The sales profession is responding to major changes brought by big data. The big data revolution is making the sales industry more efficient and effective than ever.
In 2019, Forbes contributor Louis Columbus wrote a great article on the ways that big data is changing the sales and marketing profession. His article talked about utilizing big data for everything from customer analytics to optimizing pricing strategies.
However, there are additional nuances to consider. You should understand the different data-driven sales strategies to pursue.
Best Marketing Strategies with Big Data
Every business can benefit from a strong marketing strategy. However, not every marketing professional could easily come up with one. What to do when you feel stuck and out of ideas? You can either continue brainstorming or use our tips for inspiration.
You can find a number of ways to incorporate big data into these strategies. In this article, we want to offer you 6 data-driven marketing strategies that are both effective and easy to implement for every salesperson.
1. Start blogging.
Blogging is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to build your audience’s trust and to drive more traffic to your website. Of course, this works only when you approach blogging in the right way and with a proper strategy.
What to blog about? You can offer interesting information about your company, the projects you work on, publish case studies, etc. This is a great way to demonstrate the company’s authority as well as show your existing and potential audience that you are open to sharing your experience and insights with the others. This applies both to corporate blogs and to guest blogging; the latter option is also great for driving traffic to your blog from other reliable sources. Of course, your content has to be of high quality in both cases.
Big data is essential to the success of most modern blogs. Google Analytics and other analytics tools use big data to help understand the nature of visitors, so bloggers can optimize their strategy. They can use big data to get a sense of the people visiting their blogs, the content that gets the most traction and the best traffic sources. Google uses a variety of big data tools like BigQuery to help bloggers.
2. Use retargeting.
It’s sad but true: 98% of users who visit your website for the first time don’t convert. How can you make them convert? There are many ways; however, encouraging them to return to your site is one of the most effective ones.
Retargeting can help you achieve that. For instance, a customer visits your website and leaves without buying anything. There’s a big chance that they will still return after seeing your retargeting ads on other websites.
The Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence blog has talked about the utilization of machine learning in retargeting. Machine learning has helped retargeting advertisers get the highest possible ROI.
Furthermore, customers can be retargeted with the help of email campaigns. If a person adds some items to their cart but doesn’t buy, you can send them an abandoned cart email to encourage them to complete the purchase.
3. Leverage influencers.
Influencer marketing is not simply a recent trend: it’s a recent trend that actually works. According to the research published by Bigcommerce, nearly 90% of marketers find Return on investment (ROI) from influencer marketing comparable to or even better than ROI from other marketing channels.
Influencer marketing can be especially effective for startups: it’s quite inexpensive, especially compared to more traditional marketing channels, and helps drive the initial attention to the growing brand. These days most customers trust personal recommendations more than traditional marketing channels. Therefore, you should consider using this strategy to grow your business.
Keep in mind that a lot depends on an influencer in this case. If your company or brand is relatively small, it’s always better to start with micro-influencers rather than invest most of your marketing budget on working with a big one.
Big data helps with influencer marketing in a number of ways. You can use big data to mine a list of influencers, as well as using machine learning algorithms to assess the effectiveness of various influencer outreach strategies.
4. Personalize the customers’ buying experience.
Why is personalization so effective? Because it makes your customers feel that the company cares about them and is interested in helping them solve their problems or fulfill their requests with the help of a product or service. This is a great and easy way to connect with your customers.
How can you achieve that? By addressing your customers by their names and by offering them products or services based on their preferences. Show them that you are willing to help them pick the perfect goods rather than simply to sell these goods.
5. Create an amazing lead magnet.
This is another great way to win the customers’ trust and to drive leads: offer something valuable to your audience. This could be an ebook, a video, a small course, or a checklist that helps solve certain problems your audience is facing and offers them some valuable information.
It might require time and effort to create such magnet; however, if you approach this in the right way, the results will definitely pay off. When you create a truly valuable content piece that no one else could offer, you can count that it will get lots of shares and drive lots of leads.
6. Add a targeted CTA to your email signature.
Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools in general. However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot make it even more effective simply by adding a call-to-action to your email signature.
Adding CTA could do wonders for your business. Of course, each case requires a different CTA: a call-to-action for your email signature for cold outreach will differ from the one used in a discount email written to your loyal customer. You need to come up with perfect targeted CTAs for every occasion or even add one to an email signature for sales rep as well, which will help make the most out of it.
Figuring out the right call-to-action for every occasion can be hard. Luckily, you don’t have to do this on your own. Instead, you can use a professional app to create email signature. Such apps are great both for beginners and professionals. They guide the first ones through every step of the process, making it easier to understand, and help the second ones save time by optimizing their work.
These are 6 effective marketing strategies to grow a business. Learn about them, pick the ones that seem the most appealing to you and relevant to your business — and start implementing them. We hope you’ll get your amazing results as soon as possible!
Big Data is Essential to Success in Sales in 2019
You can’t even hope to be successful in 2019, unless you utilize big data effectively. There are a lot of ways to get the most of your big data to get the highest ROI from your marketing strategies.