by Matt Forman, Traffika
One of the biggest strengths of digital marketing is the ability to speak directly to your target audience. In a world where we see literally hundreds of ads every day the ability to tailor our messaging to speak to the right audience at the right time is marketing gold.
A well-crafted customer database could be your business’s most powerful marketing tool but it’s the well-crafted bit where many people come unstuck. In this article we will focus on how to grow, nurture and leverage your customer database to start driving some real value in your business.
Growing your database
Take a step back for a second and consider your database acquisitions in the same way you think of your product or service sales. How do you market your products or services online? You create compelling creative, you demonstrate genuine value, you test different ad types and messaging across multiple channels towards different customer personas, right? This is exactly what you need to do from a data acquisition perspective.
Instead of money the user is handing over it’s data and it’s never been more valuable. As marketers, we need to create a compelling reason for a person to hand over their valuable details. Maybe it’s exclusive content, competitions, promotions, special offers or maybe it’s regular updates on new products, industry or company news, events and so on. Whatever the compelling reason or reasons are, they need to be conveyed through engaging creative and tested across multiple channels and platforms to understand what drives results for individual audience groups.
Whether it’s Facebook Lead Generation campaigns or a competition, an online survey, onsite acquisition through a lightbox popup or newsletter signup and so on, growing your customer database almost requires a marketing strategy all on its own.
Nurturing your database
If you’re a regular to the Traffika blog, chances are you’ve heard us talking about the importance of user experience across your website and the same goes for engaging with your customer database. Put yourself in their shoes and consider how your activity is positively or negatively impacting their user experience with your brand. Remember what you promised them in the beginning when you acquired their data. Are you delivering the quality, exclusive content you were bragging about? Are they really getting the valuable tips, tricks and advice you promised? Or are you spamming them with call to actions every other day and filling up their inbox with emails that are ending up in the junk folder anyway?
Segmenting your database into audience groups is great way to ensure you are nurturing leads based on their previous activity, desired outcome or stage in the purchase journey. How you segment your database needs to work for your business and while there’s no set segmentation you should follow, it will largely depend on your industry and what information you have available on your leads. If you’re a B2B you might want to segment your database by sector, position title or organisation size. If you’re a B2C you may want to segment your database by age, demographic, geographic location or product category etc.
Nurturing your leads is a combination of knowing who you’re talking, when and where you’re talking to them, what’s important to them and ensuring you are delivering genuine value on all fronts.
Leveraging your database
You’ve put in the time and effort, you’ve built a quality, clean database and you can now start to reap the rewards, if you haven’t already. Remember success might be driving users to re-engage with your site, increased website traffic or driving a strong click-through rate. Depending on your business, it isn’t always going to be increased sales. Your newly crafted database could form the basis of a custom audience in Facebook promoting exclusive offers, it could be segmented out into email marketing databases to help generate hype around new product launches or even Customer Match ads within AdWords. The opportunities are virtually limitless with new ad functionality and formats being created all the time.
As we’ve covered in this blog, a customer database is one thing but a well-crafted, strategically segmented, up-to-date customer database is another thing altogether. Put in the time to grow and nurture your customer database and it might just be one of the most powerful marketing tools you have in your arsenal.
Written by Matt Forman, Traffika. Traffika is a multi-disciplined Digital Business Generation team integrating strategic consulting, digital marketing and leading technologies, providing a holistic solution for growing retail or franchise businesses.