Marketing campaigns are vital to a business’ success – but are your data profiling tools delivering on their potential or are you simply shooting in the dark?
The Knowledge
When first brainstorming for a marketing campaign, we tend to run on gut instinct and our past experience as to who the intended target customer is. According to Marketscan’s Marketing Campaign Survey, 65% of those surveyed use accumulated market knowledge to work out who to target with their campaigns. But that knowledge can only get you so far – and a more analytical approach is required to unlock the true potential of your database-powered campaigns.
No Pain, No Gain
Think surgical strike, not a blunderbuss.
Use data profiling to identify key personas and ask yourself:
- Are there commonalities in your database relating to your campaign that can be exploited?
- Perhaps a pain shared by certain sized companies?
- Differing departments that share the same issues?
- Typical customer characteristics that echo your campaign’s message?
- Or specific geographical regions or types that reflect your planned mail-out’s theme?
Data profiling can uncover leads and avenues for your campaign that you may not have considered before. Let hard data inform your decisions.
A Thru B
If intending to deploy your campaign via email, use the ultimate in data profiling tools – A/B split testing – before the big rollout to ensure it will hit its intended mark:
- Create small sample groups from your overall client list.
- Use each group to test response rates:
From the persona point of view – a particular type of client versus another type to see who delivers the highest rate…
… to the pragmatic – one sample group receives your email in the morning while the other receives it towards the end of the business day. Which time delivered the highest click-through rates? Through A/B testing, you can draw up a targeted strategy that your final campaign can exploit to hit home its message.
Third Party Therapy
According to Marketscan’s Marketing Campaign Survey, over 84% of businesses use both existing and new data to flesh out their databases. But where is the best place to source new data? The benefits of bringing a third party data provider are far-reaching. They will:
- Examine your existing customers and campaign, and spot new angles that you may have missed – remember, it’s a reputable provider’s job to analyse customer records from across all industries on a daily basis.
- Cross reference your records with their own database, pulling in new and relevant leads for your intended campaign.
- Offer a data cleansing service to boost your data quality, ensuring that your records are legally compliant and up to date.
- Offer specific data packages tailored for A/B testing.
Remember:
- Your database is the core of your business.
- Use it to identify the customers whose pains most tally with your intended campaign.
- Use A/B testing on a cross section of your intended market to test if the campaign’s message is hitting home.
- Use a third party provider to help expand your customer records and aid in profiling.
Is your audience being properly targeted?
However, all of this is just one element of a marketing campaign! Ensuring your marketing campaign is highly targeted can be a challenge, but the guide ‘Conquer your Marketing Campaign Challenges’ has all the information you need to combat those highly impactful hurdles.
This article first appeared on the Marketscan blog.
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