Data analytics is today’s number one tool for business planning, strategy and decision-making. Moreover, this technology plays a key role in assisting marketers to identify the most efficient marketing strategies offering the maximum ROI. Here are three strategies that marketers can follow for developing efficient campaigns that make ideal use of their resources.
Business leaders who want to design data analytics initiatives need to clarify the goals for their projects before collecting and analysing data, so that their efforts can be tightly focused and meaningful. Their efforts should yield relevant output.
Analyze Your Audience
Understanding your reader allows you to cater to them and create content that speaks to them and gets them to take action; it enables you to also structure your marketing campaigns to meet their needs, and deliver increased return on investment. Audience analysis is an example of using technology for data analysis to understand customer characteristics, preferences, patterns, and other points of interest so that user interactions may be intensified by increasing engagement, generating more sales opportunities and encouraging customer momentum. Good audience analysis requires collecting relevant data from different sources such as websites, social media, email campaigns and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and interpreting the data through analytical tools. For instance, if your fashion brand is targeting visually attuned millennials, you can achieve greater success by understanding what social platforms they like to use and what type of posts they’re likely to engage with. This enables you to craft content appropriately, giving it an edge to generate more engagement and conversions.
Track Your Campaigns
Data analytics means that marketing departments can measure and evaluate the results, and identify what’s working and what can be improved, so that marketers can make better choices that will help their campaigns succeed, and make every penny count. Through analysis of consumer products and behaviour, businesses can learn the taste of their customers and their preferences, thus making it easier for them to plan and shape more efficient marketing campaigns with higher conversion. If your audience are interested in music events, you might want to engineer a campaign that offers free tickets. Predictive analytics also have the power to predict customer behaviour in order to anticipate needs, which could improve effectiveness of campaigns and business. Marketing campaigns must be tracked to understand success, and this requires that each campaign utilize a URL with unique UTM parameters as well as a Google Analytics tracking code on every piece of marketing material. Because your marketing efforts will evolve over time, regular metrics should be monitored.
Optimize Your Campaigns
Armed with a deep understanding of their customers and the many data points they’ve gathered on them, marketers can craft marketing strategies and convey the right message to customers at the right time to create the most precise view possible of customer journeys from awareness to purchase – an important step towards creating deep brand loyalty and lifetime customers. The first thing to do when applying data analytics to improve your campaign performance is to decide on measurable business goals – for instance, increase in the volume of traffic or revenues to your website, or sales or signups or awareness of your brand. For the measurable goals to work, they need to be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Finally, use data analytics to pinpoint the metrics that are important in furthering your goals, and devise data-driven processes for tracking and measuring these metrics. Testing variations of email subject lines and/or call-to-actions to see what appeals to audiences will help you identify what components of your campaign make it resonate the most with potential customers. Lastly, regularly assess performance of marketing campaigns to make the requisite fixes.
Measure Your Campaigns
When a marketing campaign ends, the first thing to check is whether it met the stated objectives. To do this, identify your marketing objectives and corresponding KPIs. For example, if the purpose of an advertising campaign is to increase order value or sales, or acquire new customers, establish target goals and compare it against benchmark data to see whether they have improved compared with industry norms. This can be done only if you know how to track and combine data from various sources – your website visits, posts on social media, the flow of messages in your email marketing and customer-relation management (CRM) system – to understand who your members are and what they want. You might simply collect customer feedback to use customer data or identify new opportunities through data analysis for new marketing outreach. You can use customer feedback to enhance the marketing message and improve the customer experience. Through personalisation and great customer experience, it’s the cement of marketing strategy that will pave the way for business success.