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Thomas Jefferson is credited with popularising the phrase “knowledge is power.” That phrase may be a cliche now, but it still holds true. Were he here today, Jefferson might even admit that marketing data is power. Data in marketing provides the knowledge and insight needed for companies to build a winning marketing strategy and grow a competitive advantage.
Marketing data is, by definition, any information a business collects for or because of marketing activities. There is a wide range of marketing data, from market research to transaction and competitive data. (Don’t worry; we’ll outline the types of marketing data later in this article.)
What do businesses use marketing data for? Generally, marketing data is a tool that helps them guide, inform, and revise their marketing strategies and make marketing teams and campaigns more efficient overall.
Marketing efficiency is streamlining marketing output to maximise the return on investment (ROI) while minimising costs. The first step in any marketing efficiency initiative is to measure performance and develop a benchmark, and you can’t do that without data.
Measuring and interpreting his own marketing data gave Volvo’s marketing director, Per Carleo, his “aha moment.” It can provide yours, too. But first, you must decide which data generated by your business will help you market your products to customers more effectively.
Let’s look at the various sources of marketing data that increase knowledge and can help you develop an efficient marketing program. We’ve broken them down into six main types.
Customer data, also known as first-party data, comes from in-person interactions or tracing customers’ online journeys. This data can be quantitative, such as how many customers convert via your website, or qualitative, such as what a consumer says about your brand or business in a focus group.
It’s easy to capture customer data digitally. You can track webpage visits, the forms customers fill out, what comments they leave, and so on. It’s less straightforward to capture data from offline interactions, unless you are tracking and recording phone calls.
Phone calls are a terrific source of customer data. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), data collection from phone recordings at scale is fast and efficient. AI algorithms trained to pick out keywords provide very granular insights from calls that provide insight into the voice of the customer (VoC).
Tapping into the VoC can give marketers a significant advantage in personalising marketing campaigns and streamlining the buying journey to meet each customer’s unique needs.
Campaign data is the quantitative and qualitative insight gathered from a marketing initiative. Campaigns generate huge amounts of data from metrics such as:
This data can be analysed to measure the success of marketing campaigns and:
In a digital world, technographic data is becoming increasingly more valuable to B2B marketers. This data relates to the technology used by businesses — in other words, the tech stack.
Gaining insight into the technology businesses use, and how they use it, can inform marketing strategies so that marketers can tailor campaigns to customers. For example, if a company’s software product integrates seamlessly with a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Salesforce, just knowing that a target customer uses Salesforce can lead to a much more targeted marketing campaign.
Collecting technographic data is a complex process, though. It is also laborious work to gather this data by cold calls, direct email surveys, or auditing websites for information on apps and software a business uses. Not surprisingly, a service industry has grown up around technographic data-gathering with companies like ExactBuyer, HG Insights, TechTarget, CoreSignal and many other third-party providers offering technographic data for sale.
Transactional data, which is based on actual transactions, provides critical insights into consumers’ purchasing behavior and more. That’s because a customer transaction doesn’t always take the form of a purchase.
Website clicks are a good example of valuable transactional data. Like purchases, clicks provide multiples of data. When clicks are logged, the date and time of the action are recorded. Website clicks also record which page the customer left, and which page they visited, following the click.
Transactional data has historically been hard to gather from offline transactions, especially phone calls. With the rapid rise of AI use in marketing, that’s quickly changing. By using AI to digitise, flag, and analyse speech, Invoca’s algorithms can identify when purchases are made for specific products during phone interactions.This data is easily merged with online transactional data to reflect a more complete view for marketing.
This type of transactional data can be analysed and used by sales and marketing teams to forecast sales more accurately and measure campaign performance.
You can gather data about your competitors from many publicly available market sources, such as scraping competitor websites; reviewing public filings, news articles, and social media posts; and monitoring online customer comments, reviews and surveys.
This data can also come directly from customers in phone conversations with your business. Information on competitor pricing, for example, may come up in conversation with a sales agent if a customer is looking to get a price discount. You can capture valuable information like this at scale using tools such as Invoca to record and analyse every call.
Competitor data can also provide insight into industry standards, practices, and trends as well as offer a benchmark for your marketing program. For example, if you collect data on several competitors and they are all marketing a subscription program, that trend suggests you should offer a subscription option, too.
Market data can be collected from competitor resources, market studies, and market research. Market data sheds light on your entire market, not just your competition, so it can clarify broader trends in your industry.
This type of marketing data can also help you identify opportunities for market expansion, such as the creation of new products. It can also expose threats or business risks. Suppose that market data show local automotive dealerships have all developed greater incentive packages for buyers with cars to trade in. This could indicate a threat to your market share, which means you should probably respond with a boosted package of your own.
Here are eight tips to help you use marketing data effectively to amplify your marketing strategy.
Be sure to collect marketing data from diverse sources. Relying on just one type of data can skew results and send your strategy down the wrong path.
For example, you can’t build a program solely around online behavior. Take a home services business, like appliance repair. While data shows that 64% of consumers undertake an online search for an appliance repair service, 92% of consumers pick up the phone and call a service to transact. If the appliance repair business is just collecting online data, it misses that nuance.
Collecting data from multiple, relevant sources helps to ensure that data analysis yields meaningful results for your business. In addition to first-party data from customer interactions, like phone calls, consider adding data from online behavior, customer reviews, and transactions to provide a clearer and more well-rounded picture of customer behavior.
If you’re gathering data from multiple sources and channels, the data is likely in different formats. That means you’ll need to integrate it into a data management system so it can be easily read and analysed. There are plenty of tools available from companies like IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon Web Services, and others to help you do this.
Data collection tools that already integrate with your CRM and the rest of your tech stack can save you a lot of extra work, however. For example, Invoca’s revenue execution platform integrates with tech applications like Adobe, Facebook, Five9, Google Ads, Hubspot, Salesforce, and many others.
You can slice and dice marketing data in many ways. One popular way is to analyse your target audience. What does the data tell you about your likely buyer? Are there patterns in age or financial status? Constructing a buyer persona using data can help you target marketing campaigns more effectively and decrease marketing costs.
Another way to look at data is through revenue analysis. Does the data show peaks or dips in revenue? Does it indicate why these changes occur?
Take the example of a pest control company that analyses data from mid-November appointment requests its contact centre received. That analysis shows a high proportion of calls from customers still mention mice, even though these seasonal requests typically end in late October. It could be an indication that cold weather started later this year, and the business should extend its seasonal rodent control marketing strategy for a few more weeks.
Many data analysis tools available today can make the process of analysing marketing data far more efficient. A new generation of tools powered by AI can analyse massive volumes of data at scale. Invoca’s platform analyses thousands of sales, marketing, or call centre phone conversations in real time, picking out keywords and patterns to provide marketers with key customer insights.
The insights gathered from data analysis can help marketers deliver highly targeted, customised and personalised campaigns to attract highly qualified leads to a business.
There are a countless targeted campaigns an auto dealer, for example, could launch to boost revenue. They could launch a campaign touting steeper discounts or buyer incentives during slow buying periods.
Data collected from phone calls reflects the true VoC and thus, can be invaluable in personalising and targeting marketing campaigns. To continue with the auto dealer example, the marketing team could serve ads to prospective buyers who expressed interest over the phone but didn’t ultimately make a purchase. They could even showcase the car model the caller mentioned in the conversation, showcasing its safety or performance features.
The iterative process is critical to creating a winning marketing strategy. So, however strong your data may be, it’s important to test, measure, and refine data-driven campaigns. A/B testing, or testing the performance of two slightly different forms of marketing content, can help generate more leads and improve the customer journey.
You can use this method to test website content, emails, text blasts, digital ads, social posts, and more. This approach might reveal, for example, that a slight change in wording, such as “discount” instead of “incentive,” can make all the difference in a marketing campaign.
Data analysis isn’t just a look back at what’s worked. AI tools make it quicker and easier for businesses to use data to conduct predictive analytics to guide future strategies. Predictive analytics involves using modeling and statistics techniques on datasets to make likely predictions about future performance or outcomes.
No marketing strategy can be effective if it doesn’t include the routine, ongoing monitoring of campaigns. How else do you really know if a campaign is meeting its goals?
Monitoring using AI gives marketers an extra benefit: the ability to analyse data in real time and use it to pivot and make on-the-fly adjustments to campaigns, including the digital ad bidding strategies that are so important to modern marketing.
Before real-time data analysis, ad bidding adjustments could only reliably be made to the next campaign. With real-time insights, such as Invoca’s VoC insights, marketers can adjust bidding strategies immediately to keep customer acquisition costs low. Invoca’s data insights from phone interactions can show Google Ads or other automated bidding tools the quality of leads each ad or campaign is driving so that bidding can be adjusted accordingly.
A data-driven strategy can benefit not just marketing. In fact, to make the most of data, you should foster a culture that values data-driven decision-making across the enterprise. Once teams see the results, they can easily see the everyday benefits of a data-driven approach.
There are plenty of tools on the market to help you create a great data-driven marketing strategy using marketing analytics. Here are some of the most flexible and dependable, including advanced tools that use AI.
Invoca helps businesses capture vital data from a source too often lost or overlooked: phone conversations. This cutting-edge platform specialises in call tracking and conversational analytics. Invoca fills the gap between digital marketing and direct customer interactions over the phone by providing detailed, searchable transcripts and recordings of every customer call your business makes and receives. In addition, Invoca’s AI analyses each call based on your organisation’s criteria, uncovering trends and insights you can use to drive more revenue.
Invoca’s data bridges the gap between marketing and sales teams, giving them full visibility into the buyer journey from first click to final phone conversation. This allows you to optimise marketing campaigns to drive more leads at a lower cost. It also helps you identify and eliminate barriers in the path to conversion, creating samless experiences that drive revenue and build loyalty. Invoca isn’t just another tool to add to an already crowded tech stack — it offers deep integrations with the tools you use every day.
Google Analytics is a free platform that offers tools to track website and app performance and user behavior. Codes are inserted into webpages and apps to collect data, package it, and send it to Google Analytics where it is analysed. A report is generated that includes user information like approximate geolocation, demographic data displayed through their online activity, as well as device and browser information.
Google Analytics also reports session statistics, such as duration and bounce rates, and how users arrived at the site, such as from organic search, an ad, page referral, or other marketing outreach. You can incorporate the data into your overall marketing analysis.
Google’s data can be configured specifically for analysis. So, for example, if you only want data from mobile sources, you can ask for that.
Adobe Analytics, which is part of the Adobe Experience Platform, offers cross-channel marketing analysis by “bringing data under one roof” from any digital point in the customer journey from webpages to emerging channels.
Adobe Analytics allows marketers to collect streaming web data for faster analysis and insights. It helps marketers see the data behind every conversion from paid, owned, or earned media so that they can deliver personalised buying experiences to customers.
Adobe offers advanced segmentation, so marketers can identify customers offering the best and most immediate ROI. Adobe also uses AI and machine learning to develop predictive analytics to guide future marketing strategies.
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform. Its marketing analytics and dashboard software tracks and analyses data across multiple channels used in the customer journey, such as email, social media, the web, and CRM. Like Google, it uses tracking codes to monitor website visits and customer actions.
The ability to generate detailed, automated reports on marketing assets and measure campaign performance in one centralised dashboard helps to streamline marketing operations.
Tableau is a visual analytics platform that provides intuitive data in easy-to-use interactive dashboards. Marketers can track digital media spend, social media, blog, and website performance, and other digital touchpoints along the customer journey, and combine insights from these sources to create actionable data reports.
Tableau’s dashboards are highly consumable so they can easily be shared outside of the marketing organisation to provide valuable insights throughout the enterprise.
Kissmetrics provides “person-based analytics” — behavioral analytics based on tracking billions of user actions and customer engagement. You can track the same digital touchpoints as other marketing analytics tools, but Kissmetrics “tracks every single time a visitor comes to your site, even prior to their signing up.”
Kissmetrics helps you to assess which marketing campaigns are resonating, compare the performance of landing pages, explore which search terms lead to revenue for your business, and how customers are engaging with your brand. It even has a real-time component, Kissmetrics Live, which lets marketers see up-to-the-minute trends so they can adjust their strategies on the fly.
It’s a fact that comprehensive marketing data helps teams enhance decision-making, spend smarter, personalise customer interactions, optimise campaign effectiveness, and boost ROI. So, it’s imperative that marketing teams embrace sophisticated analytics tools that can deliver actionable insights from millions of customer interactions, both online and offline.
Tools like Google Analytics and Kissmetrics can help marketing professionals to easily gather, sort and analyse data from online touchpoints effectively, but they miss offline interaction. Invoca’s AI platform bridges that gap by providing marketing with critical insights from actual phone conversations with customers.
Here are more resources to help you learn about the importance of marketing data and the impact it can have on the success of your marketing strategy:
You can also schedule a personal demo today to learn more about Invoca’s powerful conversation intelligence tools and analytics capabilities.
