We live in a data-driven world these days. Data is being used for everything for the purposes of helping companies make more informed decisions. Once you've set your marketing goals, you can start using data to help you achieve those goals.
But how can you go about using data for the benefit of your company?
This guide will show you some of the ways in which you can use data. A thorough understanding of data will help you to grow your revenue, increase the number of customers you have, and expand your company.
1. Measure Your ROI from Content Marketing
The driving force of every marketing platform is content marketing. Without it, you'll never engage your customers or convince people to keep checking back. And 88% of companies are using it. You need to make sure your ROI is positive so you're aware of whether you're doing things right.
The value of content marketing is in organic search because this is where you'll gain most of your traffic. Second is on social media, where you'll use metrics such as engagement to determine whether things are working, or not working, whichever the case may be.
So how do you use data to figure out the ROI of content?
You do this through measuring the quantity and quality of inbound links. The more links you get and the more links of value, the higher your Google rank is going to be. Engagement can be used, through simply comparing one piece of content with another, but this is arguably too simple.
You should use a weighted scoring system, based on your own firm's goals.
2. Build Your Social Media Campaigns Around Data
Social media campaigns should always be built around user data. People are what social media is all about, so this is entirely about popularity. Using data, you can find out what people are talking about and which subjects they're mentioning the most.
With this data, you can capitalize on momentum. It's done in the same way as real-time marketing focuses on what's currently trending.
To check the success of each social media campaign, set up a Google Alerts signal for your company. Every time someone mentions your brand or the name of your campaign, you'll receive a notification. Feel free to dig even deeper by weighing the quality of each mention.
This data is extremely valuable, because of all the traffic you're getting through your social media campaigns, you can find out a lot about your customers. You can find out where they're from, how old they are, their gender, and what their interests are.
Eventually, you'll be able to fine tune your campaigns like never before.
3. Learn What Works By Using A/B Testing
A/B testing started for people using direct mailing campaigns. Today it's an essential part of making your digital marketing campaign work for you. Also known as split testing, it's about taking one campaign or advertisement and making a slight change to it. You run both the original and modified ad against each other and see which gets better results.
This is an ongoing process, where you're using data to conclude which campaign or ad had the most success. It's a vital process for every company to go through because otherwise you're scrambling around in the dark.
This design will allow you to avoid the entrepreneurial blunder of making assumptions and begin making decisions based on facts.
4. Cross-Sell to Your Customers
One of the best ways to maximize what you're investing in your marketing campaign is to cross-sell some of your big-ticket items to your existing customers. Upselling customers is one of the most common methods companies use to increase the lifetime value of every customer.
Once you start to generate more money from your customers, you can reinvest that money into acquiring more customers and going through the same process again.
So how do you use data to do this?
You figure out which customers to target through looking into which pages customers are visiting, and then segmenting them based on that. For example, you may decide to target ads exclusively toward people who have visited specific pages. You may also decide to target customers who have bought certain products before.
The only way you can do this is through looking at the data.
Last Word
These four ways to use data will take your company to the next level. Using your data, you can figure out what's working and what isn't. You can plan your campaigns better and get greater success from your hard work.