Maximizing Marketing Data: Turning Immediacy Into Impact

Businesses today are infusing their brand presence into every corner of the media and marketing landscapes. As digital channels continue to multiply, customers have spread across all of them, creating the need to converge social media, microsites, display ads and other assets into one seamless brand perception.

At first, it might seem like this has placed a burdensome demand on marketers: to create persistent marketing programs that sync up across all channels to reach leads and customers wherever they are.

Disconnected programs just aren’t effective in our fast-moving world. To achieve true brand prominence, marketers must create a compelling web of messages with one consistent look and feel across every device, channel and opportunity.

Yet, this new paradigm is really an opportunity. Consider the marketing cycles of yesterday, when teams had entire months to create, launch, measure and modify a single campaign. While this might sound leisurely, it tended to waste time and budget. Marketers could spend entire quarters on one low-performing campaign. In contrast, the multi-channel campaigns required today can be measured immediately and modified just as quickly for optimized performance.

The Game Changer

The former one-campaign model just doesn’t fly these days for several reasons. In a world where customers have shorter attention spans and a greater appetite for continuous fresh content, marketers must be fast and prolific. Their campaigns must also be meaningful; today’s cynical audiences have been overexposed to generic messages. Only a personally relevant campaign will penetrate a lead’s indifference and inspire action.

Right about now you might be saying that while relevance and speed sound great, crafting that kind of campaign requires resources beyond your budget. So here’s the good news: this kind of marketing is both cost-effective and accessible. The key is using tools to encapsulate real-time data and then creating customized campaigns that reflect those data insights.

The magic element here is immediacy. This is one of the greatest advantages of digital marketing. Whether you’re measuring a banner ad or new social campaign, feedback will be immediate — which, in turn, allows you to modify the campaign just as quickly. From engagement to lead generation to close, immediacy is the engine driving response. This is the game changer that allows you to analyze and improve your messages in real time, feeding your audience the abundant and relevant campaigns needed to make a lasting impact.

Again, this doesn’t have to be arduous or complicated. Today’s technologies let you run dozens or even hundreds of campaigns — all tailored for laser-sharp precision. Within hours of campaign launch, metrics can be collected and turned into rich segmentation data, with campaigns modified for even sharper relevance and higher performance.

Turning One Campaign Into One Hundred

Using data capture and customization tools, your first step is using your existing buyer personas to design targeted campaigns. These campaigns must be synchronized across print, web and social delivery paths; companies who still produce separate programs from disconnected teams will create a weak and disjointed brand impression. After launching your synchronized campaigns, you’ll collect feedback and customer behavior data in real time, identify new communities from that data, then revise your campaigns on the fly to target those new buyers.

And it all happens immediately. You won’t have to wait months to find out who’s responding to your campaign and who isn’t, or which aspect of the campaign has been alienating viewers. Instead, you’ll be able to look at immediate feedback and quickly tweak your campaigns for maximum appeal. Today’s technologies go beyond simple demographic interest and attribute data. You’ll get genuine reactions that map out your path to ultimate ROI. Best of all, this data will continue to illuminate new and specific communities, all waiting for precise messages tailored to their interests.

How To Take Advantage Of The Data

Let’s say that you’re launching a campaign to pre-reveal a new mobile phone. Your first campaign will include top-level key messages about the phone’s touchscreen and 4G capabilities. Within two days, you analyze customer reactions and social engagement and discover many customers are curious about video streaming and voice control capabilities, as well as camera quality.

Immediately, you modify that initial campaign into a new round of campaigns promoting those features. Your next round of data spells out new details on preferences by age, gender and professional status. You break down the campaigns into more than a dozen laser-sharp campaigns, and then use the next round of data to segment audiences at the regional, local and hyper-local levels.

At this point, your leads and customers are experiencing campaigns that speak to their individual priorities and feature-customized, local references from their own towns, with offers that overcome their personal buying objection. You, the marketer, didn’t have to pull all of this data together yourself, do long hours of research, or wait months to collect it. Your tools did it all for you — and best of all, you’re only days or weeks out from your initial launch.

This kind of immediacy lets you leave superficial campaigns behind and create the meaningful messaging that drives high response. Just as impersonal campaigns go ignored by audiences, messaging based on old behaviors and preferences will seem outdated. Use real time data to revise your campaigns for maximum relevance, and you’ll make an impact on customers your competitors can only dream about.

 (Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)