How to Use Big Data to Perfect a Marketing Plan

Ask any sports executive, and they’ll tell you that the biggest and most important shift in recent years is from using gut instinct to data for making important decisions. With so much information flowing around during the current digital age, you need to use this approach when it comes to your marketing strategy. Marketers in every industry and sector are using analytics and information to glean insights on client behavior and habits. This information will help you get a leg up on the competition. Here’s how you can use big data to perfect your marketing plan going forward.

Understanding Your Target Audience

No marketing plan can be successful without first understanding the audience you are aiming at. Everything you do has to be tailored to that audience. You can’t guess this aspect of the process, so having the data will help you make informed strategic decisions. You can use data to figure out what types of customers are bringing you the most value, whether that means sales, or engagement on social media, or any other metric. You can track what methods they use to interact with your brand, and how those contacts convert into sales. Once you have enough information on your target audience, you can create a marketing funnel that caters to these behaviors to help maximize your returns.

Personalization to Your Audience

Sometimes in marketing, the most important thing is timing. Your message has to be sent and received at just the right time to affect the behaviors of potential customers. Relevancy is just as important because if your audience can’t relate to something, then it will not connect with them and it will not lead to engagement. With big data tools, you can get real-time insights into the people who are actively interested in your product. If you combine this with an automation tool, you can catch potential customers when they are most susceptible to buying your product or interacting with your brand and give them content that they will connect with.

Forecasting

To move forward in marketing, you often need to look backwards. Using historical data, you can better plan for the future. Algorithms based on statistical data can provide you with the odds of certain results over time, and even the likely behaviors of your potential customers. Once you have these odds, you can better forecast how successful each aspect of your marketing strategy can be.

Stay On Top of Industry Trends

Successful marketing campaigns need to stay trendy at all times. Once they get even a little stale, the results can plummet. By using big data tools, you can collect information from many sources, including what your competitors are doing and what is happening in the industry as a whole. This will give you an understanding of what is working and what isn’t, and how you can tweak your strategy to increase returns. The key will be knowing what to do with this data about trends. You will have to decide for yourself if keeping up with the trend is what you need to do, or whether it will be a better approach to be an outlier and go against the grain. The data can help you with this by giving you the information you need to decide whether a trend is falling and you should pivot, or whether you need to invest.

Pricing

Establishing appropriate price points can be very hard for businesses and marketers, but analyzing your data can help you make informed decisions. You can monitor the prices for all of your products and determine what consumer interest is at those points. Using this data, you can adjust your prices correspondingly so that you can get the most out of every sale you get. Not only that, but data can provide you with the insights you need to take the step of offering sales and inducements to customers. This can include pricing something as a loss leader or even for free in order to get customers to buy something else or join your mailing list, for instance.

ROI

In the end, it really boils down to your return on investment (ROI) when it comes to a marketing strategy. You might think you have some really effective content, but if it’s not resonating with consumers or it costs too much to produce, then it’s not actually helping you. Analytics can help you drill down and figure out exactly which activities are improving your bottom line the most. You can track consumer actions to your initiatives, in what way they responded, and how invested they were in something. That way you can get a better handle on your true ROI, which will help you pivot when you need to and plan future marketing efforts.

Constant Improvement

Things move fast nowadays, and your marketing strategy needs to be able to keep up. You can no longer afford to stay stagnant if something isn’t working. In the past, there was a lag between producing marketing content and understanding the results. This is not the case anymore. Using big data, you can constantly check, re-check, and test everything you do to make sure that it is operating at its peak effectiveness. If there’s a certain type of content that gets more engagement than others, then you can produce more of it. If specific buttons on your website aren’t getting clicked at the rate you need, then you can edit them. Your marketing strategy can be nimble and can pivot on the fly successfully without having to completely overhaul your strategy. Big data and analytics can help you do that to stay ahead of the pack.

What you need to remember is that big data is already a major part of your competitors’ SEO marketing plan. If you are going by your preconceived beliefs, or simply taking a cookie-cutter approach, then there’s a good chance you are falling behind. Embracing analytics means that you will always have the information at your fingertips to make the most informed decisions possible that are less susceptible to personal biases and emotional reactions. Find the tools that work well for you, and apply what you learn to every aspect of your marketing plan. You will find that the more you know, the better your results will be.