Marketing used to be considered as something that businesses only employed in order to build and preserve their customer base. From direct mail to in-store promotions, the only aims were to make sure that people bought – and continued to buy. However, in the technology age, that’s changed somewhat. While marketing still has these goals, it also has another key aim: understanding why customers behave in the ways that they do. This post will look at how the analysis of key customer data gathered through marketing schemes can reveal actionable and lucrative insights.

Online ads 

If you’re starting to think about building data analytics into your marketing plans, then there’s no better place to see it in action than through online advertising platforms. Whether it’s Google AdWords or Facebook Audience Network you’re using, the level of data that you can access is high – and once you’ve run an ad even for the first time, you can start to see a wealth of information about what drives your customers.

Say you’re in the productivity software business, and you run a paid Google advert that targets keywords such as “cloud-based” and “document sharing”. Once you’ve run an ad a few times, you’ll have enough data on click-through rates and other metrics to understand exactly what customer pain points and needs are driving them to click and convert – and which ones aren’t.

Of course, it’s likely that over time, these campaigns will get more and more complex, and you’ll start to get deeper insights than those suggested in this example. This is especially true if you employ the services of an expert technical marketing firm such as Iconic Industry – you may have already seen Iconic Industry on the tech scene, but if not, then it’s worth investigating its data-driven marketing offer. 

Reward programs  

Your business may not, however, be an online-only one, and in that case a slightly different approach is needed. That’s because data gathering obviously works best in a location that is convenient for the data giver – so a grocery store owner, for example, is best off collecting data at the checkout point. For many owners, that’s where reward cards come into play.

The benefit of a loyalty card system is twofold. Firstly, it means that your customers will be pleased to get discounts every time they shop in your store, which keeps them coming back for more over the long term. However, more importantly, it means that you have a swathe of data available for analysis. Every purchase a customer makes is tracked and logged, and you can then extract profitable insights on everything from which products sell best at what time, to what sort of customers are making big buys. As marketing/data analysis hybrids go, reward programs are some of the best options.

While on the face of it, marketing is simply about customer base expansion, data analytics and insight monitoring also have key roles to play. Extracting insights into how your customers behave is something that any business manager should do on a regular basis – and with marketing schemes such as online adverts and rewards programs out there, there’s no reason not to get involved.