7 Ways to Use Data in Marketing Plans

October 6, 2014

Data is the key to your marketing efforts; it allows you to determine how well your marketing has been doing and how you can improve your marketing efforts. Unfortunately, not every business has a good grasp on how to incorporate data into their marketing strategy.

These 7 ways to start using data in your marketing plans can help you get a practical idea of how to leverage the power of data.

1. Target Keywords

If you aren’t already looking to optimise your website around a search engine keyword, you should be. Using tools like Google AdWords, you can learn pertinent data about the competitiveness of certain keywords so that you can incorporate them into your greater marketing plan.

Picking the right keywords will help you generate visibility amongst search engine users that are looking for the kinds of products or services that you can offer. This is critical when you consider the importance of search engines; research statistics show that over half of all web traffic comes from organic search. Targeting the right keywords is the first step in helping you get a larger piece of that pie.

2. Page Visits

Which of your websites are getting the most visits? This kind of data will help you better understand how to change your website so that the pages you want to get seen are the ones that people are actually visiting.

This data will also help you when you go to tweak your website in an effort to determine what will get you the most views. If traffic goes up after you add or remove something from your site, it is a fair bet that you made the right decision.

3. Visitor Demographics

Where are your visitors from? How old are they? What fields are they interested in? All of this information can help you create a viable strategy when it comes to targeting your marketing at a particular group of people.

The more of this data you can collect, the better you will understand how good of a job you are doing at targeting the right demographic for your products or services. This data may also help you change your target demographic as necessary, if you find that you are gaining more attention than you thought you would from a particular group of people.

4. Social Media Interests

One of the best sources for data that can be incorporated into marketing plans is social media. The more information you have about what people share or follow on social networks, the easier it will be for you to determine what kind of marketing efforts will grab their attention.The Guardian advises marketers to use data from Facebook to create a comprehensive customer demographic.

5. Marketing Timing

Data about the timing of your marketing is also very important. When are people engaging with your blog posts or social media content? Learning this information will help you get a better sense of when you should create and share new content for your marketing campaigns.

6. Channels For Marketing

Want to know which platforms are best for your marketing efforts? Data that tells you where most of your visitors come from can help you get an idea about which channels need marketing improvement, and which ones are successful. Don’t forget to analyse the specifics of the data; for example, do you get more visitors from an image or a text-only status on Facebook?

Will you get more Twitter retweets if you share a quote or post some original content created by your organisation? These questions can all be answered by using data about the timing of your marketing efforts.

7. Tell People About It

The last of these 7 ways to start using data in your marketing plans is an obvious one that some marketers forget about. If you come across an interesting piece of data that helps you in your marketing efforts, why not share it with your audience? Not only will this help you build a rapport with your current and prospective customers, it will give them valuable information that helps them think about things in a different light.

 

These 7 ways to start using data in your marketing plans are just the tip of the iceberg. To maximise your success with data, you need to consider which kind of data is most relevant to your marketing and how this data specifically impacts the success of your marketing plan.

Even if you cannot apply all of these 7 ways to start using data in your marketing plans, they will help tremendously as you look to improve the ROI on your marketing campaigns.