The importance of analyzing and collecting marketing data

All marketers know that collecting data is crucial for a successful marketing strategy 🧐. Whether you're in charge of content, ads, or SEO, one thing you all have in common is the need to analyze how our strategies are performing.

Sometimes the data is chill and easy to come by, but most of the time you have to put in the work and use different platforms and tools to get the information you need.

And let's be real, competition is fierce these days. You need to move quickly and stay ahead of the game by analyzing that data, so you can keep killing it out there and stay on top.

What is data collection in marketing?

Data collection is basically the process of collecting, measuring, and analyzing data, in this case from your marketing campaigns, users' behavior, partners, projects, and market.

It implies listening, watching, and recording all the information in different tools to be then able to analyze this information to make better decisions. It can sound simple, but it implies detecting this data, identifying the ways of collecting the data, and then how to store it to be able to process it.

The types of marketing data collected can be categorized as:

1. Personal data: including name, gender, age, address, country, studies, job title, etc.
2. Behavioral data: including how they navigate, devices, CTAs clicked, videos watched, page views, clicks in emails, etc.
3. Engagement data: including how they interact with the website, emails, social media pages, etc.
4. Attitudinal data: including customer satisfaction, opinions, etc.

Of course, if a business wants to be successful, it's important to understand its environment and how its marketing campaigns are impacting its potential customers. Marketing analytics makes this possible by helping businesses see patterns, find out what people like, and keep up with what's trending.

Which are some marketing data collection methods?

There are a lot of ways to get this data, and some of them are pretty wild! But let's focus on the most common ones for now. The most common marketing methods to get data are:

📑Online Surveys: These types of surveys are highly effective when you want to obtain demographic, preference, and behavioral information on a large database. The main feature is their scalability. you select common questions for all our audience and send them through the medium of our choice, which can be emailed, pop-ups, social networks, and more.

Source: typeform

👂 Customer Feedback: This type of survey differs from the previous one in that the feedback, although it is also based on standardized questions, is usually focused on customers who use the tool.

💻 Website Analytics: you can find tools, like Google Analytics, that let us connect our website, blog, or application and, through a series of patterns, events, or indications, collect information about the behavior of users on these sites. (If you still don’t have GA4 set up check our article)

🤳Social Media Analytics: This is similar to web analytics, but instead of a site, you analyze the behavior of our followers and users on social media. Here we love Hootsuite, but you have here 12 of the best social media analytics tools)

👥Sales Data or Internal Data: Analyzing information from departments such as sales through CRM (customer relationship management software) or specific platforms (e-commerce) can be key to understanding our end-user and their decision-making process. We use Hubspot but also, here leave your 15 best sales CRM softwares)

👯Focus Groups: This type of event brings together a group of people with characteristics defined by the interview. They are subjected to different questions to understand certain aspects related to our brand, product, or service. This method provides valuable insights into the minds of our target audience.

You need to try different methods to get the data, use your creativity 🎨!

Alrighty then... so, which collection method should you use? Well, that depends. You'll pick different ways of gathering data based on what you're trying to achieve, who you're targeting or how much you want to analyze, and, of course, what resources you have.

If you need, you can search on our 200 productivity tools to find some to collect your data.

Therefore, before collecting any data, it's important to think hard about what data you need. If you miss a crucial question or go about data collection the wrong way, you'll end up wasting a ton of time and money. But hey, it's true that you never know which method will work best until you test it out.

Where is marketing data collected?

We have seen many methods that we can use, and many more that exist! But it is important to first decide where we are going to go to look for that information.

Basically, we can differentiate between:

• Internal information: ask or get the information from our tools, software, and that we have in our company. We recommend always doing a quick test to validate first the time and resources spent on this task.
• External information: go to the market to make surveys, to our clients, look for articles, etc. Also here is important first to do a quick test on a small representation! Select a small sample of your target to do a data collection test, and validate that what you are getting is what you need. Your needs may change over time, but it is important not to leave out anything that you are going to need from day one.

The type of information you need will determine the source you use, but it is quite common to start with sources that are more economical, or that you need fewer resources before going to the market, which usually involves spending more time, money, and effort.

How do you start to analyze your marketing data collected?

So once you've got some data, you have to do something with it. You have to dig deeper and make that data work for you so that you can, get some return on your investment. If the data isn’t helping you out, then why bother collecting it? 😜

Marketing data analysis is all about examining the data to understand how our marketing strategies are doing and making decisions based on that info to improve our biz performance.

👉Tip: It's important to choose a good team to process the data. Collecting data will be useless if you don't have the time or people to process it. Make sure you have this before you even start!

What do you do once you've got your hands on that data?

• Organize and Clean the Data: You have to make sure there aren’t any duplicates, inconsistencies, or errors. You can use Excel, a CRM, or specific tools to manage data.
• Visualize your Data: Once the data is all cleaned up, you need to analyze it to find patterns, trends, and insights. You can use statistical analysis, data visualization tools, or machine learning algorithms to do this.

• Draw Insights: These insights can help you understand your customers better. Their behavior, preferences, and needs. Gretel can help us out with this too, by generating insights about changes that could directly affect you.

• Develop Actionable Strategies: You gotta figure out what to do with all this info. Optimizing our marketing campaigns, improving our product development, or enhancing our customer experience.
• Implement Strategies: Once you got your strategies all figured out, you have to put them into action! And in the future, you keep track of them and make any necessary improvements. (Check here how to set your objectives and initiatives)

By following these steps, you're able to make data-driven decisions and improve your business performance.

What are the benefits of analyzing the collected marketing data?

Okay, now that you've got our data all sorted out, what's the deal with it? What benefits can you get from analyzing our business info and campaigns?

👂 Understanding Your Customers

Knowing your customers is key. Not only can you make them happy by giving them what they want, but you can also attract new ones too.

Some of the benefits of understanding your customers are:

• Improved Customer Experience: By knowing what our customers want and need, you can tailor our products, services, and marketing efforts to meet those needs.
• New Sales Opportunities: By understanding what drives our customers' purchasing decisions, you can optimize our marketing strategies and product offerings to increase sales.
• Enhanced Customer Loyalty: By providing a personalized experience that meets our customer's needs, they're more likely to stick with our brand!
• Better Product Development: By gathering feedback on our existing products and analyzing our customers' behavior, you can identify areas for improvement and develop new products that meet their needs.
• Competitive Advantage: By offering a better customer experience and customized products, you can set yourself apart from your competitors.

You can use data to personalize your marketing messages for individual customers too. By analyzing customer data like purchase history and browsing behavior, you can create marketing messages that are more relevant and engaging.

💫Identifying Trends and Patterns

Analyzing market data is essential to staying ahead of the competition. You can't afford to be left behind! In order to spot patterns or trends, you've got to keep an eye out for outliers. These are the points that deviate from the norm and can help us see if there's something else going on.

You can also keep tabs on our competition and see how they're doing, so you don't miss out on any important strategies.

Data is used to predict customer behavior and identify trends. By analyzing data on customer behavior and market trends, you can make data-driven decisions about our marketing strategies.

🌞Improve Customer Engagement

Sometimes it feels like you're trying to keep our customers engaged all over the place, but it's not working. If you're short on resources, it's better to focus on a few communication channels and learn how to use them right than try to use a bunch of channels that you don't really know how to use.

For example, if our customers and target audience are really into our social media posts, you should spend more time there instead of focusing on email campaigns.

Here are some ways you can increase customer loyalty:

• Social Networks: Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great for interacting with customers. You can use social networks to share content, run promotions, and respond to customer inquiries.
• Email Marketing: Emails to send newsletters, promotional offers, and personalized messages to customers. You can use Mailchimp for this!
• Customer Feedback Surveys: Surveys to ask customers for feedback on your products, services, or overall experience. SurveyMonkey is one top!
• Loyalty Programs: Discounts, exclusive offers, and other incentives to build customer loyalty.
• Personalized Messaging: Send personalized messages that really connect with our customers.
• Live Chat: Provide real-time customer service, answer your questions, and address concerns (like chatgpt online!).

⚙️Improve Product Development

If you're a SaaS, you probably already know this, but it applies to other companies too! You have to use your data to improve the products or services and make sure your users are satisfied.

There are two types of data collection: active and passive.

Active data collection requires talking to your users and getting their help collecting data. Here are some ways to do this:

• Optimizing pricing by analyzing sales data and customer behavior. By understanding how customers respond to different price points, you can optimize our pricing strategy to maximize revenue.
• Identifyin' customer needs by analyzing customer feedback, surveys, and opinions. By understanding what our customers want and need, you can improve our products to better meet those needs.
• Analyze product performance and identify any problems or defects. you do this by analyzing customer feedback, support tickets, and sales data.

On the other hand, passive data collection uses tools to get information from the market itself:

• Monitor Product Usage: By analyzing product usage data, you can identify areas for improvement and develop new features or functionality.
• Track Competitor Products: you can use data to track our competitors' products and identify areas for improvement. you can do this by analyzing competitor reviews, product features, and pricing data.
• Test and Experiment: By analyzing user data and feedback, you can identify which features are most popular and which need improvement.

📧Evaluating Marketing Campaigns

This is probably something you're more familiar with. By tracking metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates, and engagement rates, you can see how our campaigns are doing and make decisions about whether to keep going or change direction.

Data is used to test and optimize marketing campaigns. By running A/B tests and making data-driven decisions about campaign optimization, you can improve your marketing campaigns over time.

There are as many campaigns as there are colors, but depending on the type of campaign, you use different metrics to review and analyze them. You won't go into too much detail here, because it would take a whole book!

Marketing data analysis helps determine which marketing campaigns and channels are performing so you can improve the ones that aren't doing so well.

It can also help us optimize our marketing budgets. By analyzing the data, you can understand our customers' preferences, target them more effectively, and make decisions about where to invest! The key is to find the channels and campaigns that are most effective at reaching our goals and optimizing our available budget.

💸Maximizing the Return on Investment (ROI)

Measuring the effectiveness of our actions by tracking metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates, and engagement rates, lets us make decisions about whether to keep going with our campaigns or change direction. And, of course, you want to maximize our ROI too!

In our CAC article, you talked about optimizing ROI, but here are some other strategies to help us maximize our ROI.

1. Set Clear Goals and Identify Your KPIs.
2. Target the Right Audience. By using data to identify our target audience and tailorin' our messages to their needs, you can increase the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns.
3. Use the Right Channel. Not easy, but you gotta test out different channels and find the ones that work best for us.
4. Test and Measure Everything. Use the data to track our campaigns and improve 'em every day! Don't let good opportunities pass us by (if you don't make it, Gretel will help us out, don't worry).
5. Optimize Your Landing Pages. If our goal is conversions and you got a landing page, you gotta test and optimize it to improve our ratios.
6. Use Retargetin' to convert users who've already shown some interest in our brand, without spammin' 'em!

Conclusion

It's just as important to collect data as it is to know how to analyze it correctly.

If you forget to look at information from any of the points mentioned above, you might be analyzing our data wrong or overlooking certain patterns or information that could be really important to understand our users.

Plus, it could be making you lose money...and nobody wants that!

I hope this article has helped you to see methods of collecting data and analyzing it. If you have any questions or ideas, please write to us at : hello@gretel.co