3 Tools to Create Engaging Campaigns
The age of instant means that business owners and marketers have the upper hand when it comes to creating and adapting marketing campaigns. We have all had the age old ‘content is king’ mantra drilled into us, but are we looking in the right places when it comes to the tools that allow us to create the content that will reign supreme? Don’t get me wrong, I love web analytics, while they are giving us insight into our web traffic on a real time basis, I just don’t think that they are providing us with the full picture. Shockingly, 11% of businesses don’t even analyse their website traffic, which begs the question, do we really value the art of content marketing and if your answer is ‘yes’, are you using it to its full potential?
Audience Insights
Social media have pushed a large stack of poker chips right across the table – in the form of audience insights, and boy are they valuable. While Google is good, they just don’t hold the nitty gritty details that the likes of Facebook and Twitter can now provide. Demographics such as location, marital status, gender, job title and income enable you to tailor your campaign somewhat, but drilling down even further to behaviour such as pages your audience are liking, brand affinity and purchasing activity and use this information to create campaigns that correlate to this behaviour. Facebook also receives data from 3rd party partners; for example in the US they bought data from credit and store cards and banks, mapping it against user’s profiles. Ultimately this enabled business to extract the data for marketing use, or even in creating new offerings based on their findings.
Darren Sharples from Cloudstix offers his experience of the impact social media has had, “Social Media platforms have certainly helped Cloudstix see exactly what our customers and target audience think of our products and to better them. By being able to instantly see reviews both positive and negative of various products and manufacturers it has helped us to not only provide the products that people want and love but also avoid the ones that have been slated by the consumer. We heavily monitor social media and vaping forums to ensure we are at the forefront of this information “
Past Purchase Data
Purchase history data is invaluable to your business, and analysing it will allow to identify the way that the buying process takes place amongst your customers and mapping these processes against the information extracted from audience insights tools and web analytics will give you a comprehensive 360 view of your customer. The area to understand initially is why your customers buy, based on where your product fits according to where they sit in Maslow’s Hierachy of needs.
Using web analytic tools to track the customer journey across the site until their purchase is one way; but look at companies such as Boots, Tesco and Sephora. They are renowned for leveraging their past purchase data using customer loyalty schemes and using it to target their customers with offers targeted towards the products that they buy in a cross channel format – maximising the chances that they will use the offer and extra sales will be made.
“In the past we have used data of past purchases for improved performance of different marketing channels. For example, we have analysed the customer lifetime value and by finding the customers that have spent more money in our site, we have run Facebook campaigns targeted to them. The main goal was rewarding these users for their loyalty to the brand.” Says Inigo Antolin, Head of Marketing at Appleyard Flowers . “Another channel were we have used past purchase data is Google Adwords. Thanks to Google Analytics, you can increase your bids to customers that have bought a product from your site in the last 540 days. At a more general level, Google Analytics allows you to see where your past customers are coming from -location- and also gives valuable information in gender and age. Fully understanding this data gives opportunities to any online company to further develop its business.”
Call tracking
Call tracking will be the final piece of the jigsaw when it comes to your targeted campaigns. If you are using e-commerce on your website, great – you can map the customer journey from email to transaction and all the details in between.
However, if your business is service based and you don’t have an e-commerce solution then call tracking will allow you to identify the content and campaigns that are causing your customers to pick up the phone and begin their journey with you. Even in this digital age, 43% of all search-related conversions happen over the phone, according to AdInsight, so if you knew the campaign or page on your site that was causing a physical action, you would amplify the content that was used, right?
Looking beyond the customers you already have in your sights, using call tracking within paid search campaigns means that you can view the keywords and ads that are the drivers, leading to more educated decision being made.
The key to using large, complex data sets is to remain focused on the actionable insight that you want to gain – spending too much time analysing it mean that you are too far in to look at the data with an overall objective view.
