Speaking of CTAs, if you're new to marketing experiments, start with your CTAs. Experimenting with your CTAs is a low-risk way to try to improve the number of people who engage with your content. Instead of using words like subscribe to pull customers in, why not try, learn more, download now, get started, or join us. You can also test different colors or pictures on your CTA, as opposed to just your copy. There are a variety of experiments you could try. Use experiments to familiarize yourself with your audience. This is important because it helps you avoid making assumptions about your audience. Sometimes the cost of assumption is small. Marketing teams move fast. You don't always have the time to test out the title of an article, or the color of a button before setting it live. But constantly making assumptions about your audience, can lead to bigger issues. Assuming you know what your customer wants, can quickly spiral into brand mishaps. An example of this can be seen in the infamous Peloton Christmas ad, that was run during the 2019 season. The Peloton Christmas ad, which followed a woman's journey to fitness, missed the mark when it came to tone and narrative. The backlash to the ad was swift and brutal. In the ensuing weeks, publications ranging from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal described the ad as sexist, and dystopian. Parodies began to pop up across the Internet. Less than a month later, Ryan Reynolds' Aviation Gin brand, even hired the same actress to feature in a parody ad called The Gift That Doesn't Give Back. Needless to say, the marketing team at Peloton was a bit underwhelmed with this response. In a statement to CNBC, a spokesperson said the company was disappointed in how some have misinterpreted this commercial. The company quickly rebounded, but the lesson is clear. Conduct research on your ideal customers, build your buyer personas, educate your teams on these profiles, reach out to current customers. This will help you better understand who's shopping for, and buying your products. Hold focus groups to ask questions to a live audience, and receive unedited feedback. Marketing teams use data to inform campaign decisions. Using data to inform campaign decisions places customer data front and center. This ensures all marketing and creative assets are relevant to customer interests, and behaviors. If you're still not unsure where to start when it comes to experimenting, don't sweat it. Let's review a few additional strategies you can use to leverage your customer data while engaging your audience. Consider combining a few to strengthen, and personalize your marketing efforts. Segment your audience. Not every member of your target audience is the same. They shouldn't be treated as such. Different customer groups exist within your wider target audience, and it's up to you to define those segments. Targeted personalized messages go further than general broadcasts, and segmentation can help you reach the right people at the right time. For example, if your store sells both men's and women's apparel, you'd need two sets of marketing messages to reach those segments. Similarly, if your store has multiple locations, marketing tactics you use for say, locations in Nevada will vary from those in New York. Not only does your target audience differ by demographic, by gender, age, and location, for example, but they have different preferences, and pain points. There are also in different stages of the buyer's journey. Use HubSpot lists to identify common traits among contacts. Every customer report you build should begin with a segmented list. The more specific your reports starting list is, the more powerful the report is. For example, let's say you run a report based on all of the contacts in your database. You'll gather conclusions at a high level on your entire database based on that information yet you may get very different information when you segment the contacts in your database. If you run the same report using a list that has been created based off similar characteristics, the takeaways you gather from this more specific report will be much more actionable since you made the report more specific. Retarget your advertising. Retargeting is a critical strategy for all marketers, especially cross-channel marketers. Retargeting enables you to use ads to keep your brand top of mind among users who have expressed interest in your products or services, and are in the consideration stage of the buyer's journey. Retargeting ads are served to people who've already visited your website. You can even use retargeting ads to target a contact that is already in your database like a lead, or customer. For example, if someone browses specific product on your website, customer data allows you to resurface those products to that consumer through strategies like social media, or search advertising, or abandoned cart email marketing. When retargeting, focus on advertising and conversion metrics such as Click-through rate, form submission. Cost-per-click and cost per lead, or CPL, optimize your content based on your personas. Your website copy, blog content, social media content, and advertising are all created with your buyer personas in mind. Data-driven marketing provides much needed context for your content. Data provides insight and how to craft your content to address customer questions, pinpoints, curiosities, and desires. Once your content has been created, sources and engagement data can help you optimize your content over time ensuring you're always aligning with your personas. A great way to incorporate data into your marketing strategy is with keyword research. SEO is still the critical piece to driving effective attract sage efforts. Don't simply guess which keywords will be most effective and drive the most traffic. Instead, collect data and use it to optimize your content creation. Do you know which keywords drive the highest value traffic to your site? Do you know how you and your competitors rank for those keywords? If you want an optimized, personalized marketing process, you need to find out. Make variation testing a part of your marketing routine. Whether it's through structured, time-bound A/B tests or continuous adaptive testing, this is a great way to bring experimentation to your day-to-day or week to week process. If you aren't doing variation testing quite yet, you have a huge opportunity to optimize your marketing collateral, including your emails, landing pages, forms, and calls to action. Create consistency across channels. Your visitors want to have consistent, exceptional experiences on the apps and platforms they value. Your various channels need to work together and provide context for the messages your persona receives as they go from one channel to another. With cross-channel marketing, you use several marketing channels to interact with customers while focusing on creating a cohesive, delightful experience. Say you have a persona, Agreeable Alex. Alex is 30 and works in finance in the Greater London area. While she likes her job, it's not her passion. She's feeling stuck and wants to find a way to live in Spain where she spent a gap year before university. This is more than a dream for Alex. She's taking action and evaluating ways she can start an online business to work from anywhere. Every night she wistfully browses the Internet, researching global travel, and how to live abroad. You work at a Spanish real estate agency that specializes in selling properties to ex-pats like Agreeable Alex. Recently, Alex reads a blog post your team wrote about what to consider before buying a new Spanish home. She's impressed with your awesome content so she subscribes to your newsletter. This is where you start to nurture your persona. The next morning, Alex receives an email. It's like you read her mind. You've linked helpful interview content documenting how your past customers made the move to Spain. Alex is excited to read about someone just like her was able to make their dream come true and overcame the same issue using your service. Social media helps you close the loop. When Alex gets on Facebook later, she sees one of your retargeting ads. It's got a catchy headline and a helpful video. She clicks it. The ad leads her to a website page where she can book a free consultation with someone on your team. During the call, they walk her through each step of the process of buying a home and moving to Spain. Alex is excited and hopeful that your business can help her make her dreams come true. Unified data and a clear mental picture of your segments are the core pillars of effective marketing. Rather than presenting potential customers with fragmented messages about all the great things you can do, the products you offer, or the deals that you're running, they're getting the pieces of content that address their needs and build off each other to create a single brand message. Having unified data is enough to give you valuable insights into your ROI. But if you want your cross-channel marketing to be even more productive, you can also analyze this information to look for ways to make ongoing optimizations to your cross-channel marketing approach. Use this data to your advantage. Run experiments such as adjusting the traits of your target audience for Facebook ads, or the placement of your calls to action to continue unearthing new and valuable insights into your customers. As you prepare to implement additional cross-channel marketing campaigns, you'll be able to enrich each step with the data you've already gathered. Clearly, you can accomplish a lot with your customer data. Customer data has a power to turn general, broadcast based marketing into poignant, personalized messaging. Knowing your customers not only allows you to grab their attention and sulfur their needs, but also boost your revenue and bring your teams together.
