Using Customer Data Audits To Recharge Your Marketing

By: Eddy Goldberg
Published: June 19th, 2013

"Big data" is becoming more critical every day as a competitive tool, as well as a source of analytics for lead generation and marketing campaigns. And customer data - an invaluable resource for marketing to consumers ever more specifically - is easier to collect, aggregated analyze, and use in the quest for ideal marketing strategy than ever before.

HubSpot, a provider of integrated marketing software, has released a 26-page e-book, "The 3-Step Marketing Audit: How to use customer data to recharge your marketing," written by Rebecca Gutner, is a senior inbound marketing consultant at HubSpot. Its stated aim is to help companies conduct a "customer audit" that will produce insights about the effectiveness of their lead conversion efforts. The author, In the introduction, she says that a customer audit "is designed to provide valuable insight into your online lead conversion experience."

And while HubSpot provides customer audits, Gutner says you can do it yourself. "By aggregating and analyzing the data you've collected about your existing customers, an audit will help you identify trends that can help inform your sales process. An audit is an important step in verifying the accuracy of assumptions you may have made about the lead qualification process. This resource will serve as your guide to learning how to use your data to conduct your own customer audit."

She says a customer audit can be performed as often as quarterly, but should be performed at least once a year. Common uses, she writes, include the following:

1. To determine/update your lead scoring values
2. To inform your content strategy by learning the types and frequency of content that best resonates with your existing customers
3. To guide you about which traffic sources to invest more resources in
4. To update your sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA) to include the most accurate portrayal of sales-ready leads
5. To inform your prospecting within certain industries or types of companies
6. To update your marketing personas to more accurately reflect your core base of customers

What's inside

The e-book consists of three main chapters:

Chapter 1: What to Consider When Beginning Your Audit

• How do I collect data?
• What fields should I have on my forms? (e.g., demographic, analytical/behavioral data, other)

Chapter 2: How To Pull and Analyze Your Data

• What data should you be pulling?
• Now what does all that data you pulled mean?

Chapter 3: How To Use Your Findings To Inform Your Marketing

• Determining your lead score values
• Informing your content strategy
• Determine your most successful traffic sources
• Update your SLA
• Structure your content to appeal to your target industries
• Update your marketing personas

Conclusion

"If you take away one thing from this e-book, it's this: 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."

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To download a copy of the e-book, click here. To find more marketing resources, visit HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog.

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