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If given extra budget, 32% of marketers would spend more on data and analytics. That’s more than those who said they would spend on search, social and additional headcount!
Modern marketers love data for so many reasons. Why?
- Data helps optimize businesses from acquisition all the way through customer purchase and reengagement.
- It helps them achieve high ROI Facebook and Google Ads campaigns.
- It helps them compete against other increasingly data-driven marketing teams.
- It gets them a seat at the leadership table.
Data is more available than ever before. Silicon Valley startups and Shopify store owners alike have data visualization tools. If you are a marketer working in today’s world, it’s pretty likely that you have your own analytics system working at the moment. How can you supercharge that system to increase your acquisition? Let’s take a closer look.
Understanding your funnel data to improve performance marketing campaigns
Is it my ad creative? Is it my website? Is it my sales team? Is it my email marketing? You may never know unless you look at your business like a funnel.
So what is a funnel? It is the process by which your customer comes into contact with your business, and it looks something like this:
That being said, every business is different, and every business has its own unique marketing funnel that contributes to the success of its conversions.
CRMs like HubSpot allow you to visualize funnels, which is incredibly helpful. They’ve built this into their capabilities because marketers love funnels. Funnels help us understand where we need to optimize, double down, and cut back our efforts.
Even if you don’t have HubSpot, it’s worth thinking about where your customers are coming from from a funnel perspective.
- Where do they first engage with your product?
- How does your business engage back with them?
- And how does that first touchpoint eventually lead to a sale?
For example, consider a startup that sells meal kits. They advertise in a number of different ways: they put out billboards, they run podcast ads, they do direct mail marketing, and they do more traditional digital marketing.
To understand where their customers are coming from, you need to start at the “top” of the funnel – those first initial touchpoints. From there, you need to look at how that customer engaged with your business – did they go to the website? Call your salespeople? Enter their email address? And then what? Did they get an offer via email that convinced them to try the meal kit? Did a particular Facebook Ad lead directly to conversion?
This path is exactly what your funnel should tell you. Just to be clear, the path of your customer can look a number of ways, but the funnel itself should capture those big ideas and distill them down, so you can look at the big picture of your customer journey.
Understanding customer LTV to inform your channel mix
The best marketers know that not all channels and customers are created equal. All things equal, customers that spend $1,000 are better than the ones that spend $100.
Using analysis and data cuts, you should be able to begin segmenting your customers by tiers. Figuring out commonalities among the highest value customers can help inform your channel mix.
- Are your best users coming from search?
- Are they male or female?
- How old are they?
The list could go on.
In search businesses, certain keywords may even drive better customers. Take a tax business like PicnicTax. My work with that client yielded huge results because we were able to quickly dissect that more complex tax returns were more valuable. In other words, someone searching for “K1 taxes” or “investment property tax returns” yielded higher lifetime values than someone simply searching “online accountant.” This enabled us to more profitably shift our acquisition mix for the client.
Understanding all of this will allow you to choose marketing channels that work for the people that offer the highest LTV for your business. Knowing this information will allow you to allocate your budget more efficiently and ultimately, optimize return on ad spend.
Use data from one channel to inform another
Your data is valuable, not just in one channel, but across channels.
For example, I use learnings from email marketing creative to understand the value propositions that drive highest click-through-rates. This data translates, and I am able to use it in optimizing my Facebook and Google advertising as well.
Another great example lies in SEO: Understanding your keyword conversion from search engine marketing (SEM) can help inform your SEO strategy, because your conversion on paid keywords will likely translate to your organic keyword strategy as well.
These are one-off examples of how cross-channel data comparison is useful. When it comes down to it though, the absolute best way to execute this channel comparison is by using a data analytics software that puts all of your marketing campaigns into a dashboard. A marketing dashboard will allow you to see all of your data in one place to make these cross channel marketing decisions that much easier.
