Marketing data refers to the information an organization would use to develop and improve marketing programs. If you’re a marketer, it’s crucial to identify and understand what data is pertinent to your work so that you can optimize your efforts.
Types of Marketing Data Sets
There are several data sets that are key for marketers. These are sourced from various tracking platforms and are essential for gaining insights into customer behavior and the efficacy of your marketing efforts.
Customer data
Customer data is information about your customer’s behaviors, demographics, and more.
Market research
Market research is the information you’ve gathered about your target customers through direct interaction — interviews, surveys, and focus groups, for example.
Competitive intelligence
You can find information about your competitors on their ads, websites, review sites, and various SEO platforms.
Sales
Sales data includes metrics on the performance of your sales teams, sales pipeline, average customer value, and the quality of leads.
Transactions
Transaction data is financial information about orders, invoices, and payments.
Interactions
Also known as engagement, customer interactions are the steps (digital or physical) customers take when they visit your website or place of business.
Voice of the customer
Your customer’s feedback about your products, services, and customer support provides an insight into how they view your company.
Preferences and interests
Related to the voice of the customer, consumer preferences and interests are essential information for understanding customers and correctly targeting marketing campaigns.
Marketing metrics
In addition to the data sets mentioned above, marketing metrics like customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, brand awareness, churn rate, and revenue are critical for developing marketing programs that are cost-effective with high return-on-investment (ROI).
Sources of Marketing Data
Once you’ve identified the specific data sets you will analyze to gain customer insights, you’ll need to go to the sources to access the data. These are the likeliest data-driven applications you’ll pool your data from.
CRM
If you’re investing in unifying your data, start where the money is. Pulling in data from your CRM system (e.g., Salesforce) will enable you to understand client behaviors and trends among your top accounts.
Marketing automation platforms
Marketing automation data from Hubpost or Marketo takes you one step back in the sales process, helping you understand the path to purchase or conversion for your best customers.
Paid media platforms
Data from your paid campaigns can help you understand where your best customers are coming from and which touchpoints are influencing their decisions. Readily available via APIs from most major platforms, paid media performance data can boost your ROI.
Product metrics
It’s harder to win a new customer than keep an existing one. Load your product’s usage data, loyalty points data, and retention data into your data warehouse to understand what happens after the sale or conversion—and identify important signals among your most loyal customers or brand champions who can evangelize your products and services.
Website traffic platform
As a primary touchpoint for your customers, your company website is a potentially huge source of information about what your customers are looking for and engaging with. Useful data includes the number of visitors, page views, referring sources, and bounce rates. Google Analytics provides this information and more.
Social media platforms
Dovetailing with paid media and website traffic, your customers’ engagement with your social media accounts is an essential factor when considering social campaigns, of course. Data about the performance of your campaigns via likes, shares, and comments, as well as demographics of your followers, is crucial for developing personas and delivering targeted content.
How to Bring Your Marketing Data Together with Snowflake
Knowing the different types of data and where to find it are the first steps towards building a data-driven marketing strategy. The next step involves collecting, storing, managing, and transforming all that data, making it accessible for data analysis and drawing insights.
Marketers who move their data to a cloud data platform will see significant benefits, including a data-driven view of the customer journey and deeper insights into cross-channel campaign performance.
Snowflake helps marketers achieve the coveted Customer 360 view of marketing behavior and performance. And with full elasticity, Snowflake can scale up, down, or out to meet demand spikes such as events or holiday season commerce. With the average Martech stack size creeping closer to 100 apps in many larger organizations, aggregating, mining, and then sharing all that rich data is critical to gaining a competitive advantage.