Recharge your marketing with customer data

Don’t use intuition to guide your marketing. Use facts. By aggregating and analyzing the data you’ve collected about your existing customers, an audit will help you identify trends that can help educate you about your sales process. An audit is a crucial step to verifying the accuracy of assumptions you may have about the lead qualification process.

Customer Audits have a number of uses. First, you can determine/update your lead scoring values, find out the types and frequency of content that best resonate with your existing and target customers, and get an accurate portrayal of sales-ready leads.

A customer audit should be performed AT LEAST once per year (preferably once per quarter).

Here are some things to consider when performing an audit:

Sample size

An ideal sample size would be 1000+ contact/records. Smaller could be acceptable, between 100-1000 say, but <100 would be considered misleading.

Data Collection

Use Analytics platform such marketing automation software. Ask the right questions on landing pages. Provide benefits on your website (i.e. ebook, whitepaper, etc) to motivate prospects to engage.

Progressive Profiling

Progressive profiling allows you to control which questions appear on a form based on what you already know about a lead. Use short and easy to fill-out essays. Have different questions for them if/when they come back.

What data should be pulled?

Make a summary sheet of the following info:

• Average no. of employees. You want to get company size that is most closely aligned with your target customer
• Average annual revenue.  Look only at average revenue most likely to become customer
• Most common job titles of contacts. This outlines the role of a person most commonly researching your company
• Average sales cycle (close date – time first seen). This helps you understand the average length of time it takes a new customer to convert on your site
• Research period. This is the average length of time it takes a new lead to become a contact
•  Most common first pages seen. These are the pages that have been successful at bringing leads into the sales cycle
• Most effective original source type. Where are the customers coming from
• Average number of visits a lead makes before becoming a customer
• Average number of page views a lead makes before becoming a customer
• Average number of emails clicked
• % of customers engaged in social media
• Average Lead Score. This will help identify if the lead score values you might be using to register a lead as “marketing qualified” are accurate

Ways to use your findings. (The fun part!)

Determining your lead score values

• Lead scores must be based on objective data, not subjective assumptions
• Make a list of the values above that are represented in your lead scoring tool
• Prioritize your list from the most important characteristics to the least and assign point values in descending order

Informing your Content Strategy

• Are you sending the right number of emails?
• Which pages are most successful at bringing clients? (aside from home page)
  • What do these pages provide that resonates with customers? Build on those successes
  • Are these successful pages accessible via key entry points?  If not, provide direct links

Determining most successful traffic source

• Are Customers coming from organic search? Then invest in more blogs and articles
• Are Customers coming from referral traffic? Then enhance PR to promote content even further

In conclusion, your customer data is an extremely useful tool in helping you create an effective (and objective!) marketing strategy. Use these insights to find out how and why your customers found you. The more you understand about your existing customer base, the better you will be at designing relevant content to find more people who look just like them. If you need help, call us.