The new year is fast-approaching, so it’s high time that we evaluate our marketing strategy and come up with tactics to shake things up.
Digital marketing is one of the fastest-changing industries out there – is your marketing strategy agile enough to adapt?
There have been multiple marketing innovations introduced in 2020 (driven by both technology and the pandemic that has changed all the aspects of our lives), yet one trend is the most prominent one: Data
Never before have brands had access to so much marketing data that includes:
- Internal / private data (customers’ emails, buying preferences, etc.)
- Public data (like competitors’ identifiable marketing tactics, overall shopping trends, etc.)
You don’t need to be a data scientist or invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in data collection agencies to create a data-driven marketing strategy these days. Thanks to the Internet, big and small brands can access more data that they can process.
And it is a beautiful thing because it gives a competitive advantage to smaller brands that are eager to innovate.
Here are a few data-driven tactics anyone can implement, even without technical skills:
Improve Your Data Quality
Data: Brands lose up to 20% of revenue due to poor data quality practices (Source: zdnet/ Data Quality)
Sisense defines data quality as follows:
Data quality measures the condition of your data, using factors such as accuracy, consistency (in all fields across data sources), integrity (whether the fields are complete), and usability.
How to identify poor data quality? There can be a variety of factors including:
- Is your data consistent? In other words, if it’s coming from different sources (which is usually the case), does it correlate?
- Is your data relevant? In other words, are you using the data that helps your company’s bottom line? If you are using Facebook likes as the measure of your success, what exactly does this data do to help your revenue grow?
- Do you collect the data you need? Does your company have the necessary data that would foster growth?
Improving your data quality is not just necessary, it’s also quite doable. There are multiple solutions that collect, organize and blend data to turn it into actionable insights delivered to each of your teams. The two easiest and the most affordable solutions include:
- Cyfe (create dashboards to consolidate data and deliver most relevant data to each of your teams)
- SE Ranking (pull lots of data from various sources to monitor your site health, positions, traffic, etc.)
- Whatagraph (turn data into visualized email reports that are delivered to different teams within your organizations
Embrace Inclusive Marketing
Data: Over 25% (i.e. one in 4) of US adults have a disability (Source: CDC / Disability & Health Infographics).
Are you including these people in your target audience? Do you create marketing personas that would include a disability?
Inclusive marketing refers to adapting technologies and messaging to enable underrepresented groups to fully connect with and experience brands online.
In web context, inclusive marketing often means making your website accessible to people with all kinds of disabilities and difficulties. These disabilities may prevent web users from being able to see page elements or navigate a site using a mouse or touchpad.
Including these people into your marketing strategy is not only a smart move (otherwise, every fourth user of your site may have hard time navigating it or making a purchase). It’s also a way to show that you care. This means making your marketing philanthropic.
The good news, it is also pretty easy to implement. You don’t have to re-design your site to make it accessible to users with disabilities. You can easily optimize your site for just about any sort of disability by using a solution called accessiBe.
There’s also a DIY way to make your site accessible but it is likely to take you some time.
Use Cross-Channel Marketing
Data: The number of channels consumers are using to make a buying decision is growing. Just over a decade ago the average consumer used two touch-points when buying an item. Four years ago consumers were already using an average of six touch-points with almost 50% regularly using more than four. (Marketing Week / Why marketers are failing to target consumers at key life events)
Many of those touch-points tend to happen on different devices and through different channels. Millennial shoppers shop from mobile devices,
For example, a contemporary consumer will search Google before buying an item after seeing a social media ad. And these two touch-points are very likely to happen on different devices.
What does it mean for businesses?
They need to be everywhere.
You should also be diversifying your content strategy with a wide array of types, in order to reach the highest potential audience, on more channels. This will also help your project build authority, which is critical in retention, churn reduction and overall brand loyalty.
Yes, have a blog. It is a great SEO tool and you should already know how to be targeting keywords by now. But in addition to this, make videos, create infographics, launch a podcast, guest on other podcasts and YouTube channels, embrace newer networks like TikTok and Instagram, and contribute to other blogs. You should be producing diverse content constantly to be able to market to different channels.
Luckily, content re-packaging tools make this process easy and affordable for brands:
- Venngage: Turn any text into an infographic
- Haiku Deck: Turn any text into a slideshow
- InVideo: Turn any text into an engaging video
[Invideo allows you to create videos for Instagram and Facebook ads, customize Youtube videos to brand them better, and more!]
Personalize Your Marketing
Data: 80% of people agree that they are much more likely to buy a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences (source: Epsilon Marketing / The impact of personalization)
Marketing personalization is one of the most powerful tactics out there, yet many brands don’t really understand it.
Marketing personalization is going far beyond using “the first name in the marketing email” or even “segmenting your email list by previous engagement”.
Marketing personalization is about creating on-site personalized experiences.
You are scrolling through a website and you see a handful of product suggestions on the bottom. It shows a strip of items that you can tell are based around people of your gender and your age, much of it not flattering. Mainly because it is a selection of products that you have never before purchased or needed to purchase, but that someone might assume a person of your target demographic would enjoy.
Or you are going through your email and catch sight of a message that is titled, “[Your Name], I need to speak to you right away!” Upon opening it, it is a generic, uninteresting automail from someone’s newsletter you forgot you had even signed up for. You roll your eyes and hit ‘delete’ without going any further.
The above examples show how you lazily customize to fit a potential customer. Is it any wonder the fish aren’t biting when the bait is so unappetizing?
Now imagine this:
You are on that same website and below is a collection of items you have been searching for price comparisons on all week. Others are items related to what you have purchased on the site in the past, or reviewed highly elsewhere. They are even within a decent price range of your usual budget.
Later, you are going through your email and there is a newsletter you forgot you signed up for. But rather than cheap clickbait, it has a subject line about something that interests you. You take the time to click and read the whole thing and even end up back on the website through a provided coupon for an item you had put in your cart a few days before but hadn’t pulled the trigger on because of the price. Now you are getting it for 15% off and you couldn’t be more thrilled!
Notice how each of the counterexamples totally changes the consumer experience and makes them more willing to engage with your brand. All because you showed them that you were actually paying attention to them as individuals, not a category or demographic. They are people, not walking dollar signs and stat sheets.
That is the true meaning of personalized ecommerce and when done correctly, it is a great way to generate leads that turn to profit and also build a relationship with your customer base.
Marketing personalization is becoming more and more available for smaller brands that lack huge budgets or technical teams. Finteza is a web analytics platform that comes with a powerful re-marketing solution allowing you to customize users’ experiences based on:
- Source of traffic
- On-site actions
- Demographics (gender, age)
- Location
What’s more important, it is extremely easy to set up and very affordable.
What’s the real moral or takeaway here? Marketing innovation is a never-ending process. You can never consider this task done, but it is also what makes digital marketing such an exciting industry. Good luck innovating and reinventing!
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