Using Data to Create Marketing Campaigns

28 Mar Using Data to Create Marketing Campaigns

Data is more important to marketing campaigns than ever before. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, your customers now demand and even expect personalized marketing messaging that appeal to their unique, specific needs. No longer can marketing teams make campaign decisions based on hunches or guesses.

The word data may seem daunting and complicated. However, knowing which data to analyze, how to analyze it and how to implement it into one’s marketing campaign can make the handling and interpretation of data more manageable.

What Data to Look At

Whether it’s your first marketing campaign or the first time you’re using data in your campaign, it can be intimidating in figuring out what data to focus on. It can also be frustrating in trying to measure or interpret your data. Since each business is different in its industry, targeted audience and marketing strategies, goals and objectives, it is important to keep your company’s goals, mission and culture at the forefront when discerning which data metrics to analyze.

To help you get started, the following data metrics are good, foundational statistics to gather and analyze:

• Audience demographics and behaviors (especially online activity)
• Email open, click-through and bounce rates
• Interaction with your brand’s social media pages
• On-page website interaction
• Conversion rate
• Number of leads and the needs of prospects at each stage of the sales and marketing funnels
• Number of “dead” leads

Before planning your marketing campaign, it helps to first create personas that represent the ideal person in each of your targeted audiences. As prospects progress through the marketing and sales funnels, they will require different messaging and communication mediums. A/B testing, surveys, interviews and focus groups are great ideas to get feedback from customers about how your company can improve on its marketing campaign outreach.

Keeping an eye on certain patterns and trends in your audience behavior such as the times and days they tend to open email, visit your website or interact on your company’s social media pages, the type of content that gets their attention and causes them to click to and stay on a page or interact on social media and the type of social media platforms your audience are active on can give your marketing team a better idea of when and what to post and where to post to get the best response and interaction.

Marketing Campaign Elements

Whether it’s your first marketing campaign or you’re in need of a refresher, below are the critical elements you need for a successful marketing campaign:

• A targeted audience(s)
• A hefty contact list
• Value proposition
• Call-to-action
• Appropriate message delivery
• Follow-up

For a successful marketing campaign you need to start off with a clear understanding of who your target audience is. During the course of the campaign, it isn’t uncommon for changes to be made as you analyze your data. After a campaign is over, it is important to follow-up and look at data in the form of analytics. Look at what went well as well as the areas where improvements can be made.

Putting the Two Together

Having a good idea of what data and metrics to look at before, during and after implementing your marketing campaign and double-checking you have all the elements of a successful marketing campaign elements, it’s now time to put the two together.

As mentioned earlier, gone are the days where you can send out mass emails using a generic template at a time that is convenient for you. More marketing is also going online, so if you’re relying heavily on print marketing elements like brochures and newsletters, you may need to diversify your marketing methods (unless print media is what elicits the best response from your targeted audiences). A marketing qualified lead at the beginning of your sales funnel should not get the same messaging and information delivered the same way as a lead near the bottom of the funnel.

The goal of the marketing campaign is to bring about brand awareness and authority. When leads learn about your company, you should make an effort to make them progress through the marketing funnel to be handed off to a salesperson to walk them down the proverbial sales funnel.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Whether you’re selling a product or service to consumers or businesses, take time to put yourself into their shoes. What are their needs and wants? What do they like or find interesting? What are their pain points? Learn about your targeted audiences and how your company can solve their problems and meet their needs. Afterwards, come up with a couple fictional buyer personas.

Do keyword research and market research beforehand. Your marketing campaign will entail emails and social media to draw attention to your brand and your brand’s website. This is where site optimization comes in. Search engine optimization is a series of tactics that increase your website’s online visibility by getting search engines to rank it high in search results. The higher the ranking, the greater the visibility and more clicks to the website. Before you dig deep into SEO, the first thing to do is research the keywords you want your website to rank for.

Before you start your marketing campaign, conduct some market research on your targeted audience and what your competitors are doing.

Choose your timing carefully. Your audience data as well as data from interactions with your website and your email blasts can open your eyes to the peak time to send emails and post something on social media. The same data can let you know which message delivery method works for your different audiences. You’ll also be informed as to the type and style of website, blog, email, print and video content best resonates with your audience.

Diversify your content. A blog post will have different content, structure and feel than website content or a newsletter. Each prospect is along the same sales funnel, but at different layers. As a result, they will have a different mindset, questions and concerns. The same content, therefore isn’t sent out to someone just entering the sales funnel and someone at the end of the buyers journey, just about to make a sale. Your prospects and customer at both ends of the email marketing funnel require unique, distinctly separate messaging

Utilize marketing automation software. Marketing automation software  can help you work smarter and more efficiently in leading prospects through your email marketing funnel. Whether it’s the first email or a follow-up email, the timing and content need to be appropriate to where the prospect is in the funnel. Marketing automation can organize and segment your prospects and can be set up using a variety of templates. Each template can feature different content and collateral (i.e. newsletter vs. ad vs. social media contest) to be sent out automatically to different prospects along the email marketing funnel. Many marketing automation software also enables you to adjust the frequency of your emails and can schedule when emails are sent. Most social media channels also have a scheduling feature so you can be sure to send your messaging to your audience at a time they will most likely see it.

Conduct follow-up with the intention to increase loyal customers. A sale is great. Repeated sales from the same loyal customer is even better. Don’t stop when the sale is all said and done. Follow-up with the customer and incentivize them to join a loyalty program. Loyal customers will be the ones you can count on to make repeat purchases as well as be your brand ambassadors.

A marketing campaign can bring about increased brand awareness and visibility. Successful marketing campaigns guide a marketing qualified lead through the marketing and sales funnels. To start one’s marketing campaign off on the right foot, it helps to know what data to analyze. Data backed marketing strategies and campaigns have become the new norm and standard as the customer, not the company is becoming more powerful in the purchasing equation. Knowing your audience, having a call to action and great follow-up are a few essential components of a great marketing campaign. Using data to get a clear picture of your audience and their behaviors are among the most essential, fundamental pieces of data to have for marketing purposes. Using data to guide your marketing campaigns will make them more likely to succeed.

At Aktify, we utilize automated and real sales techniques to help the marketing campaigns of our clients succeed by helping them revive their “dead” leads. To learn how we can help your business, please contact us today.