Marketing data acquisition, interpretation and usage is no longer as simple as it used to be, especially in the European Zone, where policies are quite strictly implemented for protecting people’s right to privacy on the internet.
If anything, data analytics have become an even more in-demand field than before, given that only professionals in this field properly understand the laws and restrictions. Consequently, they are also the ones who hold the key to successful digital marketing in an era where customer data is strictly protected by law. In light of these fairly recent developments, it is important to review marketing strategies and data extraction methods, so that a balance can be reached between data privacy compliance and customer data usage.
Marketing Data: What Exactly Does It Refer to?
By definition, any data that a company acquires about their customer, and has the potential to be used for creating personalized marketing content, can be considered as marketing data. This also applies to such data even if it has not yet been used for marketing.
How Do Companies Acquire Marketing Data?
The information is gathered, extracted and collected from numerous platforms which include data from people’s search engine usage, site visits, social media information, social media interactions, online purchase history and multiple other sources where various information about people is stored for data accumulation. Not all of it is legal now, although there is no guarantee of the fact that every shady company on the internet will abide by the privacy rules. Under compliance rules, most advanced marketing data types can only be acquired by companies if they come into contact with potential clients who are willing to share it. Therefore, the touchpoints where the interactions between companies and clients happen now, hold the utmost importance.
What is Data Analytics in Marketing?
Customer data, in its raw form, is simply random data about random people, and without the data analysts organizing, deciphering and presenting them as informative and insightful reports, it would be useless. Marketing analysts are the ones who make sense of the datasets to predict customer behavior, market trends and even the possible ROI of a planned marketing campaign. To know more about the various roles and importance of data analytics in marketing, click here.
What is Customer Data Used For?
Client/customer information can be used for a variety of reasons, but it does have a few core metrics which are useful for all marketing teams:
- Identification of their target audience
- Creating more relevant, personalized and appealing content for the target audience
- Improving the quality of marketing content to better suit the TA’s taste
- Creating products/services that customers are likely to buy the most
- Improving sales strategies
- Seamless integration between marketing and sales for easy conversions
- Customers’ impression of the company and their competition
- Customers’ brand awareness and engagement level
- Lead generation, segmentation and scoring
- Lifetime value of a customer (LTV)
There are several other uses as well, but these should be enough to provide readers with a clear idea regarding how customer data is used by companies, and how important each metric is.
What are the Different Types of Marketing Data?
As far as marketing metrics or KPIs are concerned, there are far too many to mention them all here. Besides, KPIs are often specific in their validity to an industry, barring a few common ones of course. However, as far as the data itself is concerned, it can be classified under a few major categories, as outlined below.
Marketing Data from Websites
This one is particularly relevant for companies that have an eCommerce outlet, but even if they only have an online presence, analysis of the incoming traffic via cookies can be used to identify customers and collect contact information from them. Some of the most important KPIs for marketing data collected via websites are locational information, frequency of visits, specific page interests, bounce rates and time spent on each page. More personal information may not be collected under the new rules, unless shared by the potential customer willingly through creation of an account on the website.
Marketing Data from Social Media Channels
The number one source of collecting valuable marketing data is social media channels, although recent restrictions have curbed the powers of social media marketing to some extent. Still proven to be the most useful touchpoint for brands to connect with their customers, the marketing data gathered from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. is extremely important. For example, a lot of consumers prefer watching a review on YouTube, before making the decision to buy an expensive piece of equipment. This alerts the relevant companies about the consumer’s immediate interests and needs.
Return on Investment (ROI)
If a company spends $10 on social media marketing, and manages to generate a revenue of $100 from that investment, they would need to know about it so that they can analyze what made the campaign such a success on the chosen social media platform. If the revenues generated from that $10 investment turned out to be $15, they would need to figure out where they went wrong. In either situation, marketing data obtained regarding the ROI of the marketing expenses is extremely important for a company to improve their marketing habits.
What is Data-Driven Marketing?
Quite simply put, any marketing campaign or effort that is powered by the interpreted datasets would be an example of data-driven marketing. It takes the guessing game out of marketing, which in turn, guarantees a much higher ROI on any data driven marketing campaign. The necessary investments become smaller and conversion rates improve naturally when marketers have a very specific idea regarding who their most potential clients are and what it is exactly that they are looking for.
Lead scoring further filters out the bad leads, making obvious which clients are the least likely to buy, despite showing keen interest, and which ones are the most likely to convert, even though they may not show their enthusiasm in person.
