Over the next 4 weeks we will be covering the 4 key areas of producing a successful marketing strategy. These are just the basics to follow as all businesses will have their own objectives and goals to achieve which will all be different. Our first week focuses on the key essential to any strategy – your data. Customer or prospect, both are equally important to grow your business either to increase sales, registrations, engagement or raise awareness.
The very first step which we are not focusing on, as this will be personal to your own business, are your objectives for the strategy. The ultimate question of “what do we want to achieve?” is vital to produce a focused strategic marketing plan.
So for this first week we are focusing on data and showing you how important it is to your marketing strategy.
Week 1: How important is data?
Well very…
A fundamental requirement of any successful marketing strategy is to know who your customers are to understand their needs and behaviours. This is rule number one, you could have the best product or service in your market but if you don’t know who is going to use it you will not know where to advertise or who to target.
With this is mind, ask yourself “how much do you know about your existing customers?”
Do you know:
- Where they live or are located?
- Their lifestyle habits or business type?
- How many children or employees do they have?
- What they purchase and how often?
- How do they like to be contacted?
Fairly simple questions any business should be aware of when analysing their customer database. Once you know this information you will have taken a big step to achieving your successful marketing strategy.
Unfortunately for your business to be successful in this area takes time, knowledge and communication. Keeping regular contact with your customers will tell you a lot about them and give you the ability to segment them into their own niche areas, making your job of marketing to them a lot simpler.
Segmenting your customers
To segment your customer data for targeting purposes you will need to find similar characteristics to group your customers together. For example, this might be by the products or services they purchase, so you can target with specific product messages, alternatively you might group them on their financial situation or lifestyle habits.
How you segment will depend on what you want to achieve (going back to your objectives), so to increase sales in a specific area you would identify customers whose characteristics fit into the product area you are promoting, then send specific targeted messages.
Prospect Data
Once you have clearly identified who your customers are and their characteristics this then gives you the knowledge to duplicate this across a prospect marketing list.
Whether you are looking for business or consumer data, you will be able to select prospect data based on specific characteristics, such as business size, turnover, location or if you use consumer data then financial situation, number of children in household or what car they drive.
Buying in similar data to your existing customer database works well when increasing your sales, however if you are expanding into new markets testing small volumes of prospect data can help you identify new customer segments who respond to your marketing activity.
Get in touch
Call our expert team on 0845 345 7755 for your free prospect data count or start your search now by answering our homepage questions.
