3 Ways to Mine a Marketing Pot of Gold

Thanks to silos of data about customers from different channels—such as website visitors and behaviors, search, CRM, purchase data, email, and social— valuable attributes often aren’t unified in one location. As a result, it's challenging for marketers to intersect their knowledge of the customer profile across these channels to better refine their targeting, communications, and strategy over time.

While marketers are harnessing the power of technology platforms to better sort through information, it’s critical to develop and document strategies that will help you react more intuitively to the behaviors and reactions of your audiences.

Think of these strategies as a means of building a “treasure trove” of data that can be used to support your marketing activities, ensure that customers getting the most relevant message, and help progress these important relationships.

In the spirit of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday, here are three tips to help you mine a marketing pot of gold via channels native to your every day marketing activities, as well as the audiences you serve.

1. Dig through social media data- Use data to figure out the sentiment of the conversations happening on social media around your brand. Listen and respond to both positive and negative comments about your brand, products, and services. Whether someone is desperate for help posting to your Facebook wall, or just had a great call with a customer service rep and is tweeting their thanks, users deserve responses, and social sentiment data can help. Take record of the words used most frequently to describe these experiences to refine your reaction strategy.

2. Drill down the rainbow of your assets- Measure the performance of supplementary campaign assets to improve prospecting. For example, create a video to support an eBook launch to entertain and engage. This type of content offering enables demand generation but also can garner significant and repeated engagement with current customers. The use of “reciprocal” content, such as an ungated video with gated follow-up content, can provide lead scoring and interest qualification opportunities that can be strategically used to better prioritize outreach with people from your audience most likely to respond.

3. Excavate better segmenting knowledge via email- Pay close attention to all reactions to your email messages, including open, consumption, and sharing metrics. Understanding email patterns can be helpful in developing a more behavioral-based engagement model. Armed with the proper information about which actions your email recipients are taking, marketers can refine copywriting and design elements to suit a desired course of action. For example, if sharing content appears to occur across one or more specific social channels, highlight an easy-to-use sharing mechanism with language-appropriate calls to action, such as “Like this on Facebook” or “Get connected via LinkedIn.” You then can improve segmenting efforts by sharing behavioral specifically.

Implementing the right data management strategy in more intuitive ways can help marketers be more empowered to use information from disparate channels to define target audiences, understand the impacts of specific behaviors, and act accordingly.

For more tips on mining your marketing pot of gold, check out our SlideShare with tips to “Create Your Own Marketing Luck.”