4rechargeMany marketing decisions are made based on a marketer’s “intuition.” While this can be extremely valuable, where possible it can and should be paired with objective trends found within your data.

The 26-page Hubspot Guide “How to use Customer Data to recharge your Marketing” provides valuable insights on how to use your customer data to conduct a customer audit, identify important trends and verify the accuracy of assumptions.

A customer audit can be performed as often as once per quarter and should be performed at least once per year:

The sample size

Generally speaking, a good rule of thumb for true data significance is 1,000 records or more. If your data is between 100-1000, it could still have some significance. If your sample size is less than 100, it can be reviewed for overarching trends, but should be re-run when the group grows to 100.

The best way to collect the right information is to use progressive profiling that allows you to control which questions appear on a form based on what you already know about a lead. That way, each time a lead fills out a form, you are collecting valuable new information about them, while keeping your forms short and easy to fill out - not squandering the opportunity by asking the same questions twice.

Some of the data you will want to analyze pulls from your analytics platform, while other pieces of data must be collected by asking the right questions on your landing pages.

The following are suggested fields for all industries; note that some may not apply to your business.

Demographic data: Number of Employees, Industry, Annual Revenue, Gender, Age, Job Title

Analytics/behavioral data: Time First Seen - First Page Seen - Original Source - First Conversion Date - Close Date - Number of Visits to your site - Number of Pages Viewed - Number of Emails Received/Delivered - Number of Emails Clicked - Number of Social Media Clicks.

The analytics and behavioral data will give you more insight into the performance of your customers marketing strategies. You’ll be able to gauge the success of landing pages, calls-to-actions, and click-through rates to help implement new techniques and improve their conversion rates.

Other data: Lead Score - Persona (if you are tracking leads by persona and you have enough data, you may want to do an individual customer audit for each persona type) - Email - Company Name – and ny other custom fields you are tracking that would be relevant.

Information like lead scores, emails, company names, and personas can all give you a deeper dive into the customers’ path of engagement and interactions to better adjust your strategy for acquiring more new customers.

Create summary sheet

Most analytics programs allow you to export your lead/customer data -- collected from form intelligence -- into an excel format. Fill in these columns with the numerical data that you have collected from your forms to create a summary sheet. To view the entire process of creating a summary sheet, please download the guide at hubspot.com.

Lead scores

Make sure that lead score values are based on objective data rather than subjective assumptions. Make a list of the values above that are represented in your lead scoring tool. From there, prioritize your list from the most important characteristics to the least and assign point values in descending order.

Content strategy

Use the “Emails Delivered” and “Emails Clicked” fields to determine the number of emails with which most customers willingly engage. Next, review the Average Sales Cycle value to determine the lifespan in which the customer reviewed these emails. Compare these numbers to your existing lead nurturing campaigns and overall email marketing strategy. Are you sending the right number of emails? If not, consider tweaking your campaigns accordingly. Use the “First Page Seen” data to determine the field that is most successful in driving visitors to your site. For most companies, this will be the home page, make sure to also review the next 2-3 pages on the list! Evaluate these pages and optimize their accessibility.

The most successful traffic sources

One of the simplest metrics identified in the audit is the referring traffic source. Review the most successful sources for customer generation (This may not be the same as the most successful site for lead generation). Do most of your customers come from organic search? Consider investing in your blogging team. Are most of your customers coming from referral traffic? Consider expanding your PR team to help promote your content even further.

Update your SLA

If your Sales and Marketing teams are aligned, you may have set-up a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to determine the types of leads Marketing must generate for the Sales team. Use the data provided in the audit to determine if the parameters you’ve set for a marketing qualified lead are accurate.

Structure your content to appeal to your target industries

Review the data from your demographic fields (Industry, Annual Revenue, Age, Gender and Job Title). Does your existing content speak to this demographic? If not, consider adding some additional blog posts or offers (ebooks, webinars, checklists) targeted to these audiences.

Update your marketing personas

Review the assumptions you’ve made about your target persona groups. Does the demographic data you captured about your customers align with your assumptions about lead qualification? Is the Average Sales Cycle in line with your presumed buyer’s journey? If not, consider tweaking your personas to include these new findings.

Your customer data is an extremely useful tool in helping you create an effective (and objective!) marketing strategy. Use these insights as a means to understand how and why your customers found you. The more
you understand your existing customer base, the better you will be at designing relevant content to find more people who look just like them. (Source: hubspot.com)

By MediaBUZZ