8 Ways to Use Marketing Data to Maximize Results

According to Online Marketing News, 78 percent of companies employ a skeleton marketing team that consists of a writer, a social media manager, and an SEO specialist. With a crew this tight and tidy—and with the C-suite’s expectations of marketers ever-climbing, it’s no wonder that marketing has one of the highest turnover/burnout rates. The good news is, your marketing team has a secret weapon, a “fourth man” as they say in soccer, and his name is Data! Your data is the sole source of all great insights, and these insights are essential to your team’s ability to create a more engaging, productive and profitable customer experience. In today’s blog, we’ll cover eight ways you can use your data right now to lighten the load on your team, rake in revenue, and build your empire.

#1: Use Data to Create Customer Personas

Selecting the right accounts to focus on can be intimidating, especially if you have thousands upon thousands of contacts and are used to casting a wide net. Creating customer personas before selecting target accounts can help your marketing teams connect a real person to the segment they are marketing to and develop messages that resonate. However, this is a step that needs to be data-driven in order to have meaning. Yes, a persona has creative elements, but it shouldn’t be wholly woven out of hunches from what sales and marketing leaders think is the right type of customer.

#2: Use Data to Eliminate Account Selection Bias

Whereas all humans are biased, data is not. To ensure you target the right people, search your data dashboard for actionable insights. A few places to look for patterns and similarities in the data are:

• Customers who regularly spend a certain amount
• Sales spikes and dips by location
• Customers who dropped out mid-funnel
• Repeat vs. lapsed customers
• Revenue generated by first time customers

Some marketing dashboards include the ability to identify ideal customers based on current and historical sales and marketing data. This makes it much easier to create segmented lists that are founded on characteristics linked to increases in purchases.

Selling well has been and will always be about building personal relationships with customers and prospects. When you understand who your best customers are, you can use those data insights to target similar people, create campaigns that inspire action, and enjoy all the success a fine-tuned marketing strategy promises.

#3: Use Data to Target the Right People

When you use a marketing ops dashboard to analyze your organization’s data, you can quickly and accurately identify accounts in your database with the greatest potential to bring in the most revenue. To ensure you choose wisely, look at the historical performance of each account and compare it to your ideal customer profiles to determine which customers and prospects will make the list of accounts your teams will focus their time, energy and resources. A few questions to consider as you browse your dashboard data are:

• Which accounts are most profitable?
• Which accounts have dropped in profitability?
• What data characteristics are good indicators of sales success?
• What customer attributes are ideal for our products/services?

#4: Use Data to Automate Personalized Campaigns

What makes marketing truly powerful and effective is the ability to send personalized messages to individual customers — and what makes sending personalized content to thousands of customers possible is content automation. Your marketing automation tool should be able to automate personalized messages, and integrate seamlessly with other tools, so that you can use data from all storehouses to send highly personalized marketing campaigns on every channel you use.

When integrated correctly, message personalization and marketing automation tools work together to pull customer-facing marketing content from sources within your organization. Once the content has been pulled and put in a queue, it can be sent as part of marketing’s automated omni-channel campaigns. It can also be used by your sales team, who can instantly select and send pre-screened messages via their favorite sales software.

#5: Use Data to Engage in Advanced Personalization Tactics

Marketing to every customer in a way that resonates deeply, requires you to be selective in how personal you are with them. There are a variety of levels of personalization, from broad approaches that leverage basic contact data (industry, job-title, geo, etc.) to highly customized content derived from enhanced customer behavior data (order history, habits, social leanings, etc.). Whether you are creating content for a specific segment of accounts or a single account, the trick is to use your data well as you populate campaigns. It may take some messaging trials and errors to find your sweet spot, but strive to achieve a level of personalization that feels organic and friendly to customers. A few simple ways to leverage data to personalize content include:

• Addressing the recipient by name and noting their title and role
• Using images that reflect the customer’s industry and experience
• Sending case studies specific to the customer’s industry or market
• Adding a personal note to pieces through a sales enablement tool

#6: Use Shared Data to Increase Marketing Efficiencies and Effectiveness

When you integrate a campaign messaging tool with the other martech tools in your ecosystem, it benefits your ABM strategy in several ways. Integrated tools make it easy to share data and:

• Generate and segment lists
• Coordinate and automate personalized omni-channel campaigns
• Reduce content development costs
• Repurpose content for a variety of channels (SMS, RSS, chat, email, direct mail, voice, etc.)
• Establish a searchable library of content that marketing and sales can use on-demand 

#7: Use Data to Experience All the Good Things Sales Enablement Offers

When marketing and sales live in world of siloed data, mixed messages and customer confusion happens. But, when these two pillars of business integrate tools and share data that is clean, complete, current, consistent and centralized, you get a unified brand that’s poised to break records. Think of your sales team as customers of your sales enablement efforts. The easier you make it for them to use the pieces your team develops, the greater your alignment and success will be. According to CSO Insights, companies with a solid sales enablement strategy enjoy a win rate of 47.7%. Imagine if your company won nearly half of all the deals it pursued. Better yet, stop imagining it and start making it rain by fostering sales enablement.

#8: Use Data to Route Leads to the Right Sales People

Empower both sales and marketing folks to respond to inbound leads with greater speed and accuracy by using data automation to route leads as they come in. After all, leads are 9x more likely to convert when businesses follow-up within 5 minutes. What’s more, 50 percent of buyers choose the vendor that responds first. Before routing leads, make sure you validate and enrich the contact data submitted by prospects, as this ensures that both sales and marketing teams are well-equipped with accurate information that’s ready to use, whether in personalized campaigns or lead nurturing activities.

Bonus: Use Data Experts to Fine-Tune Your Marketing Machine

Sureshot has a long history of helping organizations get and maintain high-quality data that enhances the performance of campaigns and drives revenue. If you are ready to harness the power of data to unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts, start by taking our FREE Martech Assessment.