Marketing data has become a gold mine for CFOs to understand market trends, break the ice, and advise the business on feasible strategies to maximize profits.
Let’s face it marketing data is everywhere, but for the CFO they want to understand how marketing is spending money and if it is paying back as it should.
Technology and Data
Technology has made it possible for a business to gather as many facts as possible about factors that influence their business, such as customers and web performance. If you want to improve your customer experience, facts about their detailed behavior are important to guide in the marketing effort.
Facts are a source of translatable insight that is used to justify the essence of marketing and associated activities in a company. The budget of the marketing department will need to prove its input in bringing ROIs in greater folds.
Even though the knowledge and skills of the CFO and CMO might differ as indicated below, both need to work together to lead the marketing team in understanding data to come up with effective marketing solutions.
You need to get a holistic analysis of your business. Web analytic solely focus on the performance of your webpage while marketing analytics is more complex, including data from other online sources other than your webpage and offline events.
Customers and prospects feed marketing analytics while your website helps extract web analytical data. A comparison of marketing strategies and marketing data helps to understand behavior patterns and trends to explain the difference or convergence between the two.
There is a lot of data available on the market performance of a company, and if not put into good use, the company can lose out on good business.
The CFO keeps the marketer in check because the marketing expenditure should explain the ROIs. If not, there is a big problem. CFOs use marketing intelligence data to guide the entire marketing team in developing feasible and logic marketing strategies that will bring in the expected returns.
You can only tell that your business is growing through data. Technology helps to develop effective solutions that help you collect your data easily.
Transforming data into intelligence to guide action is dependent on the metrics that are of interest to you. Thereby, the action is guided by the creation of intelligence, which is achieved by interpreting various data from analytics that include:
- Customer Performance;
- Customer Segmentation;
- Customer Behavior in Real-Time;
- Feedback Data;
- Business Data;
- Marketing Data.
Collaboration between CFOs and CMOs and your marketing data
While CFOs deal with numbers, CMOs deal with business models. A CFO aims to maximize attainment of revenue and profit while a CMO focuses on aims without giving much focus on monetary value.
Whereas both are important for a business, you can decide who is more important and outsource the services occasionally depending on the size of business.
The CFO is a data scientist meant to assist the CMO to interpret and comprehend marketing data to develop a culture that is in alignment with the needs of customers as indicated by the data.
Engagement/personalization, avoiding waste in time, and better resource management is some actions that CFOs approve to fit in with the gaps from marketing data.
Whether it is web analytics or marketing analytics, using the associated data to gain intelligence that informs action is the hallmark of an effective marketing plan.
While marketers might shun away from analytics, the CFO helps to convert the analytics data to strategy in the long-run. CFOs appreciate the dynamics of analytics, unlike the marketer who regards it as metrics.
Customer Performance
Using the right financial metrics, you are able to determine the value of a customer to your business. You need to identify those customers that have done business with you a limited number of times and those that keep on coming back.
These metrics help you in determining the customers you are going to include in the next campaign. Part of customer performance data is navigation behavior of customers on your business’ web page.
Customer profiling is an important activity for every business because it is through this activity that businesses understand their customers better. As part of the business data, CFOs rely on customer performance data to understand their financial position with the aim of doing correct targeting and implementation of marketing campaigns.
Customer performance data helps to know about customer profitability so that you maximize marketing strategies on the right segments.
Recurring customers and one-time buyers should be differentiated because you do not want to spend unnecessarily on customers with low lifetime value. CFOs will help you to analyze these details so that you can use the right customized marketing strategies for your loyal customers and general strategies for the wider audience in an effort that compels them to shift.
Customer Segmentation
Marketing data helps you to gain intelligence about the different segments of your customers to further help you during targeting in your marketing campaigns. The data you have helps you to segment your customers, know from which channel they were able to find you, as well as their preferred products.
The data collected helps you to know the kind of content your customers consume either on your website or another communication medium. This intelligence is vital when doing content marketing because you can know the best communication medium to use and the content each segment is more likely to interact with.
Customer Behavior in Real-Time
How your customers are behaving in terms of purchasing patterns and trends, the company’s website page ranking on SEO and marketing spending all help to understand business performance in a for-profit organization.
Such data is what CFOs need to develop efficient and actionable plans to help attain positive change. CFOs have an important role in developing cost-effective strategies to ensure there is minimal spending but great returns on investment.
Intelligence data is broad and helps to understand every domain of the business to ensure that the marketing strategies chosen are in line. It is a way of ensuring that your content marketing strategies are achieving those conversion rates that you desire.
CFOs determine if a business is performing as intended: if the web traffic is high and sales a low, then it means there is a gap in the conversion styles. Therefore, CFOs review the various arenas deemed to aid in conversion as it is time to know whether they are doing a thing right, and if so, what the new strategy should be.
The places where your customers spend their time most, as well as the kind of technology they use and why they do what they do help in understanding customer needs and postulating future opportunities. Understanding the why is important because in so doing, your business is able to engage in activities that give you a competitive edge because your business addresses the main reason compelling customers to do with you and not others.
Feedback Data
You have worked really hard until you have had the chance the close that deal. CFOs help to determine if customers are willing to come back after this first deal, failure to which calls for action.
Feedback data helps to understand customers’ return rates and what needs to be done to improve business with existing and future customers. This data helps to guide businesses in the development of strategies that aim to improve current operations to enhance customer experience.
Personal Data and marketing data
Details like the email, phone number, and even the contact name are personal details that help to know more about the customer and how to interact with him or her. Personal data is meant to guide you when interacting with the customers.
The use of the email is different from the use of other channels like Facebook. Therefore, personal data is vital in dictating how often you should interact with your customers and the kind of content you should share.
Marketing Data
You have recently completed a marketing campaign and are not sure how you will tell if it was a success. In addition to web analytics which we have covered at the start of the article, there is software through which you CFO will advise appropriately based on analytics results.
Unfortunately, statistics reveal that the usage of these analytics tools is low. For a business seeking to attract a wide pool of customers, web analytics should be your guide map and augmented with the combined-effect of marketing analytics tools like the social media monitoring software, email marketing software analysis, call tracking, and lead contact forms.
CFOs use marketing data to understand the current trends of the customers and prospects and with a detailed database of customer profiles, use the data to interpret their future behavior and provide solutions to meet their future needs. A company remains useful and relevant to its customers as their varying needs are met, and the company is able to change with changing times.
CFOs are important advisors for content marketers because they will tell you what you need to include in your content based on their analysis of customer performance.
If your business does not have a CFO, you need one to help in the statistical domain that will give marketers a chance to make better decisions and provide effective solutions to retain and attract new customers and prospects.
Collecting information from clients creates an expectation in terms of a product or service improvement. CFOs provide pertinent information on what customers and prospects expect to see in a business’ marketing campaigns or personalized interactions.
They have provided all their information to you, which CFOs should use to help marketers in developing products and services that align to your customers’ segments in terms of their budget which should cater for elements like technology and trend.
However, your artificial intelligence solutions should factor in what your competitors are doing to ensure you gain an edge that enhances the lifetime value of your customers.
Call to Action
The analytics data tells you a great deal about your customers so that you can know what move to make next. After gaining intelligence in different realms of a business, the next big thing is change. Changes are achieved in the following ways:
Road Map
The most important thing is to develop a road map that denotes all your company objectives and what is being done to ensure they are achieved through enhanced customer experiences.
The road map helps a company to stay in check and ensure there is resonance with specific strategies. The road map helps to design a pilot test to determine if the proposed action is yielding substantial gains based on the investment.
Marketing Strategies
Activities like the mode of advertising to adopt come in focus. If you are just getting started on organic advertising and are engaging in various marketing campaigns to achieve a high ranking, you should consider integrating paid advertising to push up your ranking before gaining stability on organic search.
The CFO uses market data to develop actionable intelligence that may sometimes seem like a deviation from what a business’ marketers are used to. The CFO makes accurate proposition son needed changes.
Lamentation on the ineffectiveness of salespersons in generating revenue as opposed to doing other duties that do not add revenue compels a CFO to initiate drastic changes in the duties of salespersons.
There are postulations that soon we will have chatbots that will replace humans as a way to reduce marketing expenditures stemming from salespersons who do not seem to reach their targets.
Solving Problems
It is not just about the discovery of opportunities but the initiation of change. Your customers should be made aware of the changes that have been made to erase negative brand images that might have developed due to a mishap.
Negative statistical results are signs that there is a problem, and maybe it is time to engage in more in-depth research to understand and champion the voice of your customers and prospects to enhance their experience. Use of marketing analytics in the right way builds customer trust and attains brand loyalty.
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Juan Koss, New York, USA. I’m a marketing consultant from Write My Essay For Me company with over 25 years of experience. I’ve worked with businesses from various education sectors.