Nowadays, marketing is almost 100% data-driven. This means that if you want to run effective marketing campaigns, you need to collect and use customer data to your advantage. In fact, there are six steps you should consider when planning a marketing campaign. And in this post, we will show you how to do so.
The majority of the actions mentioned in this post do not require any financial investments. All you need to do is spend some time working on your target audience and customer base to make your marketing campaigns more effective. It all starts with segmenting your audience.
Segment your audience
The times of mass marketing are long gone. If you want to run marketing campaigns that work, you need to think of your customer base as segments and individuals, not one unified mass. Typically, companies create audience segments based on the following factors:
- Demographics (e.g., age, gender, profession, location)
- Behavior (e.g., past purchases, viewed products, communication with customer service, etc.)
- Preferences (especially interests and the types of previously viewed or purchased products)
Of course, in order to segment your audience, you need to put all customers and users together in one well-organized space, where they can be assigned to different segments and subsegments (based on their attributes). That’s what you can easily do with our contact database management feature.
Personalize your messaging
That’s the second crucial step. Different segments and individuals require tailor-made messaging. You don’t want to talk about baby dresses to a teenager, right? If you can go one step further and personalize your messaging to each and every individual, that’s even better. However, it may require a more advanced personalization engine (preferably AI-powered), especially when you have thousands of customers in your database.
Personalization includes tailor-made offers, ads, and advice that’s made with a given person or customer segment in mind. The goal is to send out messages that are more likely to resonate with each segment.
Track customer journey
Effective marketing requires a full understanding of how people interact with your offers, your website, and your brand in general. With analytics tools, you can analyze specific touchpoints in the customer journey to see what people usually do to become your customers.
Take a look at a short example of such a customer journey:
Viewed the ad -> Visited the website -> Read a blog post -> Searched for the product of interest -> Put it in the cart -> Finalize the order
As you can see, there are several touchpoints leading to closing the sale: The ad, the blog, and the search engine. And there can be many different such touchpoints in your business. Moreover, they can differ depending on the type of products you offer or the populations that you serve.
You need to understand how this process works in your company because it will allow you to direct potential customers to the elements of your offer/website that will likely help them make the decision to buy from you.
Take a look at our Pipelines to learn more!
Leverage predictive analytics
Yes, we admit that using predictive analytics is not necessarily easy (or cheap). That’s why if you can’t afford such a solution, you can skip this point. However, if you can, AI can be of great help when it comes to analyzing your customers and their behavior. These insights allow you to anticipate customer needs, deliver personalized offers, and optimize other aspects of your campaign (e.g., its timing), thus giving you a competitive edge and improving the overall performance of your marketing campaigns.
AI-powered analytics tools can provide you with insights about potential future trends and customer behavior patterns that can be predicted based on your current customer data. Doing so manually is almost impossible.
Implement A/B testing
How do you know whether your messaging is as effective as possible? In most cases, you really don’t, regardless of how well you know your target audience. That’s why it’s important to conduct A/B tests. Such tests can refer to many aspects of your campaigns:
- Timing
- Ad copy
- Landing pages
- Offer
- CTA (call to action)
- And even the form (e.g., WhatsApp messages vs. standard text messages)
Test different versions of each of those elements and stick with the one that seems to be more effective and resonates with your target audience better. And one more pro tip here: Test only one thing at once. Otherwise, you will never know what made the difference, right?
If you want to know more about A/B tests, read this article on our blog: How to use A/B tests in marketing automation.
Automate your campaigns
When you have all the previous steps done, it’s time to take your campaigns to a whole new level. You can use marketing automation to streamline your efforts and save a lot of time. With marketing automation, you can deliver the right messages at the right time based on customer actions and their characteristics.
Marketing automation allows you to create whole communication workflows that handle repetitive tasks, such as sending follow-up emails and sending reminders to your prospects. It also helps you maintain consistency across channels, thus ensuring that your audience receives relevant communication right on time. In short, by using marketing automation, you can focus more on strategy and creativity while letting the system take care of execution.
That’s where iPresso steps in the game. Our platform is designed to help you leverage customer data in the most effective manner. Our platform helps you perform many different types of marketing activities with full alignment with your target audience and its specificity.
Summary
If you want to make the most of your marketing campaigns, you simply need to collect and use customer data. All the steps we outlined in this article will help you to do so. Of course, some of them, such as predictive analytics and automation, require external tools and support. But it’s definitely a good idea to consider using those tools to maximize your results.
That’s what iPresso is about. If you’re thinking of implementing marketing automation, start with free trial access to our platform today!
Leave a Reply