Data is the driving force of the modern business world. Thanks to ever-expanding computer processing capacity, businesses are able to gather and process more and more data to make better decisions. Retailers track shopping habits and figure out ways to promote items that consumers are more likely to buy. Websites track visitor behavior and can run thousands of tests to see how small changes in their content affect traffic. Marketers have vast amounts of data available to help them plan campaigns and track their effectiveness.
Using Data To Plan Marketing Campaigns
Before a marketing campaign begins, data can be used to plan and prepare it effectively. For instance, if you’re marketing a beverage, you can use sales data to figure out what demographics to target. You’d start by examining what areas, ages, and genders buy the drink the most. You could also look at which areas are growing the most. You can then make important decisions about where to target your campaign. Do you want the growth areas to grow even faster, or do you want to focus on consumers who have never purchased the beverage? Once you know who you want to market to, you can then use data to figure out how you’ll market to them.
Again, data helps you focus your advertising as specifically as you desire. Thanks to social media sites and other online trackers, it’s easy to pinpoint basic demographic information about each website visitor. You can figure out their gender, age, income, and interests. This enables a level of specificity never before possible in television and print advertising.
Another way data can be used is to create programmatic marketing campaigns. Programmatic campaigns are ones where you target users who do a specific thing. For instance, a user who searches an ecommerce site for a specific product but doesn’t buy it can be targeted with ads for that product, since they’ve already shown some interest in it. Computers and big data help us automate these tasks and make them effective on a large scale.
Using Data To Track And Follow-Up With Marketing Campaigns
Both during and after your campaign, you can use data to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. If your campaign isn’t very effective, you can pull it before you waste more advertising dollars. Even if it meets your goals, you can evaluate how to make it more effective in the future. For instance, if you were running a campaign for online media buying, you might target a popular song to a younger age group. Your targeted efforts will pay off much more than general advertising, but after studying the data from your marketing campaign you might notice that more females purchased the song or album more than males. In the future, you’ll be able to target your advertising efforts even more specifically and see even better returns on your advertising investments.
If you’re a small business owner, you might think that many of the tools needed to run sophisticated marketing analyses are too expensive for you to use. However, many of these tools are developed by large advertising companies and you have access to them when you use their advertising services. For instance, many online ad platforms give you advanced metrics that let you see which advertisements resulted in click-throughs. In this way big data can help even small business owners meet their marketing goals.