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Data is the driving force behind successful modern marketing. It allows you to create personalized campaigns that resonate with your audience and reach new potential customers or supporters.
Taking a data-driven approach to marketing will completely transform your strategy, enabling you to capture a higher return on investment (ROI). In this guide, we’ll provide five tips to help you incorporate data into your marketing process.
The more information you have about your audience, the better you’ll be able to reach them. A data append involves supplementing your database with information from third-party sources. Appending data ensures your database is well-rounded so you have all the information you need to contact your audience members and tailor your communications to them.
Depending on your organization’s goals and needs, you may append a combination of the following data types:
For example, if you run a direct mail campaign, you can append postal address data to ensure your marketing materials reach the right people. That way, you reduce wasted resources and can be confident your target audience receives your messaging.
Once your database is fully fleshed out with your appended data, group your audience by shared characteristics. These groups—or segments—allow you to create personalized campaigns that cater to different interests or demographics represented in your target audience.
Common segmentation methods include grouping by age, location, and interests. Then, you can serve each segment content that is most likely to resonate with them, increasing the chance they’ll engage with your organization.
For example, let’s say you’re in the marketing department at a major university. You’re about to run a video marketing campaign to increase alumni donations. From past experience, you know that older alumni respond better to content that invokes nostalgia while younger alumni prefer to see statistics about where their funds are going.
To cater to these preferences, start by segmenting your alumni by age. Then, create two separate videos: one that focuses more on storytelling and remembering the “good old days” and another that explains how 45% of last year’s alumni donations went to student scholarships, 30% went to campus maintenance, and 25% went to student programming.
Send older alumni the first video and younger alumni the second, making sure to track engagement metrics to evaluate your approach.
After you’ve properly enhanced and organized your data for your current audience, think about reaching new audiences. If you’ve ever wanted to expand into a new market or test how a certain group responds to your messaging, your organization could benefit from building a custom marketing audience.
Work with a data provider to access exclusive datasets, create a custom marketing audience, and activate that audience across online and offline channels. Take a look at some example marketing audience use cases for different types of organizations:
In all of these cases, the example organization wants to run a specific marketing campaign but lacks contact information for the target audience they’d like to reach. A data provider can grant you access to your intended audience so you can successfully communicate with them.
Sometimes, it’s best to directly ask your audience how they feel about your marketing efforts. Survey responses are a form of zero-party data, which, according to Deep Sync, is information customers or supporters voluntarily share with your organization. This data can help you shape your marketing strategy according to audience preferences and feedback.
For example, if you’re sending a post-event survey, you may ask questions like:
You can also send more general surveys following major marketing campaigns or at any point to get a read on how your audience perceives your marketing outreach. Ask open-ended questions that give respondents a chance to express their opinions in full.
Throughout your campaigns, you collect a variety of data—both about your audience and campaign performance. NXUnite by Nexus Marketing recommends keeping track of the following metrics to assess your marketing methods:
With a clear, data-backed sense of how well each of your marketing techniques and platforms performs, you can make informed decisions about which methods to prioritize and which may need adjustments to better reach and engage your audience.
No matter your industry, data is a powerful marketing tool that can help you unlock important insights about your audience so you can better reach and engage them. Store the data you collect in a secure database so you can easily access the insights you need to sharpen your strategy.
Gabrielle is the Director of Marketing & Sales Operations for Deep Sync. She joined the organization in 2017 and brings 20 years of experience in strategic marketing, branding, communications, sales enablement, and digital marketing. With a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done attitude and a big-picture mindset, Gaby loves solving marketing and business challenges. She earned both a B.S. in Marketing and an M.B.A. in Marketing Management from the University of Tampa. Gaby enjoys spending time with her fiercely outspoken daughter; hiking and kayaking; rocking out in the first row of a live show; and giving back to her local community.
