Use Data-Driven Marketing to Quickly Increase Performance – Here’s How!
So, what has changed about data that will change the way smart companies approach sales and marketing? The simple answer is almost everything. Not only the sheer amount of data, but the relative ease in which we can put it to work for us.
Essentially, if you have a sales and marketing department and aren’t seriously using data to your advantage there are problems on the horizon. One of the biggest reasons for this is data-driven marketing is not just for the big boys anymore. Even the smallest companies now have access to data and BI (business intelligence) tools that were once reserved for the Fortune 500.
Let’s take a quick look at the five ways data will change your marketing and then we will break each one down and explain how to put these initiatives to work for your organization.
- Relevant Content
- Segmented Messaging
- Retargeting
- Optimized ROI
- Tracking
1. Relevant Content
Content marketing has shown itself to be very effective in the B2B sector – but only if you are delivering truly valuable content that your readers are interested in. So, how do you know what content that is?
Figure out what people on social media are engaging with. Prior to ever creating a whitepaper, infographic, video or blog for our clients, we look at what is important to the readers. A powerful and easy to use tool for this is Feedly (www.feedly.com). It is free and allows you to set up search filters so news will be delivered to you daily (and not in your email). You will be able to see how many people engaged in each topic. We use a more robust tool (www.ahrefs.com) but to start off with something like Feedly will serve you well.
Do yourself a favor and make sure the content you are creating is valuable – then make sure to repurpose it. Put it on your blog, post it on LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter at the very least.
2. Segmented Messaging
A sure way to see a significant increase in your messaging it to segment your audience. For example, let’s say you are a commercial insurance company. Manufacturers are going to be interested in different topics than technology companies. Don’t turn-off a great audience by trying to speak the same way to everyone.
There are a few ways to accomplish this. First, as long as you know the name and company of a prospect you can “enrich” your data by adding 50 plus additional attributes. There are a number of data aggregators that offer this. Another great method is to use your marketing automation platform to apply “tags” when website visitors go to different pages on your site. This will allow you to segment your email marketing. Our clients often see an immediate bump in opens and click-throughs when we segment their messaging.
3. Retargeting
Everyone has experienced retargeting – some might not know what it is called. Think about looking at a new golf club on Amazon and then going to Facebook only to see that exact club advertised to you – that’s it. Retargeting at its finest.
The more traditional way of retargeting to people is to drop a code snippet on our site. When someone visits your site you “cookie them”. This cookie allows you to “retarget” the individual on Facebook and all across the internet. It is very effective for B2B companies.
A newer method of retargeting is to use correlation methods to determine your target audiences cookie. Let’s say you have a list of 5,000 emails. Based on our past experience, we can typically identify about 70% of those peoples cookies using this method. This allows our clients to market to a highly targeted list. Those being targeted think you are everywhere – and you are – everywhere they are.
4. Optimized ROI
B2B marketers should know the Return on Investment (ROI) for every digital marketing dollar spent. Using data to track impressions, click-throughs, site-conversions and CPA’s (cost per acquisition) puts you in the driver’s seat in terms of controlling your success.
We often get prospects saying digital marketing just doesn’t work. Digital marketing is not a “set and forget” proposition. Using data for A/B splits and multi-variant testing means you can find that perfect message cost effectively. Only then do you increase your marketing spend. In any marketing campaign, there are at least 4-6 variables to test and optimize. You can imagine what this does to your ROI – optimizing data changes the way marketing is done.
5. Tracking
Your ability to pull all your digital marketing efforts into an analytics platform and make changes in near real-time can be very empowering. Tools that once cost thousands a month are now either free or available for 10 bucks a month. A great example is Microsoft’s Power BI Tool (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/). Once you learn your way around your Dashboards, everything you can track will amaze you.
They say you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Tracking the data and understanding exactly what is working and what isn’t will have a powerful impact on your marketing and bottom-line.
B2B marketing tools have never been more powerful. That is the good news. The bad news is your (smart) competition is probably already using them to their advantage.
If you’d like to learn more about ways you can quickly impact your sales and marketing efforts, sign up for a free 20-minute consultation – CLICK HERE.