How Data Can Help You Maximize Marketing Performance

How Data Can Help You Maximize Marketing Performance

How Data Can Help You Maximize Marketing Performance 1240 520 Eveline Smet

Once upon a time, Excel was all you needed. It was the cornerstone of all business strategies. Companies would rely on past data to formulate seemingly watertight growth plans. Those days are long gone.

If you’re still using spreadsheets alongside your gut feelings to steer your business, it’ll never grow beyond what it is now. Data analytics is the future, and the future is now. Today, the big data and business analytics industry revenue stands at a whopping $186 billion.

That tells you there’s an insatiable demand for these services. A massive amount of data is produced every single day. It has indeed revolutionized the Information Technology field.

Advanced techniques are employed to process data obtained from different sources in different sizes. It helps companies gain new insights on how run to efficiently, find new opportunities and get meaningful information for better decision-making.

Data analytics examines these sets of big data to reveal underlying drivers and patterns. This article takes an in-depth look at how data analytics can help you maximize performance in your company.

Learn Who Your Ideal Customer Is

In the past, gaining information on your customer was based on customer demographics or records of previous sales. This may have been effective at the time but if you think about it, it only painted a small part of the bigger picture.

The insights gained were limited, and hardly enough to formulate any meaningful strategy from it. Today, data analytics provides invaluable insight to both your existing and potential customers. You learn about what section of your website they frequent the most, what their preferred social media channels are and lots more information you would otherwise not have.

It completely changes how businesses look at their customers. It provides you with the means to customize your products/ services based on your customers’ behavior and make more accurate sales forecasts as a result.

Data Analytics Is the Key to Increased Customer Engagement

In today’s fast-paced business world, you need to be able to profile your customers beyond knowing what they like to buy from you. Based on how they interact with your website, you’ll know if there are sections you might need to tweak to their liking.

Besides this, you can use data obtained to learn when and how they like to be contacted (some customers detest promotional phone calls). You get to know about the methods of payment they prefer to use and what products they’re likely to buy so you can make the necessary adjustments to your stock.

All this information will enable you to optimize the level of engagement you have with your customers, adding that personal touch that makes them feel valued.

Leave Your Pennies in the Piggy Bank

Anyone who’s run a marketing campaign knows how it can deplete your budget. However, this wouldn’t be a major concern if you knew that it was working to reach your intended customers and gain new leads as well.

Aside from avoiding the common PPC mistakes, how else can you safeguard against flushing perfectly good dollars down the drain? By using big data analytics to monitor and optimize your digital marketing campaigns, and allocate budgets that ensure you get a high return on investment for the shortest possible marketing run.

Turning the focus inwards, data analytics can promote company growth by optimizing staffing levels which in turn manage operational costs. This is particularly useful for businesses that experience fluctuating demand for their products/services. One could attribute this to the nature of their business or the season.

For instance, a flower business may experience higher than usual demand during Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day. Its labor force, as a result, would need to be flexible. Some staff members may have to work on these days and alternate with others depending on the level of demand and other contributing factors.

Dive Deeper:

Make Smarter Decisions in Digital Marketing

It’s difficult to imagine what life would be, much less what it used to be without all the digital platforms we have today. We spend on average, 135 minutes a day plugged-in which if you think about, translates to more than 15 hours a week online.

If your company isn’t leveraging the digital space to increase your brand awareness and revenue stream, then you’re going to spend a whole lot of time playing catch up with your competition. Data analytics will help you make smarter marketing decisions across the board with regards to which channels to invest in, and how long the marketing campaigns should run for.

Through monitoring, continuous analysis, testing and measurement you can optimize your campaigns to ensure that you are milking that cash cow dry. Many customers do a lot of things online. They make cash transfers, pay bills and purchase numerous goods and services online.

It, therefore, makes perfect sense that this is where the marketing focus should be.

Personalize Your Promotions and Offers in Realtime

Meet Anton. Anton is a 32-year-old single straight man looking for love. His family and friends know this about him and are always helping him find a companion.

A life partner with whom he’ll spend the rest of his life with skipping happily into the sunset. Curiously though, despite the fact that he checked the “looking-for-a-woman” box on the dating website, his matches always end up being handsome young gentlemen who also happen to be looking for love.

His family and friends also seem to have missed that memo when they set him up with their male friends! He’s puzzled since he can’t understand why this keeps happening when he never once intimated that he prefers men over women. As a matter of fact, they’ve always seen him out on dates with ladies.

Ridiculous isn’t it? This is the same thing companies do when they don’t personalize their offers to their customers.

Thanks to big data and machine learning algorithms, your business can present specific promotions to customers in real time based on their specific wants. They are more likely to respond to an ad that has an offer for a product/service they not only use but actually love.

Breakdown Market Research Results

Do you need a comprehensive report on the state of the market? Well, unfortunately using traditional methods won’t cut it and getting the information you seek might cost you an arm and a leg using those out-dated methods. We wouldn’t want that, would we?

You can use free online survey tools to conduct qualitative and quantitative market research much quicker and at substantially lower rates than was the case before. Once you get the results you seek, data analytics will help you make sense of the data and formulate a workable strategy for your business.

Manage Your Brand Reputation

The internet is a sea of information. Keeping track of what people say about your company or brand was an impossible undertaking in the past. This was precarious since one couldn’t control malicious or slanderous information that was put out there.

Thankfully, with big data, companies can monitor the places online where their brand is mentioned. This also spans across social media channels and, websites rendering opinions, reviews and testimonials about their products. They can then use this information to their advantage to improve on their customer experience and provide a stronger brand presence.

Analyze Your Competition

You’re only as good as your greatest competition. It’s no secret then, that to maintain a competitive edge in your industry you need to keep a close eye on what your competition is up to.

With recent strides in technology, companies have the ability to use new social monitoring and analytics tools to collect and analyze competitor data. They can then use it to improve their product and service offerings to achieve a higher customer satisfaction index and marked business growth.

Dive Deeper:

Unmatched Order Fulfilment

At the end of the day, no business strategy is impermeable if your customers don’t get what they want. Placing an order is all fine and dandy but there’s no faster way to lose a customer than failing to keep your promise to them.

Say, for instance, your business deals with couture. You receive an urgent order for an outfit they intend to wear to an A-list event that very evening.

The reason they chose your company to deliver is because of the promise displayed prominently on your company’s website. It reads “We deliver within 4 hours or you get your money back”.

But, what exactly is this promise based on? Is it the past delivery records to customers on that side of town? Or, could it be the current traffic conditions on the highway?

What about the current demand for that particular outfit? Are there enough in stock or did you let your supplier know in advance that you’re running a little low on them?

How many trips to that side of town were made that day? Does it make sense to load up gas in your delivery truck to make your way across town to deliver one order? Does the price of the outfit cover this eventuality?

There’s actually a lot of analysis that should go into that assurance beyond making empty promises that your business can’t keep. Data analytics services take all this information and synthesize it to reveal whether a 4-hour delivery time promise is feasible.

You’re then able to keep your customers satisfied and loyal. Now that makes for a brilliant business strategy.

Reduce What You Spend on Inventory

There’s a delicate balance between having too much or too little inventory. Too much means that you incur additional costs subsequently leaving your money tied up. Too little on the other hand means that you don’t cash-in on potential sales and even worse, lose customers.

For retailers, it can get a bit tricky since they have to pick the right mix of products for a limited amount of storage space. Data analytics eliminates guesswork.

It gets the equilibrium between fast moving goods and those that linger a bit; suppliers who deliver fast versus those that take their time. This way, you find the happy medium to keep your company thriving and customers satisfied.

Make Accurate Forecasts

Predictive data analytics allows companies to scrutinize past sales to see if any patterns emerge. This not only allows you to understand and forecast future demand but internally, it allows you to organize your workforce.

One is also able to have predictive knowledge of when the company revenue dips. You can then come up with a mitigation plan for those periods.

The Right Price Keeps Everybody Happy

All businesses have to please their customer base while maximizing their profit at the same time. After all, that is the primary goal of any company.

Any pricing strategy worth its salt needs to incorporate data analytics to ensure that all products/services are priced based on seasonal variations, past sales records, and market trends. It can go a step further to identify purchasing patterns of individual accounts. If it’s good enough for the Fortune-500 companies, it’s good enough for yours.

Final Thoughts

Data analytics plays a pivotal role in balancing long-term strategy and immediate results. It provides reliable, accessible and insightful data guaranteed to maximize enterprise value regardless of the size of your enterprise.

As the market evolves, these changes must reflect in the way your company works and in the tools it uses to achieve its objectives. Keeping an eye on the behavior of your consumers using big data will inform the potential impact of new approaches and innovation.

Looking for a team of data-driven marketers?

At The Growth Agency, we help businesses achieve their goals by using marketing strategies that are data-driven. 

To see if you qualify for a free growth audit, talk to a TGA strategist today. We can help you create your growth strategy.

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