Holistic Data Sources to Optimize Marketing Budgets and ROI

In the current economy where businesses are entrenched in a hyper-personalized world, it is more important than ever to ensure your marketing dollars are spent on realizing value for your business. Businesses are investing heavily in personalized content strategies to meet the needs of their customers at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

But what happens when the ROI dries up? If target audiences are not accurate, businesses will lose money from creating irrelevant content for the wrong stage of the buyer journey. Creating content that produces effective engagement with customers is one of the biggest hurdles that ambitious businesses face today, so it is crucial to get the strategy right from the beginning.

Organizations often undertake content marketing strategies without a full, 360-degree view of who the customer truly is. As a result, marketing teams are held back from launching their campaigns off the ground because they fail to get the full picture of who to target and how. Time is of the essence for marketers, and every minute (if not second) when a campaign is not being acted on can result in wasted marketing spend.

Diversify Your Data Sources

Marketing teams may source exclusively from internal data or use data generated from a single system within a single department. While internal data can provide color as to who the personas are that the organization is trying to reach, it is just one brush stroke of paint in the picture. You need to pull from diverse datasets to create the full image of customer personas.

Now that you know you need to understand your customers more meaningfully, how do you make that happen? To get a truly holistic image of who the customer is, consider the following.

Move your business past the traditional CRM and data warehouse systems. These legacy systems cannot handle all the datasets needed to accurately portray target audiences, which make it more difficult for your content marketing strategy to be successful. If you do not have a clear picture of your ideal customer personas, you cannot create optimized content for them – let alone close a sale. Pivot to external data sources that can help you paint a better picture – think datasets like searches, social networking, mobile web impressions, and history with inbound and outbound campaigns. This type of data gives the best insights into things like buying patterns and habits that can offer true, actionable next steps to meet your customers, nurture them, and recommend what else they may need along their journey with you.

After all data is unlocked and collected from internal and external sources, it is then up to businesses like yours to combine that data in a way that can be viewed in a single pane. Why is this important? Because unconnected data is hard to interpret and analyze properly, leading to even more dollars being wasted on irrelevant marketing content generated from disparate data sources.

From there, organizations can rapidly personalize the customer experience through micro-segmentation, next best action, and market basket analysis, while improving customer acquisition and retention through campaign optimization, and churn analysis to increase customer loyalty.

Don’t Wait for Later. Act Now for Best Results.

It sounds simple but given how quickly consumers get their information in today’s mobile-first world, it is imperative to stay on top of this data and implement it into marketing campaigns as quickly as possible. The ability to build, test, deploy, and assess campaigns quickly is a key consideration, if you want to maximize your campaign revenue.

What else makes an effective campaign?

• Understanding your buyer persona, where they research to learn more about what they are looking for, and who they turn to and trust when they’re making their buyer decisions.
• Understanding where your customers are geographically, where they congregate, and where they socialize – both digitally and in-person. This could include where they shop online, where they are in-person, what mobile apps they use, including social selling platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
• Quickly assess the current state of your campaign and leverage available datasets to pivot appropriately. Access to these real-time analytics gives marketers like you the best possible chance to refine and optimize your campaigns and generate higher ROI.

Content marketing campaigns are made more robust and effective if quality, timely, and secure data are fed into them. Want to stand out in a crowded market and get the best bang for your buck? Ambitious businesses like yours can deploy targeted and highly personalized campaigns using relevant data to perform deep analysis on your customer types. Acting quickly to capitalize on a variety of data sources to paint a 360-degree view of customers makes all the difference between optimizing and squandering your marketing budget.

About Traci Curran

Traci Curran serves as Director of Product Marketing at Actian focused on the Actian Data Platform. With more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Traci has previously held senior marketing roles at CloudBolt Software, Racemi (acquired by DXC Corporation), as well as some of the world’s most innovative startups. Traci is passionate about helping customers understand how they can accelerate innovation and gain competitive advantage by leveraging digital transformation and cloud technologies.