How can you start taking
advantage of big data in your business? Turns out you don't need to dive
into a sprawling enterprise consulting project that will cost you hundreds of
thousands of dollars. If you're using a marketing software tool like HubSpot, you can build an optimized,
personalized marketing process on your own. Here are five specific steps you
should begin with:
1) Make A/B Testing a
Part of Your Weekly Routine -
Everybody’s heard of A/B testing, and everybody knows it’s a good thing, but who
does it on a regular basis? If you aren’t doing A/B testing, you aren’t
optimizing your basic marketing processes like email marketing sends and
calls-to-action. So how can you expect to do more sophisticated data
gymnastics?
2) Personalize Your
Emails - In this day and
age there’s no excuse for avoiding personalization where it’s appropriate. Set
up a form to collect data from your prospects, then use the data you’ve collected
to populate the appropriate values in your emails. Even if it’s just the
salutation, it changes the email from a blasted billboard to a personalized
message. And if personalization is too much of struggle, you should look for
different email
marketing software. To get you started, we
wrote a blog post that gives you tons of ideas for email personalization.
3) Get Sophisticated
About Segmentation - If your marketing
process involves sending email, it should involve list segmentation. Sending a single blast email to your whole list is like running
an ad on the nightly news circa 1965. You reach a broad audience with a general
message and marginal returns, and the message isn’t that useful to the
recipients. Instead, improve your returns -- aka your open and click-through
rate -- by customizing the message and the offer for specific groups.
4) Create Content
Informed by Keyword Research - SEO is still a critical piece of a robust sales and
marketing funnel. Don't simply guess which keywords will be most effective and
drive the most traffic. Instead, collect data and use it to optimize your content creation. Do you know which keywords drive the highest value traffic to
your site? Do you know how you (and your competitors) rank for those keywords?
If you want an optimized, personalized marketing process, you need to find out.
5) Optimize Your Funnel
With Closed Loop Reporting -
Many marketers pick their marketing mix (e.g., how much SEO versus how much social media) by pure intuition. Don't do that. Set up
a closed-loop marketing process, then use it to determine which channels are most productive for
your business so you can optimize your marketing mix.
All these steps are
fairly straight forward -- but that’s exactly the point. You don't need to get
too fancy to begin seeing some serious of the benefits of big data. You just
have to have the right process, and not be afraid to dive in!
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