Marketing questions you should be asking your team
The value of your data
When Petram engages with a client, we typically go through a series of discovery questions in order to better understand where their data is coming from, how it is stored, and how they are using it. This allows us (and them) to create a plan for data optimization that will eventually help fuel their marketing decisions. Following are a few things to consider when looking at your own customer and marketing data.
Your source of truth
You should take an audit of all current customer touch points where you are accumulating data. With those touchpoints identified, an understanding and process of how that data is assimilated, merged, enriched, and stored, is crucial for orchestrating a cohesive multi-channel marketing campaign .Is your customer data across all customer touch points stored in a central repository as a singular source of truth? It should be. If it isn’t, you risk inaccurately measuring marketing outcomes and targeting the wrong customer at the wrong time. Here are a few more risks associated with not having a single source of truth for your data:
With data touch points not synced, you will inevitably miss communicating with segments of customers and prospects.
Communication and effort will be duplicated because their data wasn’t properly integrated.
Negative marketing experiences will be common because marketing can’t be synced with a customer’s communication preferences.
Campaign performance metrics will be inaccurate because your data sources are spread across different channels and not sharing identical attributes or recent updates.
Their data wasn’t properly stored or enriched.
Creating effective journeys
Another question you need to answer is: Do you have baselines and targets for metrics at each stage of the customer journey across marketing channels? Have you defined what effective actually means for a specific marketing channel? Do you have a good understanding of what metrics contribute greater to conversion and business revenue?When looking at your customer journey, across all your marketing channels, you should have a clear view of metrics for your entire purchase funnel. This means understanding benchmark metrics for overall awareness and interest vs benchmarks metrics for repeat purchase and retargeting. Historical customer behavior across channels can help you learn which actions have the biggest impact on behavior at different buying stages.
Right channel, right time
Another aspect of your data that should be studied is the correlation between when and where a customer performs specific buying actions. How are your digital and offline marketing channels integrated in a cohesive approach to reach customers at the right place at the right time? How are you optimizing times of day to synchronize specific ads or emails to reach customers that will lead to engagement and conversion?Sometimes reaching the right person at the right time requires channel coordination, in which two marketing channels “tag-team” – this results in a multiplier effect, which increases the likelihood of customer interaction significantly. Blueshift’s 2022 benchmark report states the increase in click-through rate with cross-channel batch sends vs single-channel sends is 39%. Surround-sound marketing helps achieve this, so that all marketing channels are coordinated in terms of timing, messaging, and channel context, so that your brand is always in the mind of your customers.
Marketing triggers
Our last example of a critical question to ask about your marketing data is: What behaviors can be used to trigger personalized communications to influence the purchase journey?These behaviors can vary greatly depending on your business, but some behavioral aspects can be applied generally.
How often does a customer visit your business location, website, etc.?
How do you notify customers that your inventory has changed or a price change on a product of interest has occured?
How do you utilize milestone-related triggers to increase customer loyalty (anniversaries, birthdays, etc.)?
What are the last touch-point marketing channels visited prior to a purchase? What did that journey look like?
Moving forward
The questions mentioned here are just some of a wide-range of questions that should be asked about your customer data and how it helps define your marketing strategy. Petram helps businesses understand, define, and predict how that data can be utilized to increase revenue and marketing performance. Contact us below and let’s talk about your business data.