We all know that data is incredibly powerful as a marketing resource. But what isn’t as well known is how to take data from across channels and apply it to your overall plan.
We all know that data is incredibly powerful as a marketing resource. But what isn’t as well known is how to take data from across channels and apply it to your overall plan.
That is, how to combine different sets of data to make marketing decisions. The more you know about your potential customer bases’ income bracket and spending habits, the better your campaigns (and particularly advertisements) will perform. You’ll be providing tailored, triggering content to people primed to receive it. Sounds simple in theory, but in practice you may be asking yourself: where can I get this ‘data’?
So that’s what we’ll be talking about today in the second installment of Marketing Tips with our Global Marketing Manager Shannon: where to find customer data, how to leverage it, and 'how to' dive in to data driven marketing.
The Impact of Data
For many marketers, our ‘gut’ (intuition) is one of our top tools: we have experience to draw on regarding what worked/what didn’t in previous situations, and we apply this to the new situation. But this only works for similar campaigns – how do you make a start if you don’t have that initial experience informing your intuition? The last thing you want to do is guess when your limited marketing budget is on the line. Enter Data.
So what does ‘data’ refer to in this context? It means the behavioral flows of customers across your website and your centre, previous engagements with social media, customer spending hotspots at your centre, how your potential customer base engages with competitors, and more. By applying trends from one channel to another, you create corresponding touchpoints for your customers. For example this can mean taking note of what content works on social, and applying visual/copy insights to your website.
For marketing, the important data is anything that helps you understand your [potential] customers on a personal level. Only then can you begin to target customers with content tailored to their behaviors. The decisions you’ll be able to make with data will increase your ROI, your competitive edge, and your profitability. If you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Okay but how?’ read on for my 4 Top Tips for gathering data.
Top 4 Tips For Finding Customer Data
1. Make the Most of Your Marketing Tools’ Native Reporting
The first source of data is one you’re likely already using: your marketing tools. SquareSpace, your Social Media accounts, and your Email Marketing tool all have native analytics data. Likewise, you most likely have Google Analytics running on your centre’s website to track users, sessions, and engagements. These built-in tools are the backbone for your efforts as they give you a clear snapshot of your current customers’ online behaviors and allow you to target them using digital campaigns. But this only shows you one set of information available to you. The campaigns you can run with Social and Email will be much more interesting with a few more insights.
To make it concrete, let’s use Email as an example. In 2021, most newsletter tools allow you to track link engagements across your newsletter. You can use this data to triangulate clicking hotspots, as well as determine the top CTR links – I recommend comparing apples-to-apples: social links vs. other social links, website links by retail segment (beauty, menswear,…) etc. From this data, you can optimise your emails on a campaign basis, as well as for retargeting emails for less-engaged customers.
2. Commit to Regular Competitor Analysis
This one is a bit more qualitative, but can help you to eliminate low-return ideas without ever having to test them. Subscribing to your competitors’ newsletters, following them on social, and auditing their website will tell you exactly what their content strategy entails. As an example, let's say you see a lot of deals and a high focus on beauty products at one particular competitor. Now you know that for this competitor the female budget-shopper/sale-seeker audience is either already converting well OR is an underperforming segment; you’ll have a good idea of which it is based on community engagement with the content.
3. Don’t Skip on Social Listening
You have multiple options when it comes to social listening (watching how your client base engages with your centre/your competitors’ centre/each other). You can take a manual approach and assign a community manager to track this qualitative data natively in each channel; you can choose to work with a tool like Hootsuite that specialises in social listening and will track keywords / competitors for you; or you can do a combination of the two (my recommendation). Social listening will contextualise your learnings and help you to further segment your audience based on trends.
So now you can take your learnings from the competitor content, mix it with information from your native tools and social listening, and you’ve pinpointed what a particular segment will find triggering. You can then develop a campaign plan to target that exact same segment, using your competitor's legwork and your own customer data.
But that’s not all --
4. Contextualise Your Campaigns with Giftify
As a Giftify client, you have access to data regarding footfall, top-performing merchants in terms of gift card redemption, and KPIs. With this very concrete data about the popularity of stores/hotspots in your centre, you can refine your audience segmentation and further inform your targeting plans.
Let’s pull this all together, continuing with the example of beauty-interested female sale-seeker.
You have your learnings from the competitor content and the information taken from your marketing tools/social listening to clarify an audience segment.
Now apply your Giftify data and merchant knowledge: for the argument, let’s say you have a big box of a popular beauty brand. This brand is currently running a small promotion for 10% off purchases over a certain amount.
So, now you can segment smarter, running a clear social media advertisement to the appropriate potential client pool with visuals/copy that you know will trigger conversions based on your social listening and competitor analysis.
If you only take away one thing from this blog, it should be this: layered data is the best data.
Are you ready to learn more about how Giftify can help grow your conversion? Contact our Sales Team now
