When it comes to marketing, data science and analytics turn data into actionable insights to better connect with your target audience. Without analytics, businesses pass up on crucial information that could significantly influence longevity and customer loyalty.
In an increasingly data-centric marketing world, you first need extensive knowledge of who your target audience is to ensure your tracking information with the most impact on connecting with your audience.
Let’s explore why a defined target audience is crucial to data science and analytics in marketing. We’ll then tackle how data science and analytics are used to make informed marketing decisions and provide actionable tips to use them effectively.
Defining Your Target Audience is Crucial
The data gathered through analytics is based on your specified marketing goals. Those marketing goals are based on who your target audience is. That’s why a defined target audience is crucial to your effective use of data science and analytics in your marketing efforts. You know exactly who your customers are/will be and how best to reach them.
When determining your target audience, you identify specific pieces of information about the people buying your products like:
- Age
- Location
- Financial landscape
- How often they make purchases
- How often they purchase the products/services you offer
- Why they make individual purchases
- What industry they work in
- What challenges they’re currently facing
- Their relationship status
- If they have children
- How they communicate
- How they think
- Their hobbies
Leveraging analytical data is only useful if you know your target audience’s ins and outs. If you don’t know who your target audience is, you won’t know how to decipher or leverage the data you receive. When you define your target audience, you know what to track, why it’s essential, and how to implement changes based on this data that resonates with your audience.
For example, let’s say your target audience is single women with no children, ages 21-29, who work in the entertainment industry in a behind-the-scenes role. Although they enjoy a flexible career and comfortable pay, they’re looking to start a business of their own. They’re having trouble organizing their day and giving equal attention to all their passions. They’re always on the hunt for brands that can help them manage their day and get them on track to launching their business, all while paying homage to the woman they are. They prefer email, text, or social media communication.
You can begin a social media marketing campaign that tracks comments, direct messages, profile link clicks, how many people from social media visited your website, and what pages they visited. Based on this data, you can implement messaging or media changes for posts that aren’t getting any engagement.
Data Science and Analytics for Informed Marketing Decisions
Data science and analytics give insights into how your customer behaves throughout their buyer’s journey. Highlighting common buying behaviors, browsing habits, and popular messaging among visitors that become customers can help you establish a marketing strategy that converts. When you analyze customer data, you can better allocate your resources and time towards reaching leads.
Data science and analytics ensure you account for all details in your marketing strategy. They help take advantage of even the smallest marketing campaign details to best reach your target audience by answering questions like:
- Is this font appealing to our target audience?
- Is this discount offer messaging working?
- How is our target audience taking to our brand colors?
- Which website pages are visited most?
- What changes are best for the pages that aren’t working?
- How can we get all of our social media posts to gain the support that our most popular did?
- What email CTAs are best for our target audience?
When you can track what’s working, you can shift what’s not. You can responsibly experiment with marketing campaigns and strategies. Analytics gives you a focused-approach to deciding what to use and what not to use in each marketing campaign.
Ideas for Using Data Science and Analytics
Analyzing data from your marketing efforts can be time-consuming and tedious. Knowing what to do with this data and implementing smart changes can also be overwhelming. To begin using data science and analytics to make informed marketing decisions, start with the following:
Hire a data scientist or analyst
One of the best ways for businesses to effectively use data science and analytics is to hire an expert. Seek out the services of a data scientist or analyst who best aligns with your company culture. Data scientists analyze, process, and model data then interpret the results to create actionable plans for companies and other organizations.
Start with your user experience
If you’re unable to hire a data scientist or analyst, start with examining your user experience. Set up Google Analytics or another software that tracks website data to analyze the consistency, loading times, purchasing process, and navigation experience on your website. Dive into how visitors are experiencing your website and use this data to flesh out how you can better connect with customers online.
Study KPIs that best suit your marketing goals
To create an effective marketing campaign, you have to choose suitable key performance indicators to track. These KPIs should be based on your specific goals and target audience. Create a list of the top 15 KPIs you’re considering for your marketing campaign. Study each thoroughly and see how well they align with your target audience.
The Takeaway
Data science and analytics can and should be used to boost your marketing efforts. Collecting, analyzing, and reporting customer data significantly influences business longevity and customer loyalty.
You’ll first want to define your target audience and identify which metrics are most important to track for your marketing goals. This ensures you receive the most accurate insights into how your customer behaves throughout their buyer’s journey.
Hire a data analyst or scientist, start with user experience, and study KPIs that best suit your marketing goals to begin using data science and analytics to make informed marketing decisions.
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