Marketing begins with knowing what your business can sell and who it can sell it to. When you know your unique selling point, you can package it into a message crafted to appeal to the kind of customer (whether an individual or a business) who needs what you’re selling. But the market and customer needs are changing all the time. You need a way to stay on top of these changes as they are happening so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, make changes where necessary, and anticipate customer needs. The way to do this is by gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer data.

Using Marketing Analytics

There is a wealth of data available to marketers these days. There’s website analytics, social media analytics, and web analytics. There’s data related to customer accounts detailing how much they spend per purchase and how often they buy. Then there’s the data you collect directly, like from customer surveys, customer service interactions, feedback forms, and customer reviews. It can be overwhelming at times, but there are a couple things you can do to make customer data more manageable.

First, use a smart CRM to bring all of your data into one central location. Instead of having to separately seek out website, email, and social media data, a CRM can collect it all in one place, making it easier to analyze and compare.

Second, determine your marketing KPIs so that you’re only tracking the metrics relevant to your strategic goals. For more on KPIs, the difference between KPIs and metrics, and how to choose KPIs that align with your goals, check out this article.

Data Related to Target Audience

To understand your target audience, look to behavioral data from various customer touchpoints. Email click-through rates, website browsing behavior, social media engagement, cart abandonment rates, and purchase history are all valuable metrics for identifying the likes and dislikes of your target audience. When you have a clearer idea of who it is you are serving, you can create more accurate ideal customer profiles and customer journeys.

This kind of data can also help you segment customers according to their preferences and create personalized marketing campaigns tailored to each group’s particular needs. This involves personalizing not only the content of the message but the medium, as well. Do your customers engage with emails, do they watch your social media videos, do they click on ads they see online, or do they prefer to read your blog? The data will help you decide where to focus your marketing efforts.   

Data Is for B2B Marketers, Too

While we normally think of customer data analytics as something for retail marketers to worry about, it’s even more important in B2B marketing, where there are fewer overall customers and leads often need a lot of information and time to make a decision to work with you. Anything you can do to get to know your leads better and serve them a personalized experience will get you another step closer to closing.

Find the Marketing Technology That Fits Your Business

The data that will help you better understand your customers’ needs is there, if you know how to use it. Our marketing technology experts are here to help you plan a marketing strategy, set goals, find the right KPIs, develop campaigns, create content, and set you up with the right technology and tools to help you meet your goals.