From Roman marketplaces that used mosaics of different scenes to direct customers to stalls for fish, spices, or cloth to the proliferation of product placement in movies, technology has always shaped marketing. The modern marketplace is far more crowded than the Roman agora, and the competition has never been closer.
Here’s a look at what database services do for marketers and why data-driven marketing gives you an edge.
Linking Marketing Activity and ROI
It was once a marketing truism that you couldn’t put a price on positive press, but that’s no longer entirely true. Database services are able to connect the dots between all marketing activities and their expected outcomes in a way that delivers welcome predictability to marketers defining ROI. Even more important, the connection between marketing activity and value strengthens over time as your database services team builds historical records.
Highlighting Areas of Opportunity
How do you spot emerging markets? When do you know your buyers are coming from unexpected quarters? Can you do more to increase per-transaction spend with your current customers through up-selling or cross-selling, and if so, where? Data-driven insights excel at pinpointing areas of opportunity for marketers. By tracking site traffic, social media signals, and subscriptions, then correlating that information with hard data on conversions and sales, you’re able to trace the trajectory of all your leads through their buying journeys. When you get this bird’s-eye view of all the trails your buyers take when going from initial contact to conversion, you see where some paths are more worn than others – and that’s where you want to act.
Gaining Greater Customer Insight
Know who your customers are, and you’ll discover more like them. You’ll also retain the ones you have because you’re able to serve their needs more completely. This dual promise – readily finding new leads and maintaining great relationships with the ones you already have – gives database-driven marketing a significant edge over conventional customer-care tools. Siloed systems only create a fractured image of your customer base at best; with them, you’re not able to see and respond to all your leads’ needs.
Becoming More Responsive
Just about everything we do today takes less time than it used to, and to put it bluntly, we’ve all gotten a little spoiled because of it. We don’t want to wait two weeks for a mailed reply to a request; we don’t even want to wait two days. To maximize your sales opportunities, you need to be instantly, effortlessly responsive to your leads. Database services that put all a lead’s account information in a centralized location and let you address that professional’s needs straight away are key to keeping up with customer expectations.
Improving Content Quality
Content has moved from an almost exclusively top-down model in which businesses dictate to buyers what they need via advertising to a customer-centric model that lets audience members choose what they want to see. Your database marketing strategy must be ready to deliver desirable content on your audience’s terms, not yours. How do you know what they want to see? Again, data provides the answers. With a sound database management strategy combined with marketing automation technology, you can anticipate what your audiences want even before they know they want it – and that’s truly revolutionary.
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