Leveraging Data Analytics for Better Customer Targeting

Leveraging Data Analytics for Better Customer Targeting

by | Mar 30, 2023 | Digital Marketing Articles

Imagine trying to get a birthday present for someone you’ve never met before. First of all, will they be male or female? Then you wonder where they live, what they like to do, and what food they enjoy. It’s impossible to know without having any idea who they are. You get them something you like, candy and your favorite book, hoping they will enjoy it too. But what if they don’t?

Trying to target customers for your online business without any data is much the same as trying to buy a birthday present for someone you’ve never met. If you don’t know anything about them, how will you create ads or design a website that will draw their attention? Fortunately, business owners don’t have to gamble on who their customers are. Through data analytics and the opportunities they open up, you can be certain of who your customers are and what they enjoy.

 

What is Data Analytics?

Data analytics is one of the most powerful ways for business owners to grow their company and reach out to more customers. Multiple types of data can be used in data analytics. These include:

  • Sales Data. This data tells you what parts of your business succeed and why they do. This includes data from areas like sales growth, net revenue, and average profit margin. With sales data analytics, you can reach out to new customers, better your relationship with existing customers, or even measure how much of a product to make.
  • Customer Data. This is the best way to learn about your customers, what they are like, and where their interests lie. Customer data includes things like how you can contact them, their demographics, where they live, and even their social media usage habits. Through this, you can know better how to personalize your emails and website for them, as well as how to better segment your advertising to appeal to certain customer groups.
  • Competitor Data. By knowing your competitors, you can make your company distinctive from everyone else around it. If you know where your competitors have filled the market, you can identify where they have missed the mark and fill their shoes. Filing new holes sets you apart and gives you new leads that other companies do not have.
  • Market Data. By researching the market around you, you can understand your position in the market and how to best interact with the market as a whole. This lets you reach your goals faster by detailing the best products to sell, the best promotions to run, and the best public face to have.
  • Product Data. This kind of data interacts heavily with the customer, just like sales data does. It can better the value of each customer by creating positive customer experiences and responses. It will also show you what kinds of new products customers would enjoy, thus giving you a measure of what kind of expansion would be best for your company.

Data analytics increases your reach into the business world and simultaneously grows your business. By taking your data in hand, aggregating it, and drawing a conclusion from it, you will learn how to best expand, entertain, and engage with your customers.

 

The Power of Data Analytics in Marketing

Data analytics are powerful tools that many businesses often fail to employ. Given that businesses who do use them are 23 times more likely to get new leads, 19 times more likely to make a profit, and 6 times more likely to keep their customers, data analytics is a tool that every business owner should invest in and explore. 

These results occur because data analytics lets you reach customers who are more likely to enjoy what you offer, rather than people of the completely wrong demographic. It helps you get to know your customers better so you can offer them exactly what they want. 

In addition, understanding your company’s data is an important step toward expanding your brand awareness. If you know where to expand and how to target customers, you can begin engaging in the profitable area of performance marketing. This technique lets you partner with an affiliate company to spread the word about your business and continue to get to know your data better. Affiliate companies will place your ads on websites you might not get access to, and they will help you analyze your data. Data analytics can show you just where a performance marketing strategy might come in handy. So, data analytics are compelling. They can expand your reach, create awareness for your business, and even show you how to embrace new techniques to further your growth.

 

How Data Analytics Can Help You Better Understand Your Customers

Many of the data groups introduced above have special skills that can help you connect with your customers better. Since this is the ultimate goal of data analytics, it is important to know how to leverage this data to your best advantage and expand your customer base through it. For example, product data lets you do this because it shows you what products the customers are looking for. This means that you can produce items of interest to them. 

Customer data, on the other hand, helps you segment your customers into lists so that you can further personalize your outreach to them. Statistics and data today show that 75% of customers are happier with marketing if they receive personalized emails, texts, or mail. By understanding your customers, you can personalize your approach to help them feel more welcomed and known.

From market data, you can glean the knowledge of what campaign strategies will best fill holes in the market. This means that you will limit the number of competitors you face in certain areas of the market, creating larger profits. 

Finally, competitor data helps you understand your position in the market. If you understand this, then you will know how to expand so that your competition is low and your profits are high.

These are just a few of the ways that data analytics can help you understand your customers. Through these powerful tools, your customer base and product range can explode

Choosing the Right Data Metrics for Customer Segmentation

There are many ways to make sure that you are succeeding in the realm of data analytics besides embracing the five categories of analytic data. Increasing your intake of analytic data will help you embrace better methods of customer segmentation. Since this is one of the best ways to put your data to work, choosing the right metrics to capture even more data ultimately moves you toward the goal of customer segmentation.

Many of the ways to get more data are simple. Often, they are methods to improve your website and outreach. One simple way to make your data more accurate and helpful is to make a landing page with an enticing offer. If your landing page is professional and attractive, and you offer a product that customers will want, then you have succeeded. If you want to do even more, you can A/B test your website to learn where there might be problems for visitors, or where the aesthetic appeal isn’t quite hitting the spot. 

In addition, if you are interested in bettering your performance marketing game, you should keep up with your affiliate marketing company. Make sure that they are placing your ads on trustworthy websites and places where people would tend to be interested in your services. Track and monitor what your affiliate company is doing with your data, and track and monitor your data closely for ways to improve it. By editing your website for an optimized appearance and staying in touch with performance marketing, you can optimize your company for customer segmentation. 

 

The Key Factors to Consider When Creating Customer Segments

One of the greatest parts of good data analytics is the perspective it gives you when segmenting your customers into lists. Just like data can be segmented by what kind of data it is, so can customers. Customer segmentation is the idea of taking your data, applying it to your customers, and dividing them into lists based on your data. This means that you can make lists based on the age of your customer, what type of products they tend to buy, or even what time of day they are most active online. Personalized lists and personalized data make it easier than ever to reach your customers. 

 

The Best Targeting Strategies for Reaching Your Ideal Customers

But to achieve this, you need to have the best kind of data. Mediocre data will not get you nearly as far as specific, detailed data. This kind of data lets you analyze your customers in depth. This is the key factor to look out for when using data to get to know your customer community. If your data is not highly informative about your customers, then you need to look elsewhere for it.

To get better data, you can embrace a few new techniques. These include:

  • Using a customer data platform, or CDP. A platform like this will take all of your data on one customer, bring it together, and sort it for you to give you a full understanding of that customer and how to best cater to their desires and needs. In the end, you will target customers better if you have a holistic idea of who they are as a person.
  • Creating a more personalized outreach. This can be the next step after your CDP analysis. Using your data, you can reach customers in new, more personal ways. If your data shows you that one customer likes a certain type of product and is more active at night, you can send them an email at night advertising that product. These are small ways to customize your outreach and campaigns to make customers feel more understood and known.
  • Interacting with customers. You don’t have to meet them in person to do this. There are plenty of ways to chat online with customers, whether through a literal website chat box or a questionnaire on your social media story. However, in-person is also a fantastic way to connect with customers. You can do this through events for your company, or other business events. Either way, making a more personal connection with your customers will help them remember your company and associate you with their more human side.

 

These techniques will help you reach out to your customers, make your company feel more personal, and show them a new side of your business. By doing this, you will help the customer remember your business and maybe even recommend your business to friends and family. This lets you target new audiences indirectly.

 

Measuring and Optimizing Your Customer Segmentation and Targeting Efforts

Finally, once you’ve analyzed your data and segmented your customers, it’s time to learn how to track your progress. There are many ways to measure if your segmentation is successful or not, but two of the best ways to do this are your returns on investment (ROIs) and your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Your ROIs will show you if the money that you put into reaching new customers and getting better connections with existing ones is producing adequate financial returns. If you are losing money overall on your customer marketing efforts, then it’s time to check back in and see if you can change anything to try to draw more customer attention. On the other hand, you may find that with new improvements you are making money by drawing more sales from your customers. If this is so, then continue the segmentation strategy you are always using, of course looking constantly for ways to continuously improve.

Your KPIs are things like the number of clicks a certain link gets, the number of views each page gets, and how many sales you make. These numbers are insightful because they show you customer activity. If these numbers are low compared to how many customers you contact regularly, then you probably need to take a look back at your customer segmentation and what methods you use to engage with them. However, if they are high, then you should continue doing what you have been. 

These two techniques are the best ways to measure your customer engagement based on data analytics and customer segmentation. The data can both help you engage customers as well as get new ones and it can let you see where you can improve your business for your customers.

Data analytics is both powerful and important. This method lets you learn more about your customers and get new customers in one fell swoop. Information on your customers, like their age, where they live, and what they enjoy, can be aggregated easily to help you expand your business, drive up your sales, and see significant progress toward your goals.

 

Transform Your Marketing Strategy: Start Leveraging Data Analytics

Because data analytics is such a powerful tool and an important part of your business, Hit Your Mark offers many ways to embrace its benefits. Our team offers much experience with data analytics and many resources for understanding and collecting data. With expertise in data collection and analytics, we will collect customer, product, and operational data to allow your business to flourish. Then, with the information we collect, we target your goals and grow your business through them and the power of data analytics. Let us help you hit your mark in data analytics and each of your company goals!

How To Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

How To Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

by | Mar 20, 2023 | Digital Marketing Articles

As a business leader, you know you can bring a brilliant product or unparalleled service to market, but there are times when you need help to meet your intended success.

Here’s the thing: digital marketing is not a game of chance. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope for the best. Instead, you need to measure your marketing campaigns to see if they’re actually working. It’s like being a doctor and checking your patient’s vital signs — except instead of a heartbeat and blood pressure, you’re looking at website traffic and conversion rates.

Without an effective marketing strategy in place, the individuals, families, and groups of people that could benefit from your efforts may never become aware of what you have to offer! You’re basically throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. And let’s face it, that’s not a great way to run a business. So let’s get into the basics of measuring marketing campaigns!

 

How To Measure Digital Marketing Success

We’ve all heard how our goals need to be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. The genius of data and analytics — the backbone of digital marketing — is that they ensure your goals are measurable. 

Having the information you need to tell a successful strategy from a failing one allows you to minimize all-around waste — instead of being led on a wild goose chase!

To measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns, you need to be a master of metrics. How many people clicked on your ad? How long did they stay on your website? How many visitors filled out your contact form? It’s like piecing together a puzzle — the more pieces you have, the clearer the picture becomes!

But don’t worry; you don’t need to be a mathematical genius to measure digital marketing success. With the right tools and expertise, you can easily track and analyze your metrics to see what’s working and what’s not and adjust your efforts accordingly.

It’s all about avoiding ineffective strategies and freeing up resources to focus on the ones that work for you. With our data-driven approach, you can trust that your budget is being spent effectively to maximize your return on investment!

 

The Role of Data Analytics in Reaching KPIs

But what does measuring data look like in practice? Understanding marketing data is a crucial first step. This process includes any information that paints a clearer picture of your customers — what they want and how to reach them. 

Different marketing campaigns gather different key performance indicators or KPIs (i.e., a measurable metric used to evaluate the success of a campaign). These various indicators can be more or less helpful, depending on the industry you’re dealing with. For example, content marketers would be especially interested in the “organic traffic” and “time spent on site” indicators. Part of a solid digital marketing strategy is a strong sense of which KPIs are most important to track. 

Without tracking the right KPIs, businesses may not have the necessary data to make informed decisions, thus potentially missing opportunities to optimize their marketing campaigns for maximum impact.

Of course, data alone cannot produce results. While helpful in assessing whether your KPIs are trending up or down, data analytics only become useful when they are married with an understanding of your company’s goals. 

To turn data — even highly relevant data — into actionable steps, you need to combine data-driven information with the purpose behind your marketing strategies. With this purpose-driven model in mind, let’s assess the different processes for data and analytics management!

 

What Are the Best Processes for Data Management and Collection?

Marketing analytics sounds highly technical but can be put into simpler terms: they are the tools and processes that turn data into actionable knowledge. 

Three examples of the most popular approaches to marketing analytics include: 

  1. Media Mix Models, which assess data gathered over more extended periods. 
  2. Multi-Touch Attribution, which analyzes individual-scale information from consumer purchases, 
  3. Unified Marketing Measurement, which is a combination of the previous two.

 

Once a particular model has been chosen, it pays to implement it smartly. Using these models, you can assess a plethora of metrics, such as:

  • Bounce rate
  • Click-through rate (CTR)
  • Conversion rate
  • Email open rate
  • Social post likes

And these data points are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to measuring the success of your marketing campaigns!

One of the essential practices for today’s marketing landscape is to collect data transparently. Think of the prompt you see when you open a newly-downloaded smartphone app. Users are often allowed to “allow” or “ask app not to track.” Whether it’s permitting location information, syncing contacts, or other data points, consumers appreciate it when companies transparently give them a decision to opt in or out of data collection.

Another great reason to be transparent regarding data collection is that sometimes, to act otherwise is illegal. While the U.S. has yet to see the passage of a data-collection-regulating law on the federal level, many states have taken it upon themselves to regulate the relationship between data-collecting companies and data-providing consumers. 

Different laws and regulations apply to data in various fields, with fields as diverse as healthcare, financial institutions, and telecommunications prompting the fine-tuning of different legal expectations. Here, too, it pays to stay vigilant and up-to-speed on the kinds of data collection the law allows.

What Are the Best Data Collection Tools?

The most accessible marketing analytics tool for beginners is Google Analytics. This tool provides data on visitors to your website, such as which sites they came from and how long they spent on your website.

MixPanel is a step up in the sense that it will track the activity on your mobile app as well as your website. MixPanel’s premium version is also more feasible for small businesses than the upgraded Google Analytics tools.

Another tool to consider is Cyfe. If you’ve taken a few steps down on your digital marketing journey and have an array of data points to track, Cyfe functions as a “dashboard” so that they can all be viewed in one place. It covers both social media and sales platforms, with widgets integrating other tools like Google Analytics or Salesforce. 

Klipfolio is another dashboard-style competitively-priced tool for any businesses looking to upgrade their marketing analytics experience.

It provides a view of your business’s performance, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to optimize your digital marketing strategy. However, using such platforms can be challenging.

At Hit Your Mark, we understand the importance of tracking and measuring your data to optimize your digital marketing strategy, as well as keeping a pulse on all other related marketing disciplines. While there are many powerful tools to choose from, we take a holistic approach to data tracking and marketing to provide a complete and accurate view of your business’s performance.

 

What Are Key Metrics To Track?

Even with the perfect marketing analytics tools in place, your organization might still fumble the opportunity to harness analytics if you’re paying attention to the wrong data points and KPIs. 

All the infrastructure in the world won’t help unless you’re taking in data that can be turned into actionable steps to grow your business. The top metric, unsurprisingly, is revenue. But there’s still much to be learned after revenue is accounted for!

 

What Are the 10 Marketing Metrics To Use?

The 10 key digital marketing metrics include: 

  • Click-through rate
  • Conversion rate 
  • Cost per lead
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Goal completion rate
  • Leads 
  • Page views
  • Returning visitors
  • Web traffic sources

A complete picture of these metrics will give you a real-time view of how your business is doing and, with some analysis, how it could be doing better.

Conversion rates, for example, measure the number of consumers who “converted” as a percentage of the total number of consumers that visited your website. Whether it is opening an email, making a purchase, or filling out an online form, the number of conversions is only significant compared to the number of potential ones.

If thousands of people see your content, but only a few dozen are being converted, that could be a sign that you’re marketing to the wrong audience.

But there’s hope! With insights from accurate conversion rates, page views, and other KPIs, you can make your digital marketing strategy much more efficient! Once you switch to data-driven marketing decisions, you’ll wonder how you got along without them!

 

Use Metrics To Rocket Marketing Effectiveness!

If metrics or data are the banes of your existence, don’t worry! Just let the experts at Hit Your Mark handle it. We’ll crunch all those numbers and analyze all that data, leaving you free to focus on what really matters, like drinking coffee, your business, or your next meeting. Because let’s be honest, who wants to spend their days staring at spreadsheets and graphs? Not you, that’s for sure. So book a discovery call with HYM and finally get the boost your marketing needs!