Your prospective customers are inundated with a constant stream of messaging every day.
People have learned to shut out the noise around them, including your efforts to capture their attention, except when you address what’s most important to them.
And that’s the value of data-driven marketing.
Data gives small business owners the power to cut through the noise and reach more of their ideal customers.
What is data-driven marketing?
Traditional marketing methods relied on intuition.
The only reason it worked was that before the digital age, people were not overwhelmed with information by brands that were all vying for attention. Now we are exposed to messaging 24 hours a day, and brands compete via social media, search engines, print media, television, and email.
In the digital age, every business generates data, whether through complaints, purchases, accounts, the company website, phone calls, and so on.
That data can provide insights about your customers that help you better understand their behaviour, pain points, and desires. When you know your target market intimately, you can create marketing initiatives that resonate with your audience and entice them into an engagement.
TDInsights reports that 75% of businesses that utilize data in marketing activities, see an increase in engagement.
For small businesses, data is gold.
How to use data for marketing
Small businesses in South Africa benefit from data-driven marketing, and here’s why:
Instead of attempting to market to everyone (which costs a fortune, eats up a huge amount of time and hardly ever produces the expected value), data allows you to single out the type of people that are interested in your particular brand so that you can focus all your resources there. You get better results and save on costs.
Data allows you to ascertain:
Which of your services are most popular and work best in terms of ROI.So you can advertise these services more.
Where you might be losing clients and where you have opportunities to upsell to clients.
Where your company is generating the most revenue and where you can cut back and save time.
Running customer feedback surveys will provide information about the customer journey, such as bottlenecks or touch point glitches.
Where to get the data
That's all well and good, but where do you get the data? From all over! It just depends on what you want to know.
For example, you may want to find out which staff members are best at sales, so they can train and help the rest of your staff. Sales history will tell you that.
You may want to find out what products are sold more or generate more profit. Purchase receipts will tell you that.
The problem is getting the data to speak its story, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Here are some ideas to get started:
Intentionally generate customer feedback data by sending out surveys or holding forums.
The best software comes with reporting services that generate insights. For example, if you use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, you can run reports that provide insights about sales, marketing, leads, past customers, current customers, and so on.
Email marketing tools provide insights around open rates, clicks, who opens your emails, what types of emails get the best response rate, conversions, and so on.
How to process the data
Let’s say you run an IT Helpdesk and you want to find out what users complain about.
Once an engineer has resolved a user ticket, you could send a customer satisfaction survey.
If you have an Excel spreadsheet guru in the house, you could create Excel spreadsheets to collect the data, but this becomes hard to manage once your business starts to grow.
Even better is using the DataGrows Database Builder to capture your data and then generate reports, simply and easily.
By doing this, you will have one central data storage space from which to generate insightful data, in real-time from anywhere. Managers and Directors can also access live progress reports and statistics anytime.
Request a meeting, and we’ll help you maximise your data for powerful marketing campaigns.