By far, one of the best ways to know if your marketing campaigns are working is through the use of data-driven marketing tools.
When you want to track how well your content marketing, social media marketing, or other marketing strategies are doing, these tools provide you with a wealth of data that can help you figure out what is — and isn’t — working.
As a marketer, your goal should be to make the best marketing decisions regarding where to spend your budget. With data-driven marketing tools, you’ll be able to make the most out of your strategies, as well as make sure you’re connecting with your customers the right way.
Why Use Data-Driven Marketing Tools?
The use of data-driven marketing tools can enhance the customer experience, which can be beneficial to both you and your customers. According to Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase products from companies that personalize the customer experience.
By implementing a customer-centric marketing experience (for example, the use of targeted email campaigns), you can encourage customers to continue doing business with you. You’ll be able to build a loyal customer base.
Furthermore, customers have certain expectations from the brands they do business with. Because of that, it’s becoming more and more challenging to maintain — let alone gain — customers. It’s critical to exceed customer expectations as 1 in 3 customers would abandon a brand due to one bad experience.
Besides improved customer experience, data-driven marketing tools can be beneficial for other essential reasons, such as the following:
- They can help target your customers by providing personalized content and campaigns. As a result, you can improve your conversions and engagement efforts.
- They can also help understand customer behaviors which are crucial in selling to your customers and increasing your sales in the long run. With data-driven marketing tools, you can get to know your customer’s buying decisions and, in turn, sell more products or services to your target customers.
- They can help gather information and determine which marketing strategies are working and which need to be revised. Consequently, you can make the appropriate adjustments when your original marketing strategies can’t deliver effective results.
- They can give you an in-depth understanding of your customers through polls, surveys, and support chats. From there, you can use the gathered information to make business/product developments for your target market.
It would be best if you used data-driven marketing tools for your business for several reasons. But if you want to maximize their benefits, partnering them with specific resource planning tools may be best. Resource planning refers to the process of distributing tasks to optimize the efficiency of human and non-human resources.
With a resource planning tool, you can simplify resource bookings, provide more precise and detailed project scheduling, and ensure better overall management, including implementing data-driven marketing campaigns and strategies.
Make Sure to Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Data-driven marketing can give you insights into your customers, but only if you know what you’re looking for. It can be overwhelming to deal with data, which is why it’s important to set clear KPIs that can help you track your metrics properly. Examples of KPIs are the number of likes, website views, ebook or digital business card downloads, and so on.
6 Data-driven Marketing Tools You Need to Use
With the right data, you’ll be able to grow your business. We’ve broken down the best data-driven marketing tools you should be using right now.
1. Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is an AI software that helps create better SEO-optimized content to get the best possible ranking in the Google search result pages. It has a variety of tools to help achieve this goal, including a content planner, editor, SERP analyzer, keyword researcher, and auditor.
Surfer SEO uses artificial intelligence to analyze the top 10 websites ranking for the keywords you’re trying to rank for, then presents you with data-based recommendations on what to do. For instance, it can tell you how long you’re content should be, how many images to use, how many backlinks to get, etc. It’s without a doubt one of the best SEO tools. Check out our full review.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is every marketer’s go-to data-driven marketing tool — in fact, about 86 percent of businesses use it to explore the customer experience.
It can track the number of website visits, provide valuable insights on real-time customer engagement, count e-commerce sales, and many more. You can see what customers do whenever they visit your website and find out whether or not they find your content valuable.
In that way, you can improve low-performing pages and leverage high-performing ones to get customers to convert. And did we forget to mention that it’s free?
3. HubSpot
An all-in-one marketing automation software such as HubSpot enables you to manage leads, manage social media pages, and create custom landing pages and CTAs, among others.
This software grows your business by boosting engagement and earnings through the HubSpot Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and more. HubSpot can also be integrated with a number of third-party apps to obtain additional data.
As a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, HubSpot stands out for its lead management features. This way, you can capture potential customers and connect with them with the right messaging at the right time. You can see where they are in the sales funnel and craft appropriate content that will convert.
You can even use its automation features to ensure that you never lose a lead. For instance, if a customer is at a certain stage in the sales funnel, you can “tell” HubSpot to automatically send that customer a targeted email.
4. Salesforce
Salesforce is a CRM that stores customer information. By doing so, you can create a database of every interaction, which can allow your sales team to predict each customer’s needs, and your marketing team to come up with customer-centric marketing strategies.
Because you’ve seen where your customers have been, you can accurately offer them the information that they’d need at a particular point in the sales funnel.
For instance, if your customers are in the middle of the funnel (consideration), there’s no need to create content that introduces them to your brand. This is because they already know what you do — instead, what they’d need are articles to prove why they should pick you over your competitors.
In the same way, if they’re on the brink of conversion, they’d probably want a demo of your product or a “How-To” that can dispel their doubts.
5. Crazy Egg
If you’ve ever wanted to view web activity in detail, get Crazy Egg. With this software, you can see exactly how many clicks each link, tab, and webpage gets, thus allowing you to understand what is and isn’t grabbing the attention of website visitors. It breaks down what customers clicked and on what part of the page.
Going back to KPIs, let’s say that your KPI is the number of subscribers. If Crazy Egg shows you that people aren’t clicking on the “sign up” button, that may be a sign that your website isn’t well-designed. You can then redesign your website in a way that draws website visitors’ attention toward the “sign up” page.
6. MailChimp
Manage emails in one place with Mail Chimp, an app that allows teams to create email templates, automate emails, and more. Although it’s generally used as an email management tool, MailChimp can also track emails and click-throughs.
You’ll receive a notification every time a contact opens their email, or whenever they click a link in the email. That way, you can check if your email marketing campaigns are working or if you’re getting ignored.
Final Thoughts
With the use of these five data-driven marketing tools, you can generate the ROI you’ve always wanted, and slowly but steadily grow your business along the way. You’ll also be able to provide your customers with the experience they expect, and as a result, have satisfied customers who are sure to stick around.
