It can feel a lot like the popular 2005 game show, Deal or No Deal? In front of a live studio audience you’ve come with a strategy but, in the end, hope that luck is on your side as you begin guessing which briefcases are of highest value. You could end up with a million dollars or one pitiful penny.
In real life, any business would love to have the million dollar briefcase (or a million dollars worth of data that indicates new prospects with an extreme likelihood to buy). Fear not; there are many outlets for gathering data that help take the guessing right out of the game.
Social Data
From Facebook to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, these tools provide insight into the types of content that resonates best with your audience, as well as how and where individuals are coming into contact with your brand.
Surprisingly, a 2015 study revealed that 39 percent of senior marketing executives thought that social media data is not yet useful to their business, while 23 percent had indifferent feelings. However, with the analytics and insights that come from each platform, businesses have a direct line to their customers. Social data can help marketers adjust their campaigns while analyzing behavioral trends and real-time issues with consumers.
Existing List Data
Another way to identify good customers is to review your existing list. What are the commonalities amongst those customers with the highest conversion-to-sales rate? Once you know the answer to that, you can look for customers outside of your database who match that profile and description.
For instance, on the B2C side, perhaps they’re all stay-at-home moms with a certain square footage of home within a particular zip code. On the B2B side, maybe these customers are within a certain time zone, have a certain SIC code or even soil type. Depending on your product or service, there will be a handful of data points to enrich your customer database and provide you with insights to identify which customers you are chasing.
Marketing Automation Data
With a marketing automation tool, insights into who is actively engaging with your brand through web visits, email opens, and content downloads is a useful way to gather data on individuals who have a higher chance of becoming a customer. Not only can you gather these different data indicators, but you can follow up on an individual or contact throughout their entire journey with your brand.
Need help predicting who falls in your pool of best-fit customers? Using Right On Interactive’s Customer Lifecycle Marketing platform, marketers can integrate social media, web analytics, and CRM data seamlessly for a holistic view of both prospects and current customers. Download our latest e-Book, Lifecycle Marketing 101, to learn more!
