Successful Marketing Begins With Data Analysis
Consumers today are not as easy to target as they once were. As a result, conventional marketing strategies that focus more on making a sale and less on the actual customer experience just won’t cut it any longer.
Today, customers want to feel seen, heard, and appreciated. They want to know that a brand has their best interest in mind and isn’t simply trying to sell them a product to line their own pockets.
As such, there has been a shift towards more unconventional, guerilla marketing tactics that are more creative and engaging, and prioritizes the customer over the financial transaction. But how exactly are brands coming up with these marketing campaigns that are more appealing to today’s consumers?
The answer is data analysis.
What Is Data Analysis and Why Is It Important?
Data analysis also referred to as big data or data analytics, is the process of gathering and collecting available information (data) to improve and optimize performance. Big data and analytics can be used across all areas of a company, such as human resources, sales, marketing, and finance, to achieve better results overall and ensure company success.
With marketing data analysis, the process is often more specifically concerned with improving the customer experience. By gathering and analyzing data on today’s consumers, you can more easily target your preferred audiences and appeal to their wants and needs, which overall boosts traffic, sales, and ROI.
However, marketing analytics doesn’t just have to focus on the customer. It can also use data on internal factors from within the company, identifying strengths and weaknesses, so you can better position yourself in the market and know what things need improvement and what is already working.
For marketing teams, this is important because it helps you better understand your target audience so you can create more effective campaigns that appeal to your customers. It can also help the company improve overall, which can impact your brand image or reputation — and this is also important from a marketing perspective. If your marketing is good, but your company has a bad reputation or poor public image, this can affect the success of your campaigns. Thus, it is crucial for data to be used to improve your direct marketing efforts and indirectly by helping improve company performance as a whole.
How to Use Data to Improve Your Marketing
There are numerous ways to use data analytics to improve your marketing campaigns and overall performance. It’s all about understanding the needs of your specific company or marketing team and understanding your target customer.
Gathering data without any real purpose or specific goal in mind won’t do you any good. So part of the data analysis process is simply doing research on your own company and internal operations as well as your customer base to get a better idea of what you want or need to achieve. From there, you can decide how to specifically use data analytics to achieve your desired results.
Customer Experience
The customer experience is key to building a successful company. If your customers aren’t satisfied, then customer retention will drop, and if you lose your customers or fail to attract new ones, then you won’t make any sales, and if you don’t make sales, then your company will likely go under.
So one of the most important uses of data analysis for marketing purposes is to improve and personalize the customer experience. By gathering and analyzing data on consumers, you can tailor content and interactions that will more specifically appeal to and satisfy your target audience or customers.
This can include collecting information on demographics, purchase history, and online activities. And you can do this by using various online analytics tools, or you can even install AI-powered speech analytics software to collect data from customer calls.
Social Media Engagement
The majority of today’s consumers use social media to discover and interact with brands. Some even make purchases directly through social media apps. So not only should you be using data analysis to improve the customer experience overall, but you should prioritize using social media analytics to boost social media engagement.
Quality social media experiences create more positive brand experiences overall. Through social media, marketing teams can connect more with customers, drive deeper engagement, and inspire consumers to take action (make a purchase).
So the more you use big data to improve your social media marketing efforts, the better. And there are various tools and resources available to help companies collect and analyze social media metrics.
SEO and Page Rankings
Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for collecting and measuring data today, and it is specifically beneficial for the purpose of SEO and boosting search or page rankings. The content on your website, for example, such as landing pages, blogs, and overall copy, plays a role in how high you rank in search results on Google. And the higher you rank, the more traffic you will drive to your website, which ultimately means more sales.
So it’s crucial for marketing teams to use Google Analytics to get a better understanding of their rankings and online performance. You can then use those results to understand what marketing content needs improving and what is already working well for your company.
Overall Company Performance
As previously mentioned, the performance of a company as a whole can also impact your marketing efforts. So it’s important not only to collect data on external factors, like your customers but on internal factors from within the company as well.
For example, employee performance and productivity levels can affect the customer experience. Thus, by gathering data on internal employee operations and making adjustments or improvements as needed, you can boost customer experiences and satisfaction, which will help your marketing campaigns have greater success.
Gathering internal data can also help the company plan for the future and have more success overall. Thus, data analytics isn’t just about improving your marketing efforts, but about improving all teams and operations so the company will be more likely to succeed and grow going forward.
Final Thoughts
By leveraging big data, marketing teams can better understand today’s consumers, more easily target the right audience, boost engagement and the overall customer experience, and thus, increase sales. And there is no one right way to go about developing the right data analysis strategy. It’s all about doing your research and having a clear idea or goal in mind that addresses your company’s and your target customer’s individual needs.
