What Data Sleuths Can Teach Us About Marketing

Every business is looking for a competitive edge. There’s a never-ending quest for a secret sauce that attracts customers in droves. More customers means more sales, and a large influx of sales can create exponential business growth.

There’s a good reason for this treasure hunt: an informed digital marketing business is an efficient one. Keep in mind that efficiency is more than just enhanced productivity. It’s actually the hidden power that improves the bottom line.

Interestingly enough, this secret sauce about how to get more buyers does exist. The secret is hiding in plain sight: it’s understanding buyer behavior through data monitoring.

Data monitoring removes all the problems inherent in guesswork. It substitutes a hit-and-miss approach with an accurate view of sales patterns, buying trends, and what leading competitors are successfully doing to influence buyers.

Finding relevant data

How can good data improve your business?

When you know how to look, there’s no shortage of it. It’s available from a wide spectrum of sources.

Combining external data with internal data creates big data, and big data uncovers hidden correlations. Moreover, when big data is unearthed in real-time, it can lead to unexpected opportunities. For instance, it can defuse hidden problems in your marketing strategy and it can preempt other businesses by leaping on emerging trends.

Where do you find this data?

There are 3 good sources of internal and external data: social media, reporting metrics, and transactional data.

  1. Social media – This is a good source of external data. Since this can be overwhelming, just focus on the most popular platforms like Facebook, Google +, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. These provide insights useful in creating a buyer persona. It’s easy enough to get information on age, gender, location, interests, and other data useful in getting a good grasp of a target market.
  2. Reporting metrics – This is a good source of internal data. There are many ways to understand online engagement. Google Analytics allows you to track how customers interact with your website. Online tools such as Crazy Egg offers heat mapping to show what attracts people to your website.
  3. Transactional data – This is another good source of internal data. You can find out about your buyer’s behavior through your CMS (content management systems – CMS, payment transactions, and other metrics that track click-through rates – CTR or spending trends).

Data mining and business efficiency

The purpose of data mining, finding data, and analyzing it, is to make your business run more efficiently.

Here are 3 examples:

  1. You can use data mining to enhance your marketing. You can decide what products to make and what products to improve. You can decide where to direct your marketing efforts and what campaigns to discontinue.
  2. You can use data mining to notice recurring patterns and identify emerging trends. This information can be used to correct problems or discover opportunities. You may observe, for example, that customers don’t pay attention to your “buy” button on your sales pages because of the color, size, or vague call to action (CTA). This is a problem that’s easy to fix. What about an overlooked opportunity? Perhaps, you notice that more people buy bundled products rather than single-item products. This clues you in on how to structure your offers.
  3. You can use data mining to give customers a better buying experience. Amazon has done an outstanding job of this. Here’s a story from marketer Sean Madden that illustrates how Amazon has used big data to provide unbeatable customer service. “Last month, I talked to Amazon customer service about my malfunctioning Kindle, and it was great. Thirty seconds after putting in a service request on Amazon’s website, my phone rang, and the woman on the other end – let’s call her Barbara – greeted me by name and said, ‘I understand that you have a problem with your Kindle.’ We resolved my problem in under two minutes, we got to skip the part where I carefully spell out my last name and address, and she didn’t try to upsell me on anything. After nearly a decade of ordering stuff from Amazon, I never loved the company as much as I did at that moment.”

Data-centric marketing tips

There are innumerable ways to use big data to get big results in your marketing. Here is a quick rundown of ideas to clue you in on what is possible.

  1. Improve your interactions on social media. Now that you understand your target market better, you can improve how you interact with them on social media. You can speak directly to their needs, wants, and desires in a language that synchs with their way of thinking.
  2. Improve your content marketing by addressing what your target market wants to learn from you. Instead of guessing what types of content attracts readers, you can provide sage advice on things that matter to them.
  3. Improve your paid advertising. Now that you know where your target market hangs out and what their interests are, you can make your paid advertising much more accurate, increasing conversions because you are using engaging language when addressing their needs.

The better you know your customers, the better your business will do. While there are many ways to get into your customer’s minds, but nothing is quite as accurate as using data mining to figure out customer goals and desires, fears, and frustrations.