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In recent years, it’s become pretty difficult to tell whether or not an active marketing strategy is being as efficient as it could be. If you’ve come to this point, obviously you’ll want to know if there’s room for improvement, and how you can stimulate it. This all comes down to gathering useful data. Here are some tips to get you moving in the right direction.
Develop Rational Segmentation
The recency, frequency, and the money spent (RFM) still remain very useful indicators of the way your customers are behaving. By spending more time and resources analyzing the way your customers interact with your business, you’ll be able to reconfigure your segmentation to fix the patterns you find, and rationalize the whole strategy. Segmentation is essential for any modern business, from retail brands with something for everyone to narrower niches like attorney marketing. Try looking into the seasonal fluctuations of your business, the average amounts of orders, and rebuy rates. This will allow you to draw connections between buyer behavior and the marketing mediums you’re using, and strengthen your customer segmentation. Once you’ve established a dependable segmentation strategy, stick to it, and if possible, apply it to several of the marketing channels you’re using. This will allow you to understand your customer base much more thoroughly.
Use Tests That Deliver Useful Results
Once you’ve established the segmentation system you’re going to use, the next step is testing the data you have streaming in. Try to be modest when you approach testing, especially if your resources are already quite stretched. It may be tempting to apply several concurrent tests into a single marketing campaign, but this can lead to the results becoming questionable, distorted, and in the long run, not all that useful. If you’re not all that experienced with testing your marketing campaigns, it’s best to start off making small, incremental changes. This will bring back results that are much clearer and more informative to your next step. To start with, you should only be changing a single element at a time, and testing the effect this has. For instance, if you wanted to see how the colour of a call-to-action button affects conversions, this should be the only element on a page that you change.
Make Friends with Brands You Share an Audience With
Obviously, we’re not suggesting that you reach out to your closest competitors with a big smile on your face, and this tip won’t be actionable for certain business models. However, if we’re strictly talking about content marketing, partnering up with some other businesses in the same industry could work wonders for making yours more efficient. When you’ve got good relationships with various parts of your industry ecosystem, you’ll naturally come across opportunities for sharing content and insights, and helping each other make better sense of the target audience you’re both fishing for. As long as you set clear boundaries, leading the conversation with another brand can double your marketing efficiency in a very short space of time.