Marketing Data Guide
Marketing data can seem like a complicated subject, but it can actually be broken down into a relatively simple definition.
Basically, marketing data can be defined as any information that can be used to promote your business, sell products, set pricing, develop products, or complete any other decision that relates to your business.
Some of the common marketing sources for data include customer data that you can collect, market research, sales data, interactions with your audience, or competitive intelligence.
The more sources of business data you have, the more likely that you’ll be able to make the right decisions daily, giving you a significant edge over your competitors.
The rise of online marketing has completely revolutionized how companies collect and use marketing data.
Beforehand, data about customer behavior was limited and hard to obtain, and companies often had little to work with besides a few types of marketing data such as sales numbers and customer surveys.
That’s a stark contrast with the modern business landscape, where companies can use their website as a central hub for collecting information, interacting with site visitors, and collecting vast amounts of precise data that can be used to improve overall performance and make more intelligent decisions.
Some of the common metrics that you can track include number of visitors, traffic sources, pages that were viewed, bounce rate, as well as cart behaviors, which can provide you with an in-depth picture of what your customers care for and what are the most important things you could improve.
Another excellent marketing source for data is social media.
Since billions of people around the world spend time on social media every day, tapping into this vast resource of marketing data is an absolute must if you want to maintain your finger on the pulse of your marketplace.
The wealth of data available on social media platforms is immense, and you can gain invaluable insights about how your audience behaves, what it likes, and how you can insert your brand and your products into the conversations that they are already having.
The information available through observing and interacting with your audience on social media can be an excellent basis for developing specific and proven customer personas that you can use in all stages of your marketing efforts.
View these metrics and more inside your LeadJig Dashboard
When collecting and analyzing marketing data, you must not get sidetracked by the process itself and remember what the ultimate goal is.
No matter what type of data you are analyzing, your priority should be to identify the ways that the data could help you improve your marketing campaigns and increase the return on investment that you can generate.
As we discussed earlier, gathering data is a very powerful tool. Still, ultimately, it must serve to provide you with factual information about which campaigns are producing the best results and which should be optimized or dropped altogether.
There are countless marketing data sources, but since generating new leads is perhaps the most crucial part of growing a business, it makes sense that lead generation is at the very top in terms of importance.
All of the data, such as site visitors or page visits, only matters if those visitors eventually turn into leads and customers. Therefore, you must have a way to measure the performance of your traffic and know exactly how many prospects you attract and convert.
The good news is that there are quite a few Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions that can track various aspects of performance from your content, emails, paid ads, and much more.
You can gain marketing data from a variety of sources such as interactions with your customers, their behaviors with your products, or the behaviors with your competitor’s products.
But what are some of the primary benefits of using marketing data?
Well, for starters, marketing data, especially hard data, can provide you with specific and verifiable knowledge about your customers, the marketplace, your competition, and your products, significantly increasing the likelihood that the choices you make will pay off.
As you might know from the definition of hard data, it’s data that is generated from machines, sensors, and other devices or online tools, which should go hand in hand with soft data such as consumer surveys.
By combining both hard data and soft data, you can gain the most accurate insights and interpret your performance as accurately as possible.
The end result? Improved communications with your audience that build stronger relationships, a better customer experience, and more sales for your company.
Marketing data is becoming a vital business tool that must be used by all companies that want to stay ahead of their competition.
If you want help with using data to improve your financial advisor marketing, LeadJig can help – request a demo of our software and learn how it can help take your marketing efforts to the next level.