6 Ways to Use Data Mining to Power Your Digital Marketing

Every business needs to have an effective marketing strategy to be competitive. One of the best ways to fuel your outreach success is to use data. However, small business owners are often uncertain about how to gather and use data to their advantage. These are six ways that you can use data mining to power your digital marketing efforts.

Although the past does not guarantee the future, it is the best indicator we have. Analyzing what has happened in the market previously can help you plan your marketing strategy for the future. Doing this manually is slow and can only achieve mild accuracy.

However, using technology and data to power your forecasting efforts, you can arrive at a close approximation of what will happen.

One of the best ways to leverage this as a small business is to examine your own product releases and campaigns. Try mining data from public sources of the economy also. You can learn how your previous efforts have interacted with the overall economic trends.

Another powerful way to analyze data is to examine your competitors and their offerings. You may discover a gap in the market or an opportunity for your own marketing communication. It is always beneficial to know how your brand stacks up against your direct and indirect competitors.

You can leverage data scraping to efficiently collect data about other businesses from their product pages. This may help you with your pricing strategy, for example. You can use the same technology to gather other types of data as well.

At the heart of every marketing campaign are segmentation and targeting. This is the process of defining and selecting market groups to direct your products and outreach towards. For example, you may decide that your widget is most likely to be purchased by female college students.

One of the great powers of data mining is the opportunity to create less obvious market segments. With the right toolset, you can create automated workflows that target ads to small groups efficiently. However, many of these smaller groups are significantly harder to identify without the right data and tools.

You can potentially go even further with your campaign customization and personalize messages to individuals. There is a fine line to walk here between offering value through highly relevant messaging and reminding your audience of “1984.”

Nonetheless, through data mining, there are plenty of ways to create high-value marketing content. In a simple version of this, you can analyze a customer’s prior purchase and use general market data to predict what else he or she may be interested in. Then, send an email with relevant products to the customer.

One of the challenged of digital marketing is ensuring that your acquisition costs are in line with your profit expectations. If you are spending too much to acquire a customer, it doesn’t matter how great your marketing campaign is.

You can mine data to determine what your expected customer lifetime value is. Additionally, you can predict possible changes in CLV that may happen with new campaigns. Understanding these numbers will help you make better choices about your marketing spend.

No matter how great your product offerings, you will sometimes lose customers. However, your data mining efforts may help you reveal why certain customers remain loyal and why some leave. By analyzing the purchasing trends of customers, you can identify when they stop buying from you.

Combining this with data from your customer service team, especially product returns, can help illuminate when things are going wrong. If you offer a digital product, you can also easily examine usage statistics.

These data mining opportunities can help you run better digital marketing and make your business more successful. The possibilities for data analysis are almost endless if you have the right collection and analysis tools.