedback mechanism from our audience on how to best interact with them to achieve our goals. It therefore offers the ability for companies to evolve with their customers and adapt to changing behaviors and needs.
Customers appreciate a seamless experience. They respond to being shown relevant offers at the right time. Data can help you create this type of superior customer experience, which deepens engagement with your brand and creates brand evangelists. As a result, companies that embrace data and use it to their advantage can turn into lean, mean, profit machines embraced by their customers.
For more information on how to leverage high-quality data in your marketing strategy, contact the Specialists Marketing Services team.
