Is Your Marketing Strategy Based on Your Data? It Should Be

Y’all, I’m not going to lie to you — marketing is tough: really tough. There’s so much you can do —?so many options — and it can be really hard to even know where to start.

You know what I see over and over? Business owners who have settled on two or three methods of marketing, have gotten complacent, and are basically just hoping that these methods are working.

In a lot of cases, they’re even collecting data on what they’re doing.

But they’re not using it.

And when you get right down to it, their marketing isn’t exactly failing, but it’s not doing as much work as it could — it just doesn’t have a great ROI.

When they finally take a look and realize this, they tend to blame the marketing tool that they’re using, and they don’t look at the bigger picture.

Look, when it comes to marketing, if you’re not completely keyed in to your target audience and what they’re looking for, if you haven’t defined the data that matters most to your business, then your marketing is going to suffer, and you’re not going to see the ROI you should be seeing.

Here’s what you need to do.

Figure Out Your Target Audience

The very first thing you need to do when deciding what to do with your marketing (and how much to spend) is to define your target audience.

Again y’all, I see a lot of mistakes that business owners are making here. When you ask them who their target audience is, they basically say, “everyone!” with a wink and a nudge.

That’s not a target audience. That’s a waste of money.

When you narrow down the people you’re targeting with your marketing, you make that marketing more effective. Your marketing becomes more successful because you’re able to spend more money on people who are more likely to make a purchase.

This guides you in choosing the right marketing tools. Maybe you’ve been spending a ton of money on Google pay-per-click ads, but your target audience just isn’t going to be as receptive to that as they might be to alternative social media ads.

If that’s the case, it’s time to shift your marketing strategy. Audience is half of the puzzle — it helps you understand how those people would like to be approached and the best way to approach them.

The other half of the puzzle is data.

Once you know who the most valuable potential customers are, then you can start looking at your data to figure out how to make the most of your marketing dollars.

Identify and Track the Metrics That Matter Most to Your Business

Okay, so you’ve got your target audience nailed down. You know who you’re targeting, and you’ve got a good idea of what marketing tools are going to be most effective to reach them.

Now you’ve got to dig into that data.

If you want to maximize your ROI, you need to first decide what metrics matter to your business.

The first thing to do, before you even dig into your data, is to look at your entire industry and figure out what metrics are most important there.

For example, it might be the case that customer acquisition costs are super important in your industry, or maybe it’s just pageviews (this is huge for bloggers who rely on display ads). Maybe it’s just monthly sales — whatever it is, use that as a starting point.

Then, you need to figure out if those metrics matter to your business. For example, maybe you have an eCommerce business, so views aren’t as important as overall sales (even though you have a blog with ads on it).

Then, put together benchmarks for your business. What are your goals for the quarter? For the year? What were your previous goals? Did you hit them? Are you able to see what was holding you back from reaching those goals (or exceeding them)?

Now you can start to figure out if your marketing is actually working.

How Do You Really Know If Your Marketing Is Working?

Now that you have those benchmarks in place and you have your audience and your marketing tools figured out, you can figure out if your marketing is actually working as well as it could be.

You probably have a lot of data built up from all the marketing you were doing up to this point. You can dig into that data now and see what it tells you.

For example, let’s say your cost per lead from PPC ads is $250. Each lead is valued at $1,000, so that seems like a pretty good ROI, right?

But what if the data tells a different story. What if the industry benchmark for cost per lead is much lower than yours? You wouldn’t know that without researching industry benchmarks then looking at your own data.

What if you’re spending way more on those ads than you need to be? What if, by narrowing your target audience, you’re able to reduce that cost by 50%?

Or what if you learn that your industry is much more successful with social media ads than with other PPC ads, that the average cost per lead was down around $100?

You might want to shift your marketing tactics entirely.

Let’s look at another example. Suppose you look at your data and see that you have what looks like a really high cost per lead from your direct mail campaigns.

But it turns out that, when you finally get a lead, they’re worth almost 8x the cost of acquiring the lead.

You weren’t sure before if it was worth the investment. You were thinking of stopping the campaigns entirely because they were so expensive.

And now you know you shouldn’t. Your data steered you in the right direction.

And in fact, you realize that you need to narrow your targeting to a smaller audience, resulting in an even greater ROI.

Without an understanding of your target audience, your industry benchmarks, and your data, you might have shot yourself in the foot, spending too much money on PPC ads that weren’t as effective as they could be while not investing enough of your budget in direct mail campaigns that were working.

Don’t Have a CMO? Work With a Fractional CMO and Hit That Revenue Goal

A fractional CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) is someone you hire to handle all your marketing without having to pay a CMO’s salary.

You’re getting a consultant who knows the ins and outs of marketing and can help you identify your target audience, identify the right benchmarks to shoot for, and then help you come up with a marketing strategy that’s based on your data and has the ability to increase your marketing ROI.

It’s about more than just the success of a single marketing campaign — it’s about creating an overall strategy that supports your business’ growth.

Fractional CMOs will look at more than just your marketing. They’ll look at your operations, your sales, and how that all fits together with the marketing you’re doing. They look at the big picture and come up with a plan that really works.

Allowing you to focus on your business and the work you do best.

Let’s talk about what I can do for you as a fractional CMO.

Contact me today —?let’s connect.