Data is everything. Any marketing agency or in-house team worth their salt knows that the numbers have all the answers when it comes to knowing how to grow your company and make more sales. Your gut feeling and intuition can only get you so far—you need data to back you up. Here are five simple ways to improve your data-driven marketing strategy and get its worth in gold. 

1 Use Data From Multiple Channels To Inform Each Other

Whether you’re an SEO specialist, a digital director, or even a graphic designer, your work doesn’t live in a bubble. The data you get from your specialization can be helpful for other people on your team and inform key parts of campaigns. For example, if you’re in charge of PPC ads, you doubtless do lots of testing to find out what types of headlines, language, stories, and pictures resonate with your target demographic, and what leads to a sale. That information is gold. Use it to know what to put in email subject lines, what to put on landing pages on the website, what to write about in the blog, etc. 

Similarly, you can use SEO insights to know what people are searching to find your business and potentially encounter more keywords to bid on for PPC and inform other marketing channels. Whether you’re working in-house or at an agency, it’s important to share this data with other people in your team, since they can benefit from having a better understanding of your audience. 

2 Keep Your Data Secure

Data is your company’s most valuable asset. No matter what kind of marketer you are, you need to keep your data safe. And not just from hackers—all sorts of threats to your data loom close if you’re not paying attention. Making sure you have a solid data backup plan in place before something goes wrong is much better than attempting to recover bits and pieces of data after it’s lost.

You may want to follow the 3-2-1 method of data storage to keep your data safe and secure no matter what. This system suggests you have three different backups of your data, in two different formats (usually a physical drive like a NAS, and a cloud-based format), and then have one of those three backups in a separate location. Many businesses manage to check off two of these requirements at the same time by backing up their NAS to the cloud. Whatever method you choose to diversify your data storage, make sure you’re in a constant habit of backing up devices and holding data security as a top priority. 

3 Clean Up Your Company Data 

To the dismay of data scientists and marketers everywhere, data doesn’t automatically come nicely packaged in clean Excel spreadsheets. Most raw data is a mess, scattered, and difficult to make meaning of. Before you’re able to provide actionable insights from your data, you need to clean it up. 

Depending on the amount of data you need to organize, you might consider using a data management platform (DMP). These platforms aggregate data from different sources into meaningful tables and graphs, and can be extremely useful for informing data-driven marketing for agencies and companies alike. Once your data is converted into a readable format, you’ll be able to derive insights to know which aspects of your marketing deserve the most attention. 

4 Relentlessly Ask For Customer Feedback

The most important part of a data-driven marketing strategy is, of course, data. And it takes a lot of time to get enough information to make an informed decision for a marketing strategy. Add to the timeline how long it takes to parse through and analyze all of that data, and it’s going to be a while until you’re able to implement anything. If you haven’t considered that in your timeline, you’re going to be behind your competition. 

So why not just go straight to the source? Questionnaires and online surveys are a low-lift, straightforward way to get actionable data. The only drawback to this strategy is that people are usually resistant to spending time filling out a survey unless it can benefit them in some way. Incentives like gift cards or discounts can often easily fix this problem. Make sure that your surveys are simple, short, and that the questions are structured to give you easy to read data. Open-ended questions can be difficult to quantify (even though they hold valuable customer data in their own right). 

5 Do Extensive Demographic Planning & Audience Segmentation

It’s easy to think that more eyes on your product or business directly means more sales. While exposure never hurts, you might be spending money marketing to people who were never in your target demo to begin with. Save money and time by using your data for extensive demographic research to inform your audience segmentation efforts. Segmenting your target audience will ensure you’re marketing to people with the messaging, CTA, and content that will resonate with them most. 

The changes between different audiences don’t have to be completely different, but maybe one audience will engage with a different style of headline or photo than another. Little tweaks here and there are easy to do and can directly impact your conversion rate and lead generation. Using your data to make targeted, personalized marketing strategies will be much more effective than a mass, cookie-cutter campaign.