Dissecting Data to Anticipate Marketing Trends
Data drives everything.
Whether you’re looking internally into your best practices and evaluating production cost/benefit, or looking externally to segmented messaging and customer acquisition, we are always sifting through data in order to gauge results, successes, and shortcomings.
In our current era of marketing, we have more data than ever to inform our business decisions.
Marketers as Data Scientists
There are two types of marketers: those who eagerly follow trends and those who anticipate them.
While simply keeping your finger on the pulse of the marketing world is a strategy that will yield consistent results, the true leaders of the industry have made it a habit to predict where marketing is heading, recognizing the future, and being at the forefront.
It may seem like sorcery to some, but the reality is that recognizing a diverse field of data points and subsequent careful market analysis can predict trends and position smart marketers for future success.
In line with all of this, the best marketers think of themselves not only as salespeople, but as data scientists, analyzing and understanding complex data to predict market trends.
Insight and Data Collection
Determining where to find this data is more than half of the battle.
Earlier in the series, we discussed the importance of going straight to the source and getting as much data from our customers (and potential customers) as possible. In the digital world, there are endless ways to collect this data, including:
- Google Analytics
- Cookies and Web Beacons
- Social Media
- Email Tracking
- App Usage
- Data Mining Companies
Whether you choose to acquire the data yourself or hire data companies to do it for you, the raw data is at your fingertips.
Make Your Data Useful
Large databases seem attractive — the more the merrier — but the reality is, unless they’re curated by trusted sources and expertly maintained, a big database can equal a big mess.
The solution to a major technical headache lies in prevention: it’s essential to make sure that the data you have is as far from corrupted as possible. Major sources of data corruption can be anything from improper formatting to old data.
Remember: always use trusted services for data acquisition and consider investing in data management software to mitigate human error in data handling.
Keep Data Up to Date
The market is evolving and customers are evolving with it. For the first time, we can track our customers in real time and evolve with them too.
It should go without saying that maintaining current data is crucial to ensuring your company is able to anticipate market trends and the needs of customers. Not only does up to date data inform more strategically sound campaigns, it also works to give your business the agility to make changes in messaging and customer approach on the fly.
Current data gives marketers the ability to double down on successful marketing efforts proving their return or cut their losses when a campaign has proven to yield weaker ROI than they had hoped for.
Use It
We’ve touched on using data to predict marketing trends and how marketers should think of themselves as data scientists, but it’s also important to remember that when push comes to shove, sales is still at the heart of what we do.
Data needs to be utilized effectively to be worth the effort it takes to harvest and process it, and that utilization goes far beyond market speculation. Data allows us to launch campaigns with more precise levels of customer targeting and, like we’ve outlined in our previous installment of this series, approach the goal of true one-to-one marketing.
It allows us to hyper-personalize, make impressions on high-value prospects, streamline the customer journey, and make major changes to our campaigns on the fly – with the end goal of increasing ROI across the board.
The bottom line is this: there’s a reason “data-driven marketing” makes an appearance in the tagline of so many successful marketing companies.
You don’t have to make it your slogan, but you should make it a priority.
Looking for a way to utilize your data in a tech-based marketing campaign? Contact us to see how we can help.
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